Modernity is an elusive word. In The Painter of Modern Life, Charles Baudelaire opted for a deceptively ambiguous description: “By ‘modernity’ I mean the ephemeral, the contingent, the half of art whose other half is eternal and immutable.” But his famous figuration of the flâneur concretizes modernity’s social consequences and lived experience through the aimless wandering on labyrinthine streets. The flaneur’s cartographical mobilities assemble a lyrical, poetic city song.
This nineteenth-century Parisian figure seized an opportunity in the modern metropolis: sauntering down the street and collecting sensory data from the city. Being a passionate, yet detached observer, the flâneur used the practice of walking to heroically claim the ownership of public space and honour the freedom and autonomy afforded by modernity.
Since the early twentieth century, the institutionalized car culture has been predominant in many metropolitan areas. Jaywalking is considered an illegal act; an obedient walker is seen as a model citizen. However, the history of how car companies invented the crime of jaywalking is largely forgotten. The walker’s freedom is shattered by designated pedestrian sidewalks and regulated traffic lights. Jamming more cars into our cities has become the beacon for the metropolitan ideal of urban planning, and it has also become the bastion against spatial invitations to vibrant street life.
The death of the flâneur entails a triumph of privatization of public space and an utter celebration of automobiles in the city. The walker somehow personifies the alienated and the unwanted on the street. The configuration of urban space only aims to hasten things along but undermines the dwelling experience of its residents.
Psychogeography is an inventive exploration of urban environments and emphasizes the influence of urban typography on emotions and behaviours. Psychogeographers, whose ideas are indebted to the avant-garde group Situationist International (1957-1972), endeavour to reclaim the significance of walking in relation to individual and collective agency. Drifting has become a hip fashion—looking for new meanings of the celebrated, the banned, and the ruined, meanwhile dissecting grand narratives of the city. It is cute and playful; it doesn’t guarantee the safety for oneself or others but what price is freedom? Should there be something more here?
Likewise, Michel de Certeau justified the imperative of “walking in the city”—a tactic of infusing personal (his)stories and memories through urban walking to challenge the underlying strategy of built forms and question the instituted spatial arrangement. His pedestrian walker is supposed to embody a creative resistance to make the city more intimate and more memorable.
On April 23, 2018, a white van plowed into the pedestrians, 10 dead, and more injured, in a seemingly safe city. The street that witnessed the crazed, violent vehicle-ramming attack also endures ordinary road rage. In North York, Toronto, Yonge Street is structured to favour automobiles. Speeding cars and hostile drivers are uncannily part of the banal everydayness. Being a pedestrian is to put a body in the increasingly dangerous public space, where walking, the fundamental transportation, is disagreeable.
Urban walkers, again, are the ultimate victims of spatial politics. The power of resistance is a romantic unction; the participatory agency is ruthlessly expropriated. The walking souls are bemoaned by the city. Their presence is incommunicable as their bodies are found evidences of the treacherous street against humanistic enterprises. The walkers’ last freedom is silence.
Works Cited:
Baudelaire, Charles. The Painter of Modern Life. Phaidon Press, 2010.
De Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life. University of California
Press, 2011.
Originally published in White Wall Review 42: Special Issue (2019)