'Everything is Worth Examining' - An Interview With Darran Anderson

Darran Anderson at Angkor Watt (photo by Chris Kelly)

Darran Anderson's Imaginary Cities is a sprawling, epic pyschogeographic exploration of our relationships with cities, both real and imagined. With a frame of reference which takes in everything from Marco Polo to Judge Dredd, the book is a breathtakingly ambitious piece of creative non-fiction, told with wit, insight and energy. Anderson is a former co-editor of The Honest Ulsterman, and is also the author of a 33 1/3 study of Histoire de Melody Nelson by Serge Gainsbourg. Here, he talks about the ideas and inspirations behind Imaginary Cities, and his future plans. 

Read my review of Imaginary Cities here.

When did you begin work on Imaginary Cities? What was the initial vision for it, and has much changed along the way?

The initial inspiration for writing the book was a conversation I had with an architect on the roof of the Foreign Correspondents Club in Phnom Penh several years ago. We were talking about Gaudí and visionary architecture and, as we talked, these colossal thunderstorms were slowly rolling across the sky towards us. The river below had started to flow backwards due to the deluges of rainy season there. And it occurred to me that the city I was in, given the century of history and the various utopias and dystopias it’s endured, was as extraordinary as any in sci-fi or fantasy. Barcelona likewise. And Venice, Tokyo, Berlin, St Petersburg, Nairobi, Buenos Aires and so on. So I decided to explore the border between cities of fact and cities of fiction and the symbiotic relationship they have; how we partially dream the cities we live in. The original conception (and several lost chapters were written in this mode) was to write it as a tour of a single vast city but I don’t think an affectation like that sustains well over the course of an entire book, and my sanity probably wouldn’t have prevailed to the end.

Looking back, I think the interest in the subject goes further into the past. Kierkegaard has a great line about life being lived forwards but understood backwards and I think we do attribute significance in hindsight, to the extent of selective editing. We all have these fascinations. I grew up in a terraced house in Derry city, and from my bedroom window I could see the mock-Russian spire of Pennyburn Chapel, a place that I associated with impossibly-mysterious illustrations by Edmund Dulac and Gustave Doré for books like Arabian Nights. I read futuristic comics like 2000AD and Akira, and played computer games like Strider, Turrican, F-Zero and Midnight Resistance, many of which reimagined cities. I’ve probably spent as many hours thinking about the cities in the background of Streetfighter 2 as those in Hokusai prints, Le Corbusier blueprints or the paintings of Fra Carnevale or Breugel.

At night, I used to listen to a beat-up old longwave radio, and the languages and names like Belgrade, Medina, Baghdad, Ho Chi Minh City, Kabul, Kyoto and Beijing seemed incredibly poetic and romantic, juxtaposed with the sound of drunks and rain and helicopters in the night outside. However superficial they might seem, ideas get into our heads at impressionable ages and they remain there, bouncing around and then re-emerging much later in unexpected ways. That’s true for architects as much as writers. It was a real delight to read Frank Lloyd Wright talking about gazing out at the glow of the steelworks in his youth and dreaming of Arabian Nights too. That’s the joy of culture I suppose; that sudden unexpected connection with voices from long ago, and the hope that you might do the same some day to readers of the distant future.

In the book, you talk about your upbringing in Derry, and the way in which it affected your perception of urban spaces - can you elaborate on that?

It influenced everything and still does. Before you consciously knew it, you received countless lessons in how space and architecture are used to oppress and exclude but also how it can be subverted and reclaimed. My father and his family grew up in Springtown Camp, an abandoned U.S. military base from the Second World War; squatting there with dozens of families in tin huts because Catholics had been denied housing (one of the sparks of the Troubles). Growing up, there were areas you didn’t go near, and others (crossing the border for example) where you knew there was a likelihood of being insulted and harassed by the army or police. I got a particularly nasty kicking once in Belfast because the street I was walking towards almost certainly marked out my background. On another occasion, I had a gun waved in my face from a passing car whilst being repeatedly addressed as ‘boy’. I got off unscathed compared to friends and family. The psycho part in psychogeography seemed apt back then, though it’s mercifully changed since. It didn’t go unnoticed though that a lot of it was articulated in terms of space. You take those quite extreme examples and you can’t help but apply them, travelling through different cities and, sadly, you do see connections; whether it’s the theft of public space into private hands, the use of kettling, curfews and forbidden areas. Space is an articulation of power after all.

There’s a Foucault quote that I keep returning to in the book, “Where there is power, there is resistance”. This was evident in Derry; explicitly in an autonomous community like Free Derry but implicitly in lots of everyday senses. My friends and I spent our youth, very enjoyably it has to be said, amidst the failures of architecture and city planning. We hung out on the rooftops of abandoned buildings, alleyways, docks. Part of the Derry walls had been fenced off with barbed wire, as a ‘security risk’ presumably, but we found if you swung over a large drop, you could get inside and no-one ever bothered you and you could get up to all the healthily-illicit teenage activities uninterrupted by the authorities. There were lots of these places where you could go under the radar. Space could be rethought and remade, if you took the necessary risks. That has profoundly stayed with me. There’s always hope and it often comes not in happy-clappy evangelism about green cities but in defiance. You can build little pockets of utopia within what might be discerned as reasonably-dystopian situations. We forget this has already happened almost everywhere; libraries, public parks and hospitals, playgrounds and so on were once long dreamt-of places when cities were heavily industrial and purgatorial. We may not realise how radical and utopian they are until they are gone. And they are going. 

There must have been a lot of material which didn't make it into the finished version of Imaginary Cities - do you have any plans to use this elsewhere, in book form or in other media?

I’m sure some of it will see the light of day though I’m not certain in what form. The first draft was 1673 pages long but I’m not sure it could’ve been regarded as a book. It was something else. I did worry that it was spiralling out of control and would only exist as a chaos of papers stuffed into a briefcase somewhere; I was having visions of Walter Benjamin at one stage. Some of the chapters could work as standalone pieces. There were some that were hard to leave out but had to be; the chapter I pitched to the publisher was on underground cities, for example, and it didn’t make it. The vast majority of writing on my real experiences in actual cities across the globe was ditched.

All writers have this problem I guess. There’s a great quote by Paul Valéry, “A work is never completed except by some accident such as weariness, satisfaction, the need to deliver, or death: for, in relation to who or what is making it, it can only be one stage in a series of inner transformations.” Most writers are smart enough to realise this early on but I was mule-headed enough to keep going and try and include everything. I have a feeling I’ll be writing about cities for some time to come.

Did anything surprise you, as you researched Imaginary Cities? Did you discover any trends that you hadn't expected?

The entire process was a massive learning process. I notice buildings now in different ways. All the time. Everywhere. All their flaws and beauty and how they work or don’t work with people and their environment. It’s liberating and maddening but it makes me realise how blinkered I was in the past. I just saw through space as if it wasn’t really there or I wasn’t really there.

While all of it was a surprise, in a deeper sense, none of it was; I think we all know these things subconsciously, in how we interact with cities and dream about them. Calvino, the literary inspiration behind the project, has a great line in Invisible Cities, “Arriving at each new city, the traveller finds again a past of his that he did not know he had.” We have a vast awareness of the poetry and possibilities of place but we get distracted and deceived by the spectacle, by commerce and ideology, all telling us that this is the way it has to be, and it has to be mundane, compromised and mercantile. There’s a jolt of recognition and energy when we’re reminded that this is a wretched exploitative lie.

Given free reign and unlimited resources, what does your Imaginary City look like? 

It would have to be a collage. All cities are collages; anything singular isn’t a city but rather an abomination, however pristine. It’s been tried and proposed repeatedly but there’s no human ever born who’s fit to design an entire city, not a real functioning one. I’d like to see most of what I’ve come across be built, all together, complimenting and clashing, in a vast patchwork monstrosity of a metropolis. And given I’d be in charge, it’d be a tyranny the likes of which the world has never seen.

It raises an important point though; namely how most architects and urban planners are egotists to varying dictatorial degrees. Very few allow room for other voices or for the prospect of change (there are exceptions like Cedric Price for one). We mistakenly think that architects love buildings; in truth, they love their own buildings and are often abject nihilists towards the buildings of others. They are happiest at the sight of wrecking balls and detonations. That half-secret is part of the reason I love the profession. ‘The urge to destroy is a creative passion’ as Bakunin put it.  

It seems that we are currently drawn to dystopian views of the future, rather than the 'spacesuits and hovercrafts' vision of the future that could be found in the Fifties and Sixties - does that seem accurate to you? And if so, how do you explain the increasingly pessimistic outlook?

It is accurate but dystopias are overrated. If Orwell were alive, he’d have recognised we’ve gone past the primary Soviet-focused concerns of 1984 into other problems (though it remains eternally apt in a vast number of secondary aspects of power: the media, language, othering and so on). The problem today in Britain, Ireland and Europe is partly the absence of utopian thinking (Adam Curtis is great on this in his films). In ages of pessimism, cynics prosper. The idea that we can change things has become completely paralysed. And it’s no coincidence that this powerlessness has come in an age when we’re force-fed narcissistic and ultimately meaningless mantras of empowerment, mindfulness, self-help; as if the individual is the issue and any change beyond is impossible. We need to remember that we built our welfare system, for example, having just defeated the Nazis in a battle to the death, in an age of rations and a country half-blown to pieces. If such a thing was possible then, why not now with all the energy and wealth and ideas and technology we have now at our disposal? We have bought into the lie of austerity perpetuated by self-aggrandising spivs, thieves, mediocrities and ideologues and it’s time to wake up and turn the tide.

What's your writing routine like? Do you have a daily target? And what sort of environment do you like to work in?

I write on scraps of paper during scraps of time, often travelling or when I should be sleeping. Then I put the jigsaw together at the end. Almost entirely through my own fault, I’ve never really had the time or money to do it any other way (work being the curse of the drinking classes, as a wise man once said) and, while I’m curious to see what I could write with a free run at a book, it does prevent writer’s block; there’s never a blank page involved. So it’s a collage essentially, which mirrors cities appropriately enough; it’s writing as Babel. I am extremely lucky to have a brilliant writer, Christiana Spens, as a fiancée; she’s been invaluable for support and guidance (I’ve been a huge fan of her work long before we started going out). Without her, there’d be no book. Hopefully, I can repay her some day.

Who are your favourite current authors?

I had a problem with my sight for most of last year so I only read when I had to. It’s a small joy to be able to read for pleasure again but I can’t seem to regain the suspension of disbelief needed for most novelists. So it’s nonfiction from here on in. I love Umberto Eco’s essays. Kenneth White’s The Wanderer and His Charts. Simon Critchley’s Memory Theatre blew me away; it’s fiction but it doesn’t feel like it. I read a lot of essayists who aren’t here any more, from Montaigne to Sontag, but it feels like there’s a revival of sorts in the form. If I had to pick two contemporary writers: anything by Rebecca Solnit and Peter Conrad. I love what they write about and how they write it.

What are you working on next? 

There’s a lot of books I want to write and a graveyard of abandoned projects that I may return to for bodysnatching. In the short-term, I’ve just pitched a Borges-inspired book on mythology called Fata Morgana; I have to keep the exact details reasonably secretive but it’s exciting as I don’t think a book of its type has been quite done before. In the long term, I’m writing a book on computer games and architecture (expanding on talks I recently gave at the V&A and the London Festival of Architecture). The first book will be relatively succinct though the subject is vast; the second another sprawling beast. Until I hear back from publishers, I’ll be rotating the thought ‘what the hell am I doing?’ around again and again in my head. I’ve started researching the games book and the interest, especially from game developers, has been phenomenal, despite being repeatedly told it can’t and shouldn’t be attempted by others. It seems insane that games are now bigger than Hollywood and yet there’s so little critical writing on them from outside the gaming industry and pockets of academia (within, there’s a lot of fascinating erudite writing). Games tell us an incredible amount and we need to realise that our snobbery and pedantry is only holding us back and causing us to miss entire worlds. One of the things you learn from great essayists like Montaigne is that everything is worth examining.