To contend with the printed word, I'd like to present a more ephemeral collection of references: a survey of the web resources related to Ekistomancy that I have found so far. For a more general magical link resource, Sk4p.net has an excellent one here.
(Note: Know, of course, that like any, pardon the pun, linked list, links may die and links may break. I intend on retroactively updating the list as time goes on, culling dead links to old branches of the web, and I shall mention when I most recently update down at the bottom of the post. In the future, then, there may therefore be some discrepancy between when this list was first posted and when I have most recently updated it. If this discrepancy irks me, I might even farm out the list to be its own page on the site, an event which shall also be retroactively noted in-post. I am, if anything, a thorough webcreature.)
One should note the paucity of direct Ekistomantic resources- this is not a long list, as it is a tiny, tiny field. I actually feel bad, as not a few of the links are to websites I myself have contributed to, lending a subtle air of self-congratulation to the list that evaporates only when one Googles the hell out of the iterations of city-magic keywords and comes up with little else. Such is the result, I guess, of original research and study, to be a self-reflective field.
Our first stops are two message board threads:
Barbelith Underground>>Temple>>Urban Occultism
Barbelith started soon after Grant Morrison began publishing The Invisibles, as a gathering-place for those interested in the comic and the issues/pursuits it discussed. It saved itself from the miseries of Eternal September (the massive increases in noise over signal during internet discussions that has happened since the web's inception) by requiring prospective posters to competently fill out a webform stating their interests and intents. Unfortunately, the day-to-day moderation of the place, including pawing through new apps and pushing fresh blood into the place, seems to have dried up in the last few years, and the board has had a number of outages and database explosions in 2009. The thread linked to above has not, for example, been updated since 2004. Most of the other threads one can find via google search haven't seen action since 2003.
Many of the more active posters on Barbelith's Temple section moved themselves over to Liminal Nation, where our second thread hails from:
Unreal Cities- Urbanomancy, urban shamanism, etc.
Liminal Nation, a forum specifically for offbeat magical practice, has been much more active than Barbelith as-of late, perhaps because it was set up by 'Lithers and specifically poached much of that board's magical conversation. This thread is more-than-representative of that activity. One might even be able to figure out who their beloved Ekistomancer posts as over there.
And some other things:
Megapolisomancy, Or Why All Cities Are Haunted
This post on the sci-fi blog io9 is a nice roundup of tangents to the field, if in the context of, well, being a blog about science fiction.
Unknown Armies net.magick Archive- Urbanomancy
Here is the earliest site I can find relating to the Urbanomancer character class presented in the quasi-magical RPG Unknown Armies. It is vaguely helpful to the practitioner, but is mostly game mechanics.
The Demon-Haunted World
The slides and notes to a great presentation on the interaction of cities, technology, and magic by Matt Jones, a designer at dopplr.
And tangentially related:
Urban Shamanism
The website of David Lang, advocate of modernized shamanistic practices, who lives in Oregon. Not strictly city magic, but certainly aware of the role Shamanism needs to play in modern life, and the need to reconnect many cities with their geography and environment. Ekistomancy is cousin to such practice, but not directly related.
Last updated October 19th, 2009
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