Psychogeography is an actual thing, a proper area of research, and not just some pseudo course dreamt up by the Hanger Lane Gyratory School of Further Studies to con Arabs out of £9,000.
It is the study of the effects of the environment on the emotions and behaviour of its inhabitants.
Anyway, the point is, Canary Wharf has got some screwed-up psychogeography.
I know about the grid layout and the green spaces and the slice of Manhattan etc. But something's wrong.
It's not organic. It demands that humans follow its straight lines rather than meander and cluster and drift and huddle in secret like real humans like to do.
So everybody dashes from A to B at a fast rate of knots (Canada Place Mall is like a parade of army ants - ruthless, purposeful, joyless and fast).
Anywhere that is not on the beaten track feels lost and isolated. Bars are either heaving, or empty.
In his book Walk The Lines, author Mark Mason talks to City Of London planning officer Peter Rees who has a refreshing take on what he can achieve in his job. "London's unplannable," he says. "I say that as a planner and I'm thrilled by it."
He goes on to say that the primacy of the City of London as a financial centre is based on narrow alleys and confused, illogical streets.
"It's like a collection of beehives. The bees are going out of their banks and cross-pollinating and coming back with the nectar to make honey.
"You don't get that in Canary Wharf and American cities. They're too organised. People are compartmentalised into their own buildings."
Canary Wharf needs some hidden places, secret nooks and really awkward cornering where insider traders can randomly congregate to bitch about Madge in accounts or conspire to ruin small Third World countries without interruption.
– From July 2011
