John Rogers (1972-)
luke chamberlain
riter, Film-maker, & Psychogeographer W Interview via Zoom Meeting / November 20, 2024
uke Chamberlain: Thank you so much for taking the time to meet with me today. L I've got a couple questions that are more focused on your perspective regarding psychogeography, and then I have a few more that are specific to your experience of the Black Path and how it relates to some of the research I'm working on. John Rogers : Yeah, go for it. C: Great. I'll start by saying I think it's been pretty well documented to L this point your feelings towards the importance of walking and experiencing a city’s psychogeography. I'm wondering how walking as opposed to other modes of transportation allows for a deeper engagement with the urban environment, and how architects or urban planners could enable such engagement? JR: So, just to remind me, is your approach coming from studying urban design? C: I’m majoring in architecture, but I've got a studio project that's focusing L a little bit more on urban design or urban fabric, so I'm interested in this realm a little bit more during this semester specifically. R: Alright, I think for me it breaks down in a couple of ways. One is the idea J from one of the topographical writers from the 1920s that I was very inspired by and think provided a brilliant template for urban rambling, urban exploration, and experiencing the city. It was a really interesting time for exploring London because really what they were doing in the 20s was exploring the London that had burst its boundaries from the London County Council and into the countryside. London was gobbling up parts of the whole of the county of Middle Essex, parts of Kent, Essex, and Surrey would be absorbed into London as they were exploring this new terrain. So it's very similar to the London I was trying to recapture in my more recent book Welcome to New London whereas This Other London was exploring their terrain. nyways, one of those writers wrote that when you walk, you are in and a part A of the landscape. You're not experiencing it through the filter of a motorist in a sealed pod. They create their own sensory environment. They have their music playing, they've got their heat or their air conditioning on. The sounds that they hear, everything they experience is filtered. They're removed from the city around them. So, in many ways the walker is free of these things. They're not just trying to survive, nor are they removed from the city, but they are in it. They're experiencing it. And if you're walking as part of a practice, or walking deliberately or consciously, you can experience this fusion of yourself in the city where you feel like you've got a more intense relationship with the city, a more symbiotic relationship with the built environment and the topography, but I suppose cyclists also experience the topography. I remember I did something with Jon Day who wrote a book called Cyclogeography . Before that, for me at least, the difference was split between either being on foot or using any wheeled vehicle, so anything with wheels was bad and the pedestrian was a superior being. At that point I didn't distinguish between cyclists and motorists, but he pointed out the experience of river valleys, which obviously deals with topography and is a real interest of mine. He said, “You really feel it in your legs on a bike in a way you couldn’t