Flâneur: The Art of Wandering the Streets of Paris by Federico Castigliano

Author:Federico Castigliano [Castigliano, Federico]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Cultural, Essays, France, Non-Fiction, Travel, Urban Life
ISBN: 1546942092
Amazon: B073PDQQ6L
Publisher: Federico Castigliano
Published: 2016-08-31T23:00:00+00:00

8

THE CITY OF TOMORROW

For whoever takes an interest in the history of the flâneur and the habit of walking in the city, Paris is a fascinating field of study because it is possible to revisit the evolution of areas of consumerism in the course of a single walk, from the arcades to those multifunctional buildings that I shall call “super-places”11. Spared by the bombings of the Second World War and despite some major post-war transformation, Paris has retained the coherence of the city of the past. The result is a sharp divide between the physical landscape of the city (cityscape) and the cultural landscape (mindscape), profoundly influenced by the modern. Paris today is also marked by the dichotomy between the centre and the suburbs (banlieue), a conflict that the authorities have been trying for years to alleviate. The particularly dense and centralised structure of the city has impacted on the transport system but also on the mentality and habits of the inhabitants. In the centre of Paris, it is partially possible to replicate the experience of nineteenth-century flânerie. Anyone, though, who decides to go outside the ring road (boulevard periphérique), the highway encircling the historic city like an outer circle of walls, to head towards the department of Seine-Saint Denis, till the airport at Roissy, will find a decidedly different architectural and human landscape. He would find the tedious expanse of the new city, the railway junctions, waste grounds and car graveyards, and even a mysterious blue cuboid shape, the Ikea at Villiers sur Marne, like a spaceship landed from a distant planet. In this suburban limbo, which appears scattered and insubstantial, there may be many examples of super-places: not just shopping centres and the airport but also, for example, La Défense business district and the Disneyland Paris amusement park.

As new “centres of gravity” for the urban masses, the super-places stand out in the Parisian landscape due to their impressive scale, the variety of duties carried out and the multitude of people who visit them. Unlike non-places, they assert a strong identity and a power of attraction; they stand out as landmarks that dominate the area in which they are located, bringing about a break with the historical city. The prefix “super-” puts the emphasis on their multipurpose function and at the same time sets them apart from non-places; rather than marginal areas in the city landscape, they have emerged as new centrality. The distinctive characteristic of the super-place is its ability to dominate the area to which it belongs, catalysing crowds and guiding their movements, a property that derives as much from its economic weight as from its symbolic power. The super-places and especially the great shopping malls that we find on the outskirts of Paris as in other cities of the world, could be therefore seen as an evolution of what Benjamin defined as “phantasmagorias” 12: aesthetic incarnations of an economic and technical model, images of itself that a society wants to present through the medium of merchandise and its ostentatious display.

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