The Flaneur - Walking in the City
Laurie Taylor explores the history and meaning of the urban stroller, past and present.
Thinking Allowed · BBC Radio 4
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Show Notes
Walking in the city: The flaneur and flaneuse. Laurie Taylor presents a themed programme which explores the history and meaning of the urban stroller, past and present. Keith Tester, Adjunct Professor at the Thesis Eleven Centre for Cultural Sociology, LaTrobe University, Melbourne, charts the origins of the 'Flaneur'; the "man of the crowd" of Edgar Allan Poe and Charles Baudelaire, and one of the heroes of Walter Benjamin's Arcades Project. Matthew Beamont, co-director of University College London's Urban Lab, contends that the city idler isn't simply a by product of modernism, illuminating London's past via the nocturnal wanderings of poets, novelists and thinkers. And Lauren Elkin, lecturer in the department of English and Comparative Literature at the American University of Paris, counters the implicit assumption that the city belongs to a figure of masculine privilege and leisure. She introduces us to the transgressive 'flaneuse' who claims the right to city space.
Producer: Jayne Egerton.