‘Botanizing on the asphalt’
AGOOD WALK DOESN’T always mean striding out into the empty hills; for 19th-century gents like Charles Baudelaire it was all about drifting through a city and relishing the crowd ‘as though it were an immense reservoir of electrical energy’. The famous French poet popularised this form of urban exploration, known as flânerie, but others enjoyed it too: Walter Benjamin likened it to ‘botanizing on the asphalt’; Honoré de Balzac saw it as a ‘form of science… the gastronomy of the eye’; and Virginia Woolf was often inspired by her ‘street haunting’ (for more on women walking the city, see the wonderful book, Flâneuse, by Lauren Elkin). And it couldn’t be easier to try: all you need to do is let yourself drift where the fancy takes you through the city’s streets and snickets, ‘to wander with no purpose’ as the word’s Old Norse root, flana, means. And, as you closely observe the restless, curious carnival of city life, you’ll form what Victor Fournel called ‘a mobile and passionate photograph’ of the place.