"A century ago, 90% of Londoners' journeys under six miles were made on foot. Now we are alienated from the physical reality of our cities. Will Self on the importance of walking in the fight against corporate control"

"Borges's animals and beggars are those who still seek the disciplines of physical geography – we understand that to walk the city and its environs is, in a very powerful sense, to use it. The contemporary flâneur is by nature and inclination a democratising force who seeks equality of access, freedom of movement and the dissolution of corporate and state control."

"When you think about it, relying on the likes of Google, YouTube, Facebook et al stand up for the niche and the curious is pretty naive. Where their interests coincide they will side with the mainstream, and those interests will coincide more and more. We can’t rely on large Internet companies to look after this stuff – Yahoo’s half-arsed custody of Flickr should have taught us that. If we’re going to have an infrastructure that enables the spirit of the cyberflaneur to thrive we’re going to have to build and maintain it ourselves, above and beyond the financial blinkers of the mainstream.

One of the most surprising things about the Internet is how people think there’s a single monolithic culture. There used to be, back when access was difficult and determined by circumstance. But it’s not like that now. The Internet is for everything and everyone, which means it’s like everything else, prone to mediocrity and abuses of power…"

"The Colors of Berlin is for tourists and Berliners. The book is a unique tool for urban exploration, serving both as inspiration for a personal vision and documentation of the city. It is a declaration of love to Berlin. It helps the flaneur and the city-lover see and experience the urban landscape in a new way. Stadtblind’s aim is to create a distance from that which is familiar, to re-frame the familiar in such a way that it becomes fresh, worthy of attention and affection. We present the everyday spaces, objects and surfaces of contemporary Berlin ina manner that provides a new means of perceiving cities. It is precisely the everyday aspects of our lives that are most often overlooked; and it is precisely the everyday that most constitutes our lived experience of cities."

[via: http://youarehere2011.wordpress.com/suggested-reading/ ]

"The Flaneur Society was created in response to Walter Benjamin's book Berlin Childhood Around 1900. In it he explores the concept of the Flaneur, one who wanders without destination.<br />
<br />
Intrigued by this concept, the society was created to spread the concept of the Flaneur beyond academic studies and into the general consciousness of how we think of urban spaces.<br />
<br />
The Guidebook to Getting Lost is a small pocket sized book which defines the concept of the Flaneur. Using the language of the Park Service and backcountry maps, the guide aims to introduce the participant to a city without the concern of street names and directions. Inside, there are three maps which can guide the participant to a state of Flaneuring. A PDF of the guidebook can be downloaded here." [PDF: http://www.flaneursociety.org/guide.pdf ]<br />
<br />
[Tumblr: http://flaneursociety.tumblr.com/ ]

"So imagine a commitment to learning that involved making regular learning walks with high school students as a normal part of the "school" day. Now, these learning walks should not be confused with walking tours, which are designed based on planned outcomes. One walks to point X in order to see object or artifact Y. The points are predetermined, hierarchical in design.<br />
<br />
Instead, learning walks are rhizomatic. They are inherently about being in the middle of things and coming to learn what could not been predetermined. Learning walks are part of the "curriculum" for instructional seminar (which I described here)."

[My comments cross-posted here: http://robertogreco.tumblr.com/post/7182110515/walking-and-learning ]

"Constrained walks and the dérive both reveal the city's psychogeography, and force the city to give up more of itself. It's funny to find, right on my doorstep, the streets I didn't know that I didn't know, the ones I'd got the unknown habit of avoiding. The city grows.<br />
<br />
Space clearing makes visible and disrupts the psychogeography of my home. By standing in far corners, I find new perspectives. I strengthen rarely visited spots in my own mental map. Later, I find myself noticing the corners more. My house looks larger. The changed shape of my rooms encourages me to walk differently about the space. I stand in slightly unfamiliar spots, look at my bookshelves with a new-found unfamiliarity, and this prompts new combinations of titles to come to my attention, and new ideas.<br />
<br />
I wonder if I could make something to do this for me? Maybe a robot vacuum cleaner programmed to find rarely visited corners and play an attention-grabbing sample, hey, over here, over here."

"Walking, as Thoreau said and Solnit elegantly demonstrates, inevitably leads to other subjects. This pleasing and enlightening history of pedestrianism unfolds like a walking conversation with a particularly well-informed companion with wide-ranging interests. Walking, says Solnit, is the state in which the mind, the body and the world are aligned; thus she begins with the long historical association between walking and philosophizing. She briefly looks at the fossil evidence of human evolution, pointing to the ability to move upright on two legs as the very characteristic that separated humans from the other beasts and has allowed us to dominate them. She looks at pilgrims, poets, streetwalkers and demonstrators, and ends up, surprisingly, in Las Vegas--or maybe not so surprisingly in that city of tourists, since "Tourism itself is one of the last major outposts of walking." …"

"Serendipitor is an alternative navigation app that helps you find something by looking for something else. Enter an origin and a destination, and the app maps a route between the two. You can increase or decrease the complexity of this route, depending how much time you have to play with. As you navigate your route, suggestions for possible actions to take at a given location appear within step-by-step directions designed to increase the likelihood that, in the end, you will have encounters you could never have pre-planned. You can take photos along the way and, upon reaching your destination, send an email sharing with friends your route and the steps you took." [via: http://twitter.com/agpublic/status/21619402371]

"wrote an essay about how learning to use internet is like learning to live in city…for class where we read urban critics/philosophers/sociologists Walter Benjamin, Michel de Certeau, & Georg Simmel…lived in 19th & 20th centuries, talked about: what happens to people when they move to cities, how it feels to live in dense urban centers, & whether “the city” is imaginary place…Some of their concerns about experience of mass urbanization are similar to concerns…about experience of mass internet use: dealing w/ infooverload, wandering in non-linear fashion, learning unfamiliar interfaces, developing less sensitivity to shocking sights, finding connections w/in fragmented communities, encountering thousands of strangers every day, & acting badly when anonymous.<br />
<br />
…resemblance btwn physical & virtual worlds is not surprising…“city is an archetype of human imagination”…social aspects of web modeled on places where many of its developers, entrepreneurs & designers live: SF, LA, NY…"

"This paper explores and illustrates how Benjamin’s analysis of the nineteenth century culture of consumption might contribute to an understanding of the new communal formations and self-reflexive subjectivities of the internet in the twenty-first century. Theoretically, this will be done with a specific focus on the concept of the flâneur as discussed in The Arcades Project (416-455), and on some lines of reasoning that are central to his essay on “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”. The empirical emphasis will be on two examples of so called Web 2.0 technologies: the photo sharing service of flickr and the videoblogging functionality of YouTube." [via: http://jeweledplatypus.org/cgi-bin/blosxom.cgi/text/citynet.html]

"“Adept of the joys of watching, connoisseur of empathy, the flâneur finds the world ‘picturesque.’ ” – Susan Sontag

"That is, should you want to describe a man's walk around the city in as detailed and realistic a way as possible, capturing every minor event and instant, then you would have to include the circumstances of that walk in their often bewildering totality: every fragmentary thought process, directionless flight of fancy, and irrelevant detail noticed along the way, via a million and one dead-ends. Things remembered and then forgotten. Deja vu.

That daydream you had early today? That was, Ulysses suggests, part of the infrastructure of the city you live in.

The city here becomes a kind of experiential labyrinth: it is something you walk through, certainly, but it is also something that rears up mythically to consume the thoughts of everyone residing within it."

AND

"Inspired by Bloomsday, then, it seems well-timed to ask not only how our cities can best be mapped – and if narrative is, in fact, the ideal cartographic strategy – but what other physical possibilities exist for narrative expression. Put another way: what if James Joyce had been raised in an era of cheap 3D printers?
After all, given the possibilities outlined above, we might even someday be justified in concluding that Dublin itself is a written text, and that Ulysses is simply its most famous translation."

"best urban environments are walking cities...benefit greatly from diverse range of elements all occupying same space. NY, Rome, Barcelona: ...homes of the flaneur as we know him...must not forget that [he] is a farmer w/ different shoes. The wanderer, walker, one who experiences the environment around him with glee-- ...exists in the forest of skyscrapers & brownstones equally as well as the vistas & oaks of Small Towns...It is under this light that the link between urbanity & ruralism becomes clear. Structurally urbanism is more alienated from the suburban than from the rural environment. The rural & urban are modes of working with a limited given & applying ones means in an efficient manner. Typically this plays itself out in terms of limited urban space & unavailable rural funds. Can we develop a strategy for transitioning directly from the rural to urban? How do we ensure that our cities do not forget the frugality of their rural roots & develop accordingly as they expand?"

"In the context of modern-day architecture and urban planning, designing for flâneurs is one way to approach issues of the psychological aspects of the built environment. Architect Jon Jerde, for instance, designed his Horton Plaza and Universal CityWalk projects around the idea of providing surprises, distractions, and sequences of events for pedestrians." ... "The most notable application of flâneur to street photography probably comes from Susan Sontag in her 1977 essay, On Photography. She describes how, since the development of hand-held cameras in the early 20th century, the camera has become the tool of the flâneur: "The photographer is an armed version of the solitary walker reconnoitering, stalking, cruising the urban inferno, the voyeuristic stroller who discovers the city as a landscape of voluptuous extremes. Adept of the joys of watching, connoisseur of empathy, the flâneur finds the world 'picturesque.' (pg. 55)""