ABSTRACT
The dominant metaphor of today's city is the labyrinth, albeit a labyrinth that takes on new spatio-temporal forms. However, the "mongrel city" of chaos and diversity is not only the legacy of "underdevelopment", to be tidied up and reorganized to endow it with the rational order lacking in Barthes' Tokyo. Just as the flaneur of the last century opposed the modern city, the virtual flaneur practices a strategy of resistance to the tastes, values, and ideologies of the pantopolis. The presence of the cyberflaneur is thus borne out by attempts to attribute new meanings to the city's more soulless places and to reclaim urban spaces, contravening their conventional and sanctioned uses. In the 1920s, the flaneur's art of wandering mutated into "excursions" led by the Dadaist movement to: "chosen places, particularly those that have no reason to exist", as stated in a pamphlet distributed by Dadaists on the streets of Paris in 1921.
