Flâneur no relation Walter Benjamin
Architecture and urban planning
The concept of the flâneur has also become meaningful in the psychogeography of architecture and urban planning, describing people who are indirectly and (usually) unintentionally affected by a particular design they experience only in passing.
In 1917, the Swiss writer Robert Walser published a short story called "Der Spaziergang" ("The Walk"), a veritable outcome of the flâneur literature.
Walter Benjamin adopted the concept of the urban observer both as an analytical tool and as a lifestyle. From his Marxist standpoint, Benjamin describes the flâneur as a product of modern life and the Industrial Revolution without precedent, a parallel to the advent of the tourist. His flâneur is an uninvolved but highly perceptive bourgeois dilettante. Benjamin became his own prime example, making social and aesthetic observations during long walks through Paris. Even the title of his unfinished Arcades Project comes from his affection for covered shopping streets.
The crowd was the veil from behind which the familiar city as phantasmagoria beckoned to the flâneur. In it, the city was now landscape, now a room. And both of these went into the construction of the department store, which made use of flânerie itself in order to sell goods. The department store was the flâneur's final coup. As flâneurs, the intelligentsia came into the market place. As they thought, to observe it – but in reality it was already to find a buyer. In this intermediary stage ... they took the form of the bohème. To the uncertainty of their economic position corresponded the uncertainty of their political function.
In the context of modern-day architecture and urban planning, designing for flâneurs is one way to approach the psychological aspects of the built environment.
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