Neogeography defined...

A SLIGHTLY MODIFIED DEFINITION OF NEOGEOGRAPHY IS NOW POSTED ON PLATIAL.

We're happy to see that neogeography is gaining momentum. As we mentioned in response to a comment in our previous post, we think that it's a much needed descriptive category.

To flesh it out a bit:

Neogeography describes, or names, a diverse set of practices that (mostly) fall outside the professional geographic domain. Rather than making claims on scientific standards, methodologies of neogeography tend towards the intuitve, expressive, personal, absurd, and or artistic, but may just be idiosyncratic applications of "real" geographic techniques. This is not to say that these practices are of no use to the cartographic/geographic sciences, but that they just usually don't conform to the protocols of professional practice.

Neogeography is, or should be, broad enough to include, urban exploration and its Situationist offspring (like psychogeography), illegal architecture, site-specific sculpture, collaborative mapping, geo-tagging, guided walks, ephemeral cities (Burning Man for instance), imaginary urban planning (see Urville), altered maps, travel writing, place based photo blogging, etc.

When one asks what connects all of these activities, there may not be a clear answer, but they all fall, however tangentially, in the realm of geography (usually "humanist"). Neogeography, to rework Elizabeth Grosz, is an attempt to explore geography "from the outside."

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