The Flâneur and the Freedom to Walk

The art of wandering is not dependent on wealth, status, or being well-traveled but is a philosophy of life that can be applied to most settings. However, it requires having places to wander freely.

‘Golconda’ (1953) by the surrealist painter René Magritte.

“From the late eighteenth century onwards, it is no longer from the practice of community but from being a wanderer that the instinct of fellow-feeling is derived. Thus an essential isolation and silence and loneliness become the carriers of nature and community against the rigours, the cold abstinence, the selfish ease of ordinary society.”

-Raymond Williams, The Country and the City

The well-being of human life, culture, and society depends on a baseline set of standards. Food and water must be gathered and continuously supplied. Shelters need to be constructed and maintained. One must feel safe and secure in their homes, on the street, and in their wider communities. In aggregate, humans must first reach a certain threshold of basic physical and psychological standards before obtaining higher aspirations akin to those spelled out in Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.

However, once our material standards have been met, we all seem to crave something beyond the material world. Whether we are secular or religious, we all desire deeper meaning to our lives and there is a realm of experiences that many of us yearn for. We feel this urgent sensation, but rarely do we know how to appease it. Where should we begin seeking this “meaning” in life? Some of us believe that we must go searching far and wide, way “out there” beyond the horizon. However, a forgotten method of exploration suggests we begin our search by aimlessly wandering wherever we find ourselves right now.

A flaneur is a French term that is simply defined as “an idler or lounger” and was first ascribed to 19^th-century affluent males sauntering down European boulevards idling their days away while everyone else worked. How nice that must have been. A slightly better definition describes the flaneur as “primarily a leisurely observer of city life, someone who wandered through urban landscapes, observing but not actively participating in what they witnessed. This allowed them to experience and analyse city existence from a detached, external perspective.”

However, these definitions fail to capture a few important things. First, there is too much pomp and classism dripping from this definition which makes it seem as if this behavior can only be for an elitist class of scholars, artists, or writers who have the luxury of spending all day with their heads in the cloud. Second, it is too city-centric–one can just as easily apply this mode of thought to rural or purely natural settings as well. Lastly, it misses or downplays the larger significance of the experiential aspect of those who partake in this activity or what can be gained from having the mindset of a flaneur. This isn’t simply a casual stroll for mere entertainment or relaxation per se, but more akin to walking mindfully.

This concept of slowing down to wander and explore one’s immediate environment is quite a revolutionary and democratic act. Henry David Thoreau, a flaneur in his own right, captured this sentiment perfectly when he wrote, “It’s not what you look at that matters. It’s what you see.” Likewise, Marcel Proust also famously opined, “The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.” As I argued in Wandering and Mindfulness: On the Right to Slow Down,

Slowing down and appreciating the small details of our world is one of the most remarkable discoveries and enhancements one can make to their life. It is a central component to what I mean in my definition of wandering—appreciating that adventure is all about how you see things rather than what you look at or where you are situated on the globe. Acts of wandering infused with mindfulness allow adventures for anyone, anywhere.

This is essentially what the true flaneur is up to. It wasn’t their outward appearance of walking around in some flamboyant outfit to be admired by all the lowly laborers of the 19^th century nor was it entirely the large sum of wealth they had accumulated that allowed them to idle their days away. Rather this was a creative mindset and philosophy of life that one stepped into on occasion and a skill on how to be captivated by one’s surroundings. The flaneur is attempting to live in the present by admiring how infinitely interesting everything around them is. It follows that given the right attitude and attention, wandering one’s own town, city, or countryside can be just as thrilling as strolling down some grand boulevard in a famous European city or park.

Thus, if one has the acuity to harness this mental skill of the flaneur, virtually any place on the globe becomes worth traveling to. That is why I think the art of wandering is such a revolutionary, democratic, and liberating act at its core. However, this is easier said than done, especially when we live in an increasingly populated and industrialized world. After all, we need plenty of places to wander freely.

There is (to be overly dramatic for a moment) a “war on walking” that greatly hinders our ability to walk casually through our cities and towns nowadays. Many of us probably scoff at the idea of someone blissfully and casually lost in a modern city. Cities fill a lot of us with instant anxiety and stress from how overstimulating such environments have become. Heavy, loud traffic; pollution; and sirens echoing from a firetruck or ambulance–all create a cacophony of assault on our senses. Physically trying to cross streets and crowded sidewalks with our heads on a swivel and doing our best not to run into others makes the idea of slowing down to “take it all in” laughable in this hectic environment.

Also, it should be noted that this “war on walking” isn’t a conscious conspiracy led by the plane, train, and automobile industries but rather a long-term process of urban planners and politicians succumbing to the winds of change and trying their best to make appropriate changes for transportation and commerce for their towns and cities. Nevertheless, these inevitable changes have often come at the expense of the pedestrian way of life.

The author Rebecca Solnit, in her book Wanderlust: A History of Walking noted that “Freedom to walk is not much use without someplace to go.” As a consequence of industrialization, we’ve spawned a world that “accommodates the automobilized and suburbanized mind” with the “privatization of space,” where previous public spaces in cities and towns that were once much more densely integrated and had naturally evolved for walking—allowing for the free flow of people to wander, to interact, to exchange ideas, to democratically assemble and protest with much ease—have been dramatically altered and eliminated to make way for suburbs, highways, and other infrastructure for driving and expediting consumerism. This has had a tremendous effect on the ways we perceive and experience space and time, especially within cities and towns.

Our bodies have evolved to function in a world completely unlike the world we now inhabit, and as a result, Solnit worries, “that body has begun to atrophy as both a muscular and a sensory organism.” This sudden phenomenon of technology supplanting the functioning of the human body, leading to a lack of movement, may help explain rampant health problems in society such as obesity, stroke, high blood pressure, and osteoporosis along with such marketable niches of gyms, dietary supplements, surgeries, and tenuous gadgets and other modern charlatanism promising to make us perfectly fit in 30 days or less. The physical effects are just the beginning. How we think individually and collectively is also transformed as technology and the rapid transformation of society influence our bodies and minds in unpredictable ways.

We cannot control the winds of change and while many spaces of cities and towns are difficult or impossible to casually traverse, we can rest assured that, for now, there remain plenty of places to wander. The fact is, most of us likely inhabit places with the freedom to walk somewhere–parks, trails, nature preserves, railroad tracks, downtown squares, and endless miles of unexplored streets. Maybe those places aren’t always the most idyllic and perhaps they are even downright shabby—we would, after all, be hard-pressed to find anyone who genuinely enjoys walking down a city block of boarded-up foreclosed homes. However, I’d venture to guess that there are still many beautiful unknown spots to explore within walking distance of wherever we find ourselves. The only down payment they require is a small investment of our time and attention. As I stated in my earlier post,

[M]aybe we don’t always need some far-flung expensive tour around the world to bring us greater contentment in our lives. Many of us wish we could travel more than we do but learning how to appreciate smaller acts of wandering and mindfulness may be more empowering than we first realize. Applying mindfulness to the wanderings that are accessible right out our back door or in our own neighborhoods is what most of us have control over and can do to live a more adventurous and fulfilling life. How do we remain enchanted by the places we’ll spend most of our time? Is it possible that we can see these mundane places we’ve lived in for ten or twenty years with fresh eyes and explore them as if we’re just now visiting them for the first time?

There are plenty of places around the globe where walking feels more natural than others. Some of those places are by design, like Dublin, Ireland which has been referred to as a “walker’s city” and a place I recently traveled to and wrote about. I envy those who live in such enchanting ancient cities or have quick access to the mountains and seashores of the world to easily ramble along. But I have to remind myself time and again, that while I can only occasionally visit some of these places, I have to mostly live in one spot on the globe at any given time. I have to learn, (and often relearn) how to appreciate what immediately surrounds me. I have to step into the mindset of a flaneur from time to time and take advantage of one of the greatest freedoms of all and one I always have access to: the freedom to walk.

If you enjoyed this article, consider these related articles from Those Who Wander on the art of wandering:

• Adventure as a Mindset

• Dublin and Its Environs: A Walker’s City and the Weight of History

• Applying the Adventurous Mindset: Room Travel with a French Aristocrat

• Wandering and Mindfulness: On the Right to Slow Down

• The Case for Slow Travel and Slow Reading in a Fast-Paced Society

• Traveling Versus Wandering

Thanks for being a fellow traveler with me through this read. Please consider subscribing, sharing, and supporting this project—much more to follow.

Cheers!

-JSB