1. Cities and Gender Class 1
The flaneur
Cities and Gender
Class 1

2. The Flaneur Paul Gavarni, Le Flâneur, 1842.
Gustave Caillebotte, „Paris Street; Rainy Day ” (1877)

3. The tourist vs the flaneur
Purposefully walks and travels
In search of meaning
A „ true urban hysteric” (Mark Crinson)
Interested in the mainstream, the spectacular
Dutiful, schematic
THE FLANEUR:
Aimlessly wanders
More interested in impressions than in finding “meaning”
Observes the world peacefully; a detached observer of the city
Interested in the alternative, the hidden
Artistic, leisurely

4. Walter Benjamin ( )
„Theses on the Philosophy of History” redefining the concept of history
„The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”  commodification
The flaneur  urban walker, the quintessential figure of modernity

5. Charles Baudelaire, “The painter of modern life” (1863)
“The crowd is his domain, just as the air is the bird’s, and water that of the fish. His Passion and his profession is to merge with the crowd”

6. Charles Baudelaire, “The painter of modern life” (1863)
“For the idler, for the passionate observer it becomes an immense source of enjoyment to establish his dwelling in the throng, in the ebb and flow, the bustle, the fleeting and the infinite” (Baudelaire)
“The poet is able to be away from home and yet to feel at home anywhere, to be at the very centre of the world, and yet to be unseen of the world”
“It is not given to every man to take a bath of multitude”; only a poet can take such a bath that “a fairy has bestowed the love of masks and masquerading, the hate of home, and the passion for roaming”

7. Subjectivity
Keith Tester: self-hood is dependent on the contingencies of spectacles such as crowds (5)  permanence of his soul (“being”) vs changes produced by encounters (“doing”)?
In Baudelaire: nobility, heroism, invisible yet stands out  social position, privilege
Via the walk: the flaneur completes his otherwise incomplete identity (7)
His gaze controls the urban environment
Examples: Manet, Constantin Guys, Louise Aragon, Paris Peasant, Gérard de Nerval, Journey to the Orient, Sartre, Nausea, Robert Musil, The Man Without Qalities

8. The Walk
“There is a kind of frenzied romantic love with the spectacle of the public” (7)
vs: “Public spaces can be places of immense existential fear” (10)
A sense of freedom
Searching for some kind of meaning/or lack of meaning
A form of being with others
Impressions and transitoriness inspire his art
vs. the desire to find the eternal in the transitory

9. Art and commodification
The flaneur’s vision is artistic vs. the commodification which defines the late 19th and early 20th centuries
Artistic nature of the 19th century flaneur vs its contemporary manifestation: “The flaneur has walked into the pages of the commonplace”
“Benjamin’s argument is that the rationality of capitalism and, especially commodification and the circulation of commodities, itself defined the meaning of existence in the city” (13)
The hollowness of capitalism and the hollowness of egoistic individuals is refellected in the flaneur (13)
Emptiness of the flaneur; the walk fills this emptiness

10. The Production of Space
HENRI LEFEBVRE ( )
Space is socially constructed; Social relations are inscribed in space; e.g. there are places you are not allowed to enter, places exclusively for men, etc.
Place is planned – produced - for us but we also produce our own notions of space: „We are workers, producing out own factory just by walking down the street: that’s one way to summarize what I took away from Lefebvre’s The Production of Space”

11. Place vs. Space PLACE: Physical, planned
Trope of the map: it imposes order on space
Panoptical viewpoint
Imposes its rules and regulations on us
Wants to be objective
SPACE:
Lived, experienced
Trope of the tour: the flaneur observes space
The perspective of those who walk and transform place into space
Our subjective perceptions
Admittedly subjective

12. The panoptical view vs the flaneur’s perspective
View from the top of BT Tower
Amsterdam (2009)