Guy Debord once remarked, ‘One day, we will build cities for drift.’ Drift is the Anglicised version of the French word derive which Debord laconically defines as a ‘technique of rapid passage through varied ambiences’ in an urban milieu. A derive is an urban drift, an artful practice of getting lost in a city to pay attention to and bring to the foreground everyday urban practices that go unnoticed in a typical urban commute. The varied ambiences Debord has in mind are the three spatial zones in a city: work, rest, leisure. As a form of aimless wandering, or ‘locomotion without a goal’, derive cuts through all three of these zones, unmaking our conventional, everyday experiences of the spaces of the city shaped to commodify our customary encounters with the urban environment as a socio-political and economic force. To derive is to trample upon lines of official urban demarcations meant to prohibit or control pedestrian mobility, remapping the contours of a city in pursuit of liberty. Debord offers a more detailed definition of derive as a walk through a city in which:

For city dwellers, urban space is far from neutral. Following Lefebvre and de Certeau, we can define urban space as the ‘active sphere of everyday life and as a form of discourse’. The drifter is an urban practitioner of psychogeography, another term invented by Debord, who defined it as the ‘study of the precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organised or not, on the emotions and behaviour of individuals’.