Tuesday 11 October 2011

thesis topic thoughts..

The flaneur as I have researched over the past week, is a stroller around the city as such, but at the same time the articulation to the semicomatose state of which inhabitants move around the city.

"The street becomes a dwelling for the flâneur; he is as much at home among the facades of houses as a citizen is in his four walls. To him the shiny, enamelled signs of businesses are at least as good a wall ornament as an oil painting is to the bourgeois in his salon. The walls are the desk against which he presses his notebooks; news-stands are his libraries and the terraces of cafés are the balconies from which he looks down on his household after his work is done." 1938 = The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire. in Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism. NLB 1977

The Flaneur is not indicative of any one type of person, but it would be interesting to link the ideas of the Flaneur to the people inhabiting our city streets today. The Flaneur could be representative of the street dweller, the vagabond, the children/teens accommodating street corners or car parks. They might equal the connection to the city and the urban environment, lost during ones journey from A to B. People inhabit the spaces between buildings, and have done so for a long time. Yet food in cities is slowly moving back indoors. As people become less interested in where it comes from as they do how it is made. City kitchens are becoming privatised, even markets are becoming less food driven and more touristic and fashionable. What is happening to the link between food and street? and what effect is this having on the younger inhabitants occupying the streets?

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