Flâneur

Definition

The flâneur is the figure of the urban stroller — the detached but observant wanderer who experiences the modern city through the act of walking rather than the discipline of the map or the efficiency of transit. For Baudelaire, the flâneur is the "painter of modern life" who finds poetry in the crowd; for Benjamin, the flâneur is a historical figure whose habitat is the arcades and whose demise is sealed by Haussmannization and the commodity. The flâneur is a way of using the city that is irreducible to its functional grid — a practice of the everyday that prefigures both the Situationist dérive (wandering as critical method) and de Certeau's "walking in the city" as the tactical appropriation of space from below.

Key Thinkers

• Walter Benjamin — the flâneur as the hero of modernity; the arcade as flâneur-habitat.
• Baudelaire — the flâneur as the painter of modern life.

Related Concepts

• Arcades — the native habitat of the 19th-century flâneur.
• Psychogeography — the method that descends from flânerie.
• Dérive — the Situationist radicalization of flânerie.
• Modernity — the condition the flâneur navigates and embodies.

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• Benjamin for Architects — the flâneur and the experience of the modern city.