ABSTRACT
This riff or mini chapter opens with a focus on a nineteenth-century figure who, in effect, reinvents wandering as an urban pursuit: the flâneur. The flâneur emerges in mid-century Paris as the city fills with new crowds of immigrants from rural France and beyond. The urban crowd creates a natural habitat for the flâneur, who, as Baudelaire writes, is at home in the midst of the crowd. The city itself, however, also becomes an object of vision—especially in the new era from 1853 to 1870 when Georges-Eugène Haussmann undertakes a massive reconstruction of Paris. The flâneur as a detached observer embodies the new cosmopolitan spirit of self-regard and in his wandering spectatorship embodies the structural separation of a mirror, in which the city both admires and comes to know itself. Wandering takes a different role in mid-twentieth-century Paris as Guy Debord and the Situationists invent the concept of drift or la dérive as a means of understanding how urban environments reorganize human consciousness. Lauren Elkin meanwhile provides a reminder of the women wanderers who seem invisible mostly because we are trained not notice them.
