Probing the surroundings...

"The point is not so much do we notice (attend to) the city? No doubt we do. Rather the point is, how do we notice it?...

            There and not there, only fitfully attended to" ( Thrift 2004, p.399).

There is something romantic about the Flâneur. There too is something appealing about the city. So when we begin to notice the city, how do we capture the city as experienced? Many will argue that they in fact experienced the city- the city which tends to every vice; the city which performs a caste of suspecting characters; the city which captures the growls and roars and thunderous honks, toots and beeps of taxicabs. But...is this to experience what every other fast paced suit can see?

"Walking along these city streets Seeing people busy Pacing Each with their own itinerary Cracked city sidewalk Aged city structure Smoggy city air Going here, getting there Never seems to be a minute to spare As cars stream along Arteries of streets, the blood flow of the city The machine is breaking down Gradually The cracks and leaks slowly showing Urban decay Coupled upon Moral collapse The path, which I tread Is laden with traps Waiting to destroy me The city is dirty A crowded cacophony A droning noise Always there and never gone away The city is our cage We the animals Are under its oppression. Jeremy Patnou- http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/in-the-city/." Thrift suggests there are some contradictory undertones to the thinking of the city as experienced. He recalls the snobbish romanticism about the city and its inhabitants as proposed by authors such Benjamin, Breton and Debord.  He says: "These authors want to believe that the city is an all-consuming capitalist machine, a space of subordinate strategies, and, at the same time, a treasure trove of chance encounters which allow us to see round the dominant system, a subordinate space of tactics" (Thrift 2004, p.400). For what I understand of Walter Benjamin, the city was both interior and exterior; " "knowable and known, and . . . mysteriously alien and fantastic" (Rignall 113-114). You can see the objects, the buildings, the people, but can you really take in and absorb what is going on around you? For Benjamin, the rise of the Flâneur came about with the architectural parisian changes. The capitalist roots that came in the form of the arcades provided an one who can stroll at leisure, an idle pace to experience what is being seen. These passageways seen in the arcades were representative of "neighbourhoods which had been covered with a glass roof and braced by marble panels so as to create a sort of interior-exterior for vending purposes" (http://www.thelemming.com/lemming/dissertation-web/home/flaneur.html). Baudelaire explored the site of the arcades and went on to explain how in some ways the arcades were much like a world in miniature- with there own comings-and-goings, a fast paced changes, and even it's own language.  "Yet Benjamin also suggests the flâneur enters the scene with commodity capitalism; here Benjamin in fact equates the flâneur with the commodity and the consumer: “[t]he flâneur is someone abandoned in the crowd. In this he shares the situation of the commodity” (p. 55). On the one hand, the flâneur is the very definition of alienation, and on the other it is in fact the flâneur who can see through the commodification of human labor and social relations within capitalism, and—rather unlike the commodity—protests against it" (Pope 2010, p.6).                                                                              Does/did the flâneur exist? Feminists today argue that the term flâneur is a predominant male character and rightly so. The textual representation presents he as as a well-dressed man "strolling leisurely through the Parisian arcades of the nineteenth century--a shopper with no intention to buy, an intellectual parasite of the arcade. Traditionally the traits that mark the flâneur are wealth, education, and idleness" (http://www.thelemming.com/lemming/dissertation-web/home/flaneur.html). However, today scholars suggest there to was/is a binary opposition in the form of the female; "flâneuse"(Akkelies & Nguymen 2009, p.122). She experiences the city differently as she can not show the same behaviours as the flâneur, wandering aimlessly around town. Observations today have accounted how men and women use urban spaces and thus a better understanding of the flâneur/flâneuse has come to take form. Baudelaire and Benjamin forgot to mention the woman's experience of modernity, thus lending to the flâneur in modernity as male. Janet Wolff, feminist scholar writes, "  (Wolff 1985, p.37).

References
Nguymen, T.M. & Akkelies, V.N. 2009, 'Gender differences in the urban environment', in Daniel Koch, Lars Marcus and Jesper Steen (eds.) 7th International Space Syntax Symposium, Stockholm.


Thrift, Nigel 2004, "With child to see any strange thing: Everyday life in the city" in Gary Bridge and Sophie Watson (eds.) A Companion to the City, Blackwell Publishing, Carlton. 


Pope, Richard 2010, "The Jouissance of the Flâneur: Rewriting Baudelaire and Modernity", in Space and Culture, Vol. 13, iss. 1. Retrieved 28 August 2011, from Expanded Academic Database.


Wolff, Janet 1985, 'The Invisible Flaneuse: women and the literature of modernity', Theory, Culture & Society, vol. 37, iss. 2. Retrieved 28 August 2011, from Expanded Academic Database.