Such methods have blossomed to the point that a new category of leisure is being labelled “experimental tourism,” and multinational corporations – which the groups gathered in Providence tend to rail against – have appropriated the message of using the city in more daring visceral ways. Nike commercials now feature some of the movement’s more physically extreme participants, leaping like comic book avengers from building to building in a method known as parkour, which has also become the premise for a PlayStation Portable game, Free Running. It’s why you watch the Calgary Flames’ Jarome Iginla, for example, dodging hockey pucks in that Nike ad, transforming the entire city into his plaything. Don’t take that used-up old city around you for granted.

In the grand scheme of obsessive urban behaviour, the Paris Situationists were a kind of supernova. In their heyday, from the late 1950s into the ’60s, the Situationists would randomly traverse, say, Paris, using a London schematic. They’d draw up plans for cities consisting of emotional quarters (happy quarter, tragic quarter, sinister quarter). There is not really an exact word that ties together the disparate bags of tactics used to unravel cities all over the world throughout history. Psychogeography will have to do.

Psychogeography was the Situationists’ pet. It was originally conceived as a critique of urbanism by Paul-Henry Chombart de Lauwe, who charted the movements of a student over a year. The path forged a triangular rut: home, piano lessons, school. The idea of reprogramming these ruts seemed to simultaneously peak and converge with the May 1968 uprisings. “Under the pavements, the beach!” they chanted. Dig deeper, they meant – figuratively, literally. And by 1972, as the Situationists faded away, psychogeography disappeared. So much for digging.

“Just sort of out of the blue, the idea was in the air again,” Mandl says. Where their meanderings were once secretive and insular – often of sketchy legality – now through the hypertext of blogs and tangentially linked WebRings, today’s groups are piggybacking on those original precedents. But why now? Let us count the ways:

1. Communication technologies advance faster than we can realistically use them.

2. We endlessly attempt to reconcile our expanding virtual experience with the physical city where more of us now live than at any point in history.

3. Shows like Jackass continue to push wacky performance art into mass culture.

4. The Amazing Race elevates the scavenger hunt on a par with sitcoms.

5. Natural disasters increase the urgency of consummating a relationship with a city before it’s gone.