Guy Debord’s truest intention was to unify two different factors of “ambiance” that, he felt, determined the values of the urban landscape: the soft ambiance – light, sound, time, the association of ideas – with the hard, the actual physical constructions. Their intentions remained completely as abstractions. The Situationists’ response was to create designs of new urbanized space, promising better opportunities for experimenting through mundane expression. “Cities have a psychogeographical relief, with constant currents, fixed points and vortexes which strongly discourage entry into or exit from certain zones.”

In “Formulary for a New Urbanism,” Chtcheglov had written, “Architecture is the simplest means of articulating time and space, of modulating reality, of engendering dreams.” Similarly, the Situationists found contemporary architecture both physically and ideologically restrictive, combining with outside cultural influence, effectively creating an undertow, and forcing oneself into a certain system of interaction with their environment: This confusion is also fundamental to the execution of unitary urbanism as it corrupts one’s ability to identify where “function” ends and “play” (the “ludic”) begins, resulting in what the Lettrist International and Situationist International believed to be a utopia where one was constantly exploring, free of determining factors. The implication of combining these two negations is that by creating abstraction, one creates art, which, in turn, creates a point of distinction that unitary urbanism insists must be nullified. Wolman “Unitary Urbanism – the synthesis of art and technology that we call for - must be constructed according to certain new values of life, values which now need to be distinguished and disseminated.” It demanded the rejection of functional, Euclidean values in architecture, as well as the separation between art and its surroundings. At a conference in Coscio de Arroscia, Italy in 1956, the Lettrists joined the International Movement for an Imaginist Bauhaus to set a proper definition for the idea announced by Gil J. Following Chtcheglov’s exclusion from the Lettrists in 1954, Guy Debord and others worked to clarify the concept of unitary urbanism, in a bid to demand a revolutionary approach to architecture. The idea of urban wandering relates to the older concept of the flâneur, theorized by Charles Baudelaire. The Lettrists’ reimagining of the city has its precursors in aspects of Dadism and Surrealism.

The originator of what became known as unitary urbanism, psychogeography, and the dérive was Ivan Chtcheglov, in his highly influential 1953 essay “Formulaire pour un urbanisme nouveau” (“Formulary for a New Urbanism”). Psychogeography was originally developed by the avant-garde movement Lettrist International in the journal Potlach.

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