The flâneur is dead, long live the flâneur!

What the flâneur observes are the little everyday things of life, things which escape easily in the haste of everyday life, the little details that catch his eyes, which establish feelings, moods and whole stories. Wo walks today has a goal, and who has none, has at least an intention (shopping, sightseeing, walking). But is it still possible to awaken the flâneur in us? Can we find again the happiness of the “first gaze”? The Flâneur was once guided by the course of the streets. Every road was a possibility. The Fâneur discovered without searching. Are we today able to experience the space similar like the Flâneur in his time? Is the modern man yet able to stroll after all? Or made haste and restlessness of modernity the flaneur to a relic of a past time?

The flanerie acts as a guide in an increasingly confused world. It tries to oppose something against the increasing alienation and homelessness, to elicit an empirical value from experiences. The flaneur likes to be incorporate by the city, but the city has to give him something back as well: An individual character, places which especially invite to relax and to think and are really new. Have shopping streets and pedestrian zones banished the flâneur? What do we need in a city to stroll in it? What do we need in ourselves to wander?

Parallel to the city the flâneur starts to move, but has no fixed point during his observations. He dives into the crowd, but it is important for him not to merge with the crowd and to keep his loneliness. Protected from the crowd he can observe without interruption. In the crowd, the flâneur searches for new sources of aesthetic inspiration.His goal is to recover a sense of community, as Baudelaire put it, “to be away from home and yet to feel everywhere at home”.Part of the process is getting lost in the crowd, and so, there’s a constant risk we will be moved, saddened, excited or fall in love. Walking among crowds keep our sense of community, with fresh perspectives on our environment, and on ourselves, but still retain freedom and individuality.“The crowd is his element, as the air is that of birds and water of fishes. His passion and his profession are to become one flesh with the crowd. For the perfect flâneur, for the passionate spectator, it is an immense joy to set up house in the heart of the multitude, amid the ebb and flow of movement, in the midst of the fugitive and the infinite. To be away from home and yet to feel oneself everywhere at home; to see the world, to be at the centre of the world, and yet to remain hidden from the world – impartial natures which the tongue can but clumsily define.”

Charles Baudelaire, “The Painter of Modern Life”, (New York: Da Capo Press, 1964). Orig. published in Le Figaro, in 1863.