"Taking me to parts of the city I rarely think of and never visit..."

Derive. Pronounced dur-eve... It's French.

Last week's lecture in Geography was about derives, in part. It was a method of walking developed in the 1950's by the Situationalists Internationale in Paris (where else), who objected to certain developments they saw in cities. A little bit Marxist, they disliked the materialism of the city, the constraints people experienced to space and time (people seen as chained to the clock), and what they saw as the city planner's way of manipulating the pedestrian's view, impression, and culture of the city by deciding what things would be nearby to one another, what could be seen from how. And one of the more interesting this that hit me was the idea that the planner/developer molds the way people move by designing entrances/exits for masses of people.

So they developed this system of walking, ideally unconstrained by time---so no bounds of going to work, to class, of avoiding rush hour---in which the walker puts himself outside of the preconceived views of the city. The idea is that by seeing the city from different angles we experience it in a different way and can glean a sense of the psychogeography.
To do this you walk through sidestreets, through the small passages between places instead of the wide ones. With a great variation in ambience, very quickly. By ignoring the bird's-eye view (as this is how cities are planned) in favor of the ground-level view. By leaving yourself open to encounters with fellow city-dwellers.

Interesting reading from one of the original derivists: http://library.nothingness.org/articles/SI/en/display/314

Anyway. So make up your own mind about it. The political aspect is a little fuzzy to me: how exactly can walking be a political protest? For yourself, but I doubt anyone else looking at one of these SI blokes actually thought, "now there's a protesting chap if I ever saw one!"

Right. So I had an assignment to go on my own derive through Edinburgh and document it in a way I saw fit---photos were easiest, and in fact I put up all 135 non-fuzzy/-duplicate photos to my photobucket, see links above and to your right. Not all of these made it into my powerpoint, and many were not meant to demonstrate the experience of the derive but rather were interesting things I saw.
Of course those are too many to go through and give titles to all, so forgive me for not doing that either, but if you're interested, a lot of photos are up from my one-day excursion.

All told I was only out for about five hours, but I walked a circuit all around the edge of Edinburgh, roughly skirting the edge between "urban" and "suburban" the time, though of course the suburbs are different here than what we (at least I) expect for a 'typical' American city.

It gave me a lot to think about too, this idea that what we see, what we notice, is designed that way, intentionally so or not. Everything has some story behind it, and for some people those stories of location are the fabric of their lives.