The Flaneur - Walking in the City

Thinking Allowed

BBC

Society & Culture, Science

4.4 • 997 Ratings

🗓️ 27 April 2016

⏱️ 28 minutes

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Summary

Walking in the city: The flaneur and flaneuse. Laurie Taylor presents a themed programme which explores the history and meaning of the urban stroller, past and present. Keith Tester, Adjunct Professor at the Thesis Eleven Centre for Cultural Sociology, LaTrobe University, Melbourne, charts the origins of the 'Flaneur'; the "man of the crowd" of Edgar Allan Poe and Charles Baudelaire, and one of the heroes of Walter Benjamin's Arcades Project. Matthew Beamont, co-director of University College London's Urban Lab, contends that the city idler isn't simply a by product of modernism, illuminating London's past via the nocturnal wanderings of poets, novelists and thinkers. And Lauren Elkin, lecturer in the department of English and Comparative Literature at the American University of Paris, counters the implicit assumption that the city belongs to a figure of masculine privilege and leisure. She introduces us to the transgressive 'flaneuse' who claims the right to city space.

Producer: Jayne Egerton.

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is a Thinking Aloud Podcast from the BBC and for more details in our terms of use and much,
0:06.2	much more about thinking aloud. Go to our website at BBC.co.uk. UK. Now you couldn't say that Jim and Dave and myself were exactly walking on the
0:27.1	wild side when we set off every Saturday night on our teenage pub crawl.
0:31.2	Men after all we knew exactly which parts of Liverpool City Centre we'd be crossing.
0:36.3	First of all, a pint of mixt, in the legs of man in commutation row, and then a walk along
0:40.0	lime street to the vines with its snooker hall and its altar, yes an altar with candles and flowers
0:45.1	surrounding a representation of a deity, a large photograph of Liverpool Hero Emlyn Hughes.
0:51.6	And then the long uphill walk to the famous Philharmonic pub with its
0:55.3	rosiest marble toilets and onto the crack with its draft double diamond and the back room where Janet
1:00.9	introduced me to John Lennon and then finally back down Bold Street to Dale Street and the temple bar, where it end the evening being held upright by the solid crowd which had gathered to cheer on the two trumpet mercy sappy jazz band.
1:14.4	It was only much later in life when I'd read some Walter Benjamin and learned about the
1:18.8	character of the Flanure, that I began to think that Jim and Dave and I might have been doing something
1:23.6	altogether nobler in those days than simply getting off our faces. But I can now
1:28.4	check my credentials in this respect because I'm joined by Keith Tester who is adjunct professor at the thesis 11th century
1:36.1	at Lattrobe University in Melbourne, but more significantly for the moment he's editor of a collection
1:40.6	entitled the Flannier. I think really Keith I'm probably excluded because you can't really have a trio of Flaneers I don't suppose.
1:50.0	Solitryness is a pretty key characteristic.
1:54.0	That's right.
1:55.0	I mean if we look at the classical literature on the flanoe, it's a person, it's a man on his own,
2:01.9	and I specifically use the word man we come to that later.
2:04.7	I mention Walter Benjamin I think do we start there if we are we're trying to
2:08.0	get out and grasp what this figure represents what it is we need to go back to Benjamin we can start there but I think a better
	...

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