ABSTRACT
The urban cityscapes of the Parisian arcades were perfect examples of an imaginative ‘panoramic architecture’ devised to orient the individual’s movements through the marketplace. In light of all the social changes brought on by the French Revolution, the most significant of these were the result of budding capitalism which involved the need to create new social spaces for vending and purchasing purposes. These were passageways through neighbourhoods that were covered with glass roofs and lined by marble panels so as to shape a sort of ambiguous interior-exterior environment. Through the literary inspiration of Charles Baudelaire [1821-67], this generic space and the character of the flâneur, a marginal occupant of such a space, were initially theorised by Walter Benjamin in the 1930s and published posthumously (1980). Both authors wrote about the growth of a new upwardly mobile class as one of the key groups to embody the public experience of modernity:
Inevitably men, flâneurs would stroll through the city to kill the time afforded them by wealth and education. Their tendency for nonchalance meant that they would objectify the masses, treating the other passers-by and the surrounding architecture as riddles for interpretative pleasure. The act of the flâneur symbolised
privilege and the liberty to move about the city observing from a distance, not interacting, consuming the sights through a controlling but rarely acknowledged gaze, directed as much at other people as the goods for sale. An anonymous face in the multitude, the flâneur was free to probe for clues that were unnoticed by other people, simpletons, caricaturised as domestic beings. In making apparent the spatial inversion between public and private, Benjamin brought the outside in and placed the inside out. This inversion was intended as a social subversion whereby leisure became one of the main tools behind creating an enduring persona for the flâneur as someone not confined to an increasingly State-manipulated domestic sphere but who had the capacity, freedom and cultural capital to live in the world.
