ABSTRACT
Benjamin writes in ‘On Some Motifs in Baudelaire’ that the crowd ‘was the agitated veil’ through which Baudelaire saw the city (Benjamin 2009, 43). The city and the crowd were entwined. Baudelaire’s genius was to live and write the city through the crowd. Benjamin explains that despite this, the crowd is rarely to be found explicitly in his work precisely because the crowd was his manner of framing the city. The city, in its very urbanity, gathers crowds of all sorts. We might say in a very non-Benjaminian vein that the crowd is proper to the modern city, it is a property (in the sense of an attribute or characteristic) of the city. Crowds are typical of an urban environment, from the rush hour crush on public transport to the frenzy of ‘retail’ sites on any major Saturday, or worse a ‘black Friday’. But because of its quotidian status, this crowd which is proper to the post-Fordist city becomes all but invisible to us. At the same time, the urban environment that we inhabit seems to take on a ‘natural’ or ‘obvious’ character: as though it is as it should be, or it is as it must be. The solidity of the old stone buildings alongside the sparkling new (and increasingly not-so-new) glass infrastructure, denote an always already built environment; constructed and completed. The city seems to bustle with life, flowing past the solidity of its walls, through the channelling streets, all the time made safe by the policed and regulated nature of its ‘public’ spaces of shopping centres, streets and parks. The productivity, movement and life of the denizens is thus to be contrasted with the apparently stable sense of the built environment.
