Perhaps the most prominent characteristic of psychogeography is the activity of walking. The act of walking is an urban affair, and in cities that are increasingly hostile to pedestrians, walking tends to become a subversive act.
The psychogeographer is a “non-scientific researcher” who encounters the urban landscape through aimless drifting, experiencing the effects of geographical settings ignored by city maps, and often documenting these processes using film, photography, script writing, or tape. In this way, the wanderer becomes alert to the metaphors, visual rhymes, coincidences, analogies, and changing moods of the street.
The Cairo Psychogeographical Society was formed in 1989. It is an independent collective of ever changing members. Unlike official scientific or cultural entities, whether governmental or non-governmental, the Cairo Psychogeographical Society is not networked, nor does it communicate with other research centers dealing with architecture, urban planning, or geography at large. Neither is it an organization that receives financial support from development funds, commercial companies, or individuals.
The Society also does not announce its existence publicly by any means.
This extreme isolation is partly due to the criticisms the Society received regularly in conferences as well as in the press.
Critics constantly attack the Society for “a lack of validity due to its inability to produce any scientific discussion or actual discoveries.”
A more severe criticism states that “the so called ‘society’ is a collective of rich, bored, leisurely hobbyists who crave the construction of their own myths — myths that in the end only satisfy the members’ own vanity and ambitions for infamy...”
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