The urban flâneur walks in a very large city. It becomes their landscape. They walk where hostile, anonymous crowds abound and where capitalism has included art works and people. Unlike walkers in nature or the countryside like Henry David Thoreau, Friedrich Nietzsche, or Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the urban flâneur walks in "an interrupted, uneven rhythm.” Walking was not a communion with Nature, but witnessing of scattered, successive experiences.

The urban flâneur walks to subverts the city, the crowd, and capitalism, but ambivalently. They seek the crowd to hide in it. They subvert the speed of the city by slowing down, which allows their mind to grasp images rapidly. They subvert productivism by being idle and they are marginalized because of that. But idleness allows them to witness and report what is happening in the city. Lastly, the urban flâneur resists consumption by urban foraging or even theft. They simply capture vignettes and encounters.

References

Gros, F. (2014). A Philosophy of Walking. Verso.