I’m a white pawn in a game of human-scale chess, hunched beside a dumpster at the mouth of an alley opposite an abandoned brick tower that is jammed with junkies. The board is downtown Providence, R.I. Yes, the entire downtown. Any moment, my cellphone will ring, and a voice from an art gallery nearby will tell me where to move. An hour passes. The cellphone does not ring.

Ever since Hippodamos of Milesios designed Rhodes to function as a theatre, there has existed a vague instinct that a city must be treated like a stage and that somehow there is more to that stage than meets the eye. “Every city has a sex and age which have nothing to do with demography,” John Berger wrote. A city must have, if not a soul, then at least some gnarly alter ego. Within the unfaltering urban hum of traffic lights and 5 a.m. garbage trucks, quick incidents without buildup and the rapid acquisition of mythology, 24 hours a day, year after year – well, something must happen to all that energy. If we sit long enough on a certain corner, wander in strange enough patterns, with enough concentration and an open mind – if our method is perfect enough – clues to that alchemy and the city’s soul will emerge. That’s the theory. And the theory has a name: psychogeography.

Many of us are scared right now. We fear that we have ripped our world apart, spiritually and physically, past any conceivable point of repair. Yet at the local level – “the white pawn hunched by the dumpster” level – somehow it still seems treatable. An artist named David Mandl, who has just been “killed” on the Providence board, tells me, “If you’re out with a camera taking photographs in New York (and probably a lot of other places) and you’re not taking a picture of the Statue of Liberty, you’re suspicious.”

Mandl is dressed all in black and has a restless manner, eyes perpetually darting for the next key detail. Three years ago, he co-founded Glowlab, a Brooklyn collective that organizes things like human-scale chess. It hosts a summit called Psy-Geo-Conflux, a kind of urban jamboree for groups with names like the LA Urban Rangers and the Institute for Infinitely Small Things, which are composed of academics, activists, adventurers, architects and artists. They believe in ignorant bike rides and sunflower-planting brigades and wordless tours to “invisible spaces.” You can dial their toll-free numbers to receive walking instructions based on your temperament at any given moment. They’ve turned the Wi-Fi and mobile phone networks that blanket cities into a million different personalized briar patches. In one case, Manhattan is reconceived as a maze, where citizen ghosts physically pursue a human Pac-Man through the streets. It’s broadcast on www.pacmanhattan.com. Basic maps are either too much now or are no longer enough. It’s not enough to simply walk from A to B anymore without letting a coin flip determine your route or else some randomly chosen algorithmic pattern (left left right, left left right...). We’re supposed to somehow channel some higher power in our quest for clues to the city’s soul. These people treat the city as a kind of final frontier.