Flâneur. The Art of Wandering the Streets of Paris

The Lion and the Unicorn, 2012

The city and the urban condition, popular subjects of art, literature, and film, have been commonly represented as fragmented, isolating, violent, with silent crowds moving through the hustle and bustle of a noisy, polluted cityspace. Included in this diverse artistic field is children's literature-an area of creative and critical inquiry that continues to play a central role in illuminating and shaping perceptions of the city, of city lifestyles, and of the people who traverse the urban landscape. Fiction's textual representations of cities, its sites and sights, lifestyles and characters have drawn on traditions of realist, satirical, and fantastic writing to produce the protean urban story-utopian, dystopian, visionary, satirical-with the goal of offering an account or critique of the contemporary city and the urban condition. In writing about cities and urban life, children's literature variously locates the child in relation to the social (urban) space. This dialogic relation between subject and social space has been at the heart of writings about/of the flâneur: a figure who experiences modes of being in the city as it transforms under the influences of modernism and postmodernism.

The flâneur and the tourist were both characterized foremost by movement and curiosity. A range of meanings and resonances were associated with both figures, underlining the tensions between the ideas of the insider and the outsider, the Parisian and the foreigner, travel within Paris and without, mechanical versus purposeful seeing, and compulsive versus meaningful mobility. While the sense of vision was emphasized, literary representations often evoked the idea that vacuous and passive seeing, stimulated by trivial goings-on and merchandise, lets the flâneur neglect the other senses, whereas an inner preparation and discernment lead to a more balanced way of flânerie. The projection of flânerie onto world travel paralleled the mode of reading illustrated magazines, which elicited imaginary flânerie. The re-reading of Baudelaire's 'Le Peintre de la vie moderne' in this light provides some new insights regarding the concept of the artist as the 'man of the world'. What are the connections between the flâneur and the tourist in the nineteenth century? The figures of the tourist and the flâneur have been compared as tropes of modernity in sociological theory. However, little historical analysis exists on the association between the two figures. The flâneur was strongly associated with travel from early on, as the very etymology and definition of the flâneur had to do with the idea of walking, movement. A range of meanings and resonances, including contradictory ones, were associated with both figures especially in the early decades, characterized foremost by movement and curiosity, underlining the tensions between the ideas of the insider and the outsider, the Parisian and the foreigner, travel within Paris and without, mechanical versus purposeful seeing, and compulsive versus meaningful mobility.

Toplumsal Değişim, 2020

This article focuses on the concept of flâneur, which had largely emerged from the works of Baudelaire and Walter Benjamin, and attempts to reveal the level that this concept has echoed through the contemporary period. Flâneur is accepted as a teaching metaphor on the point of modernity' s relationship with urban living; therefore, it can serve the function of a tool in the social, historical, and theoretical explanations regarding the world today. Studies revolving around flaneur have been published in a wide variety of fields. This study will discuss flâneur over "strolling", "viewing", and "producing", which come at the top of the elements of city life that are as inevitable as much as they are also changing and transforming. Discussion around flaneur that will interest many of the social science disciplines and those working in these fields are examined in the context of the literature that has been developed.

2019

On the one hand, for decades there has been a growing interest in urban walking as an authentic physical, creative or subversive spatial experience. On the other hand, cities as well as different walking practices are more and more staged, are part of mediatized, as well as market-oriented city scenarios or artistic image productions. Thus urban strolling appears increasingly to be a theatreor filmlike experience. The text discusses the ambivalence and complexity of today’s walking practices and re-evaluates their meaning ranging from resistance to consumerism, referring to the historical concept of the flâneur as well as to the current phenomenon of a postheroic urban stroller. Examples from film, fine arts and literature from recent decades, illustrating paradoxical walking concepts, are used for analysis; a special focus is placed on Bertrand Bonello’s film Nocturama, Albrecht Selge’s novel Wach and Valérie Jouve’s photo series Les Passants and Les Personnages.

DINÂMIA’CET-IUL, 2021

The flâneur is well-known for being the most emblematic nineteenth-century observer of urban life. Critics have often compared the flâneur to a camera eye which records everything and insisted on the predominance of sight over other senses in the cognitive process. I would like to lay emphasis on the embodiedness of the flâneur’s vision, which is an experience of all the senses. I would like to envisage the whole of the flâneur’s body as a surface on which the city leaves its imprint. The city is a space whose sights, sounds and smells are constantly changing and mutating. The city space can be envisaged as a ‘metabolic space,’ in which ‘the links between background and figures are very unstable’ (Augoyard). The moving body of the flâneur, which can adapt to this changing space, seems to be in an ideal position to apprehend the metabolic body of the city. The flâneur’s whole body is a perceptive surface which allows things in. He makes his way through the sounds, smells, tastes and textures of the city as well as through its sights. The flâneur is not only ‘an eye impaled on a stake’ (Wittgenstein), he is ‘a living eye’ which communicates with all the other senses and captures the whole experience of moving through the city. His body might be compared to a seismograph that not only registers all kinds of sensory impressions but also translates and transmits them. By looking at texts by Balzac, Baudelaire, Dickens and Charlotte Brontë, I will demonstrate that flânerie is a sensory activity that shapes our perception of the city as much as the city shapes our own flâneries by transforming our bodies into scribes who write the ‘thicks and thins of the urban text.’ (De Certeau)

The flâneur acts as a key figure for understanding the relationship between the individual, modernity and the city. A reference to dandy young gentlemen, who walked, performed and loitered within the arcades of late 19th-century Paris, the flâneur has transitioned from a literary and theoretical figure to one used in mobile urban ethnographies. The flâneur, traditionally male, is a figure of pedestrian mobility whose sensorial and mobile engagements with the urban landscape generate distinct forms of creative practice. For this reason, the flâneur has been invoked in relation to the methods and experiences of the ethnographer, who moves and takes note in similar ways. This paper conducts a review of extant literature on the flâneur in ethnographic research, which shows a strong connection between this key figure and its ties to a European tradition dealing with Anglo-European (post)modernities. It has also inspired a range of methodological innovations in urban ethnography more broadly. Finally, through the case of Tokyo, the paper asks the question of who is drawn to flânerie and who is deterred from it, demonstrating how the transgressive potentialities of flânerie are only desirable for some.

2018

A middle-class male, wandering through the streets for no apparent reason other than the mere jouissance. The Flâneur, Baudelaire's conception of such a figure, becomes problematic when feminist theorists conceptualised the flâneuse, the female wanderer, one which can only wander for a reason, to shop, whilst in the process she becomes the subject of the male gaze, possibly even the Flâneur's gaze. This essay will further explore the differing concepts of the flâneur and the Flâneuse in relation to Hatred/La Haine (Mathieu Kassovitz, 1995) and Vagabond/Sans toit ni Loi (Agnès Varda, 1985). The Flâneur's relevance to Hatred is associated to the boys aimless yet accessible wandering through the banlieue/cité, the Parisian housing projects, and how it differs as soon as they attempt to wander around Paris.

Media/Culture Journal, 2018

The concept of the " writer flâneur, " as developed by Walter Benjamin, sought to make sense of the seemingly chaotic nineteenth century city. While the flâneur provided a way for new urban structures to be ordered, it was also a transgressive act that involved engaging with urban spaces in new ways. In the contemporary city, where spaces are now heavily controlled and ordered, some members of the city's socio-ecological community suffer as a result of idealistic notions of who and what belongs in the city, and how we must behave as urban citizens. Many of these ideals emerge from nineteenth century conceptions of the city in contrast to the country (Williams). However, a reimagining of the flaneur can allow for new transgressions of urban space and result in new literary imaginaries that capture the complexity of urban environments, question some of the more damaging processes and systems, offer new ways of connecting with the city and propose alternative ways of living with the non-human in such places.

2004

The nineteenth-century flâneur perceived the transformation of the city through urban wanderings. The practice of urban wandering was adopted and adapted by several cultural avant-garde movements of the twentieth century (Dadaism, surrealism, situationism). Thus, each avant-garde movement and its cultural producers observed, through haphazard urban wanderings, the transformation of the modern metropolis. The objective of this article is to illustrate how a cultural practice, that of haphazard urban wanderings, was transformed by the Situationists International into an urbanplanning technique of surveying the city and identifying its psychogeography in order to design the metropolis of the future.