The New Flâneries in the Urban Space: From Individualization to Collective Participation. A Transdisciplinary Approach

Walking, apart from being the most ancient and repeated mode of human movement and settlement, generating both places and communities, is a practice deeply related to specific modality of sociability, grounded in the plural and differential time and space of social and cultural practices. If the close relationship between walking and thinking—crystallised by the adage that the rhythm of walking generates a rhythm of thinking—has nurtured a long and important tradition of philosophical reflections which runs diagonally across centuries, territories and continents, flânerie is one of the forms of walking whose birth and developments can be situated and reconstructed with a certain margin of precision. Several scholars have followed its traces outside and inside stories, agreeing on the idea that, at the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, within the historical context of urban mobility’s acceleration, Paris is the urban scene in which an essential social and cultural transformation takes place: the one between the urban promeneur, born towards the end of the seventeenth century with the construction of the promenades publiques (public gardens, tree-lined avenues, parks, and the flâneur, a figure of walker who replaces the pleasure of strolling in the peaceful areas of the city with that of the free and solitary urban deambulation—between pavements, boulevards, and passages—as a mode of observation and appropriation of the city that takes place through the deceleration of the gaze, the social distinction and the “immersive detachment”, resulting in literary creation.