ABSTRACT
Flanerie, the activity of strolling and looking which is carried out by the flaneur, is a recurring motif in the literature, sociology and art of urban, and most especially of the metropolitan, existence. Originally, the figure of the flaneur was tied to a specific time and place: Paris, the capital of the nineteenth century as it was conjured by Walter Benjamin in his analysis of Charles Baudelaire (Benjamin 1983). But the flaneur has been allowed, or made, to take a number of walks away from the streets and arcades of nineteenth-century Paris. Not least, the figure and the activity appear regularly in the attempts of social and cultural commentators to get some grip on the nature and implications of the conditions of modernity and post-modernity. The flaneur has walked into the pages of the commonplace. But despite this popularization, the precise meaning and significance of flanerie remains more than a little elusive.
