Quadrilateral by Neil Ta | I am Bidong on Flickr.
The Dérivateur is an agent for musings off the beaten path. We are in pursuit of risky arguments, fortuitous correspondences and surprising deviations. Framed around the subject of the city, each issue’s theme is an urban destination determined by readers through online vote at www.derivemagazine.com (future possibilities include: the hospital, the fairground, the waiting room, the cinema, the gym). Appropriately, for our first issue “The Street” is the starting point of our trajectory. Here we pursue the urban experiences standard routes ignore: sidewalk offenses, street vendors, suicide barriers, abandoned lots, urban stratification, and more. It was French anthropologist Chombart de Lauwe who inspired the idea of the “dérive.” In 1952, de Lauwe set out to document the narrowness of the typical Parisian life. To do this, he diagrammed the movements of one student over the course of an entire year. The student’s daily routine formed a triangle, with three points representing the student’s university, piano teacher, and home.
Disturbed by de Lauwe’s findings—which expose the limited scope of the individual’s movements so graphically—Guy Debord developed the concept of the “dérive” meaning a “drifting” or “wandering” experience of the city. He explains, “In a dérive one or more persons during a certain period drop their relations, their work and leisure activities, and all their other usual motives for movement and action, and let themselves be drawn by the attractions of the terrain and the encounters they find there.” The Dérivateur aims to provide a similar digression from the daily grind, unsettling the automatism of urban experience.
Rather than following a preset path, The Dérivateur tracks the interests of readers and contributors to determine the magazine’s final course. This first dérive has engendered a view of the city at once cruel and consoling, lonely but also unexpectedly collaborative. What Carlos Neves in his piece dubs a “dialectic of hope and despair” informs virtually every piece in the collection, from Phillip Maciak’s description of the gritty spiritualism of Spike Lee’s films to Felicity Tayler’s account of the many lives of an abandoned Montreal lot.
The city emerges in these pages as a site for conflict and also problem solving. Saeed Hydaralli details how Toronto’s streets give rise to the contentious figure of the street-vendor, while Alan Blum analyzes the flâneur’s mediation of the extremes of idleness and productivity. Chloé Winders-Singer resists resignation as she battles with the chilly New York economy, and Alex Lockwood describes the challenges faced by Newcastle and its inhabitants. The streets and sewers are sites for the spread of a gruesome viral infection in Aaron Winslow’s dystopian sci-fi piece, while Eric Bellin describes the interplay between real and imagined scenes of architectural ingenuity. Together, these pieces testify to the diversity of the city street as a site for selling, strolling, fighting, infecting, dying, building, and transcending. The alternately bleak and motivating influences of the city are reflected in the visual design of our first issue, which shifts from the cold tones of winter to the greenery of spring.
What shape would your daily diagram be?
Cobblestones are stones that were frequently used in the pavement of early streets. “Cobblestone” is derived from the very old English word “cob”, which had a wide range of meanings, one of which was “rounded lump” with overtones of large size. “Cobble”, which appeared in the 15th century, simply added the diminutive suffix “le” to “cob”, and meant a small stone rounded by the flow of water; essentially, a large pebble. It was these smooth “cobbles”, gathered from stream beds, that paved the first “cobblestone” streets.
Note that cobble is a generic geological term for any stone having dimensions between 2.5–10 inches. A cobbled area is known as a “causey”, “cassay” or “cassie” in Scots (probably from causeway).
The painted triangular “shark’s teeth” at intersections mimic the red-bordered yellow inverted triangles of “yield” signs.
The man who stands at the top of the steps leading up to the blue bridge of the Groninger museum, the main bottle-necked passageway for bicyclists and pedestrians making their way into the city from the train station, is an interfering element of infrastructure. He redirects the majority of pedestrians by virtue of the discomfort involved in denying a street salesperson, so that some approach the bridge by one of the alternate bike path routes. Those that do pass by the man are either unaware of his purpose, or indifferent to it. A small number are people who regularly talk with the man.
