Abstract:
The term flâneur appeared first in the eighteenth century as conveying the meaning of idleness; in the nineteenth century it has already been applied to the metropolitan man who is freely moving in the urban public. Charles Baudelaire, the emblematic Parisian flâneur was to demonstrate both in his own life and through his poetry the huge transformation going on from a detective-like observer to somebody being passive member only of the urban crowd. The historical experience gained by the middle-class male stroller mirrors the intricate mental and material reality of contemporary European modernity. The physical framework has been the planned, geometrical and monumental cityscape of the metropolis, which accommodates a mass society where everybody is stranger to anybody else. The stroller is key figure in this setting, the dominant mode of behavior of whom is that of the blasé as it has been conceptualized by Georg Simmel. The modern (alienated) human experience and self-restraint public behavior, however, is widened with the time passing as being adopted first by the middleclass urban-dweller women, and sometime later by many members of the lower classes. The latter are initially hostile to the bourgeois code of publicity by protesting against it in the form of transgression. A good example for it has been the Other Vienna, the suburbs of the city of the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth century which could successfully generate a counterculture opposing the Ringstrasse culture of the aristocratic and bourgeois Vienna.
Any use of the analytical term flâneur and flânerie provides a favorable opportunity for gaining a holistic view of the modern city in its past entirety.
