23.3.05
Flaneur Culture
Just like Karl Marx & Joseph Goebbels, Margaret Thather was aware of the fact that those who control the streets also control the state & it was with this political truth in mind that she ordered the BBC to get serious with daytime television. Her intention was to ensure that the unemployed masses would get their boredom dulled by staying at home & watching television, instead of taking their frustration outside where they would surely gather in the streets, causing riots & mayhem.
To understand the socio-political implications of experimental strolls in the city, it is important to know how the public-domains functions as the place where individuals meet, so forming communities form & as a consequence society on the most fundamental level emerges out of the interaction of/between/inside crowds.
This public domain is not an autonomous field, but the result of the interplay between public-space & urbanism: the dialectic between the physic objects in a city & the social/cultural use that is being made of it. Because the public domain emerges out of the interacting happening between these 2 different things, both with a complex set of parameters of their own, it can only be indirectly manipulated. This happens by town planning and structural architectural interventions in public space on the one hand & by formulating laws to ban or reward certain uses of urban space on the other. These attempts to influence the public domain are always feeble & no one can predict what the consequences will be.
A strong tendency which can be observed everywhere is that when the municipal government shows more concern with economic pragmatism (to ensure the availability of labour, for instance by luring companies into building prestigious skyscrapers in the city-centre) than for urban diversity, the destruction of a normal public life can be witnessed.
A movement like Reclaim the Streets is criticizing this economic single-mindedness by which in the present day city-centres are handed over to commerce, by organizing street parties as an antidote to the monoculture of commuting office workers who add nothing to street culture besides traffic, parking problems & smog.
RTS should be looked upon as a disco-socialist activity in the footsteps of Jane Jacobs famous manifesto 'The Death and Live of Great American Cities' published in 1961. In this manifesto Jacobs argues that a thriving pedestrian culture is simultaneously the cause & the result of a healthy public-domain.
When unravelling societies power structure, starting from the national government all the way down through local governments, trade unions & corporations we ultimately end up with the pedestrian as the smallest undividable particle at the bottom of the pyramid.
This insight is not entirely new. Charles Baudelaire (1821-67) already hailed the flaneur, those pedestrians who willingly ignored the spirit of the crowds of their days & strolled around town without any specific goal or destination. While the zeitgeist held being busy as the most fashionable thing, the flaneur provoked it by wandering about with a turtle on a lead that indicated the speed.
http://www.socialfiction.org/psychogeography/flaneureng.html
To understand the socio-political implications of experimental strolls in the city, it is important to know how the public-domains functions as the place where individuals meet, so forming communities form & as a consequence society on the most fundamental level emerges out of the interaction of/between/inside crowds.
This public domain is not an autonomous field, but the result of the interplay between public-space & urbanism: the dialectic between the physic objects in a city & the social/cultural use that is being made of it. Because the public domain emerges out of the interacting happening between these 2 different things, both with a complex set of parameters of their own, it can only be indirectly manipulated. This happens by town planning and structural architectural interventions in public space on the one hand & by formulating laws to ban or reward certain uses of urban space on the other. These attempts to influence the public domain are always feeble & no one can predict what the consequences will be.
A strong tendency which can be observed everywhere is that when the municipal government shows more concern with economic pragmatism (to ensure the availability of labour, for instance by luring companies into building prestigious skyscrapers in the city-centre) than for urban diversity, the destruction of a normal public life can be witnessed.
A movement like Reclaim the Streets is criticizing this economic single-mindedness by which in the present day city-centres are handed over to commerce, by organizing street parties as an antidote to the monoculture of commuting office workers who add nothing to street culture besides traffic, parking problems & smog.
RTS should be looked upon as a disco-socialist activity in the footsteps of Jane Jacobs famous manifesto 'The Death and Live of Great American Cities' published in 1961. In this manifesto Jacobs argues that a thriving pedestrian culture is simultaneously the cause & the result of a healthy public-domain.
When unravelling societies power structure, starting from the national government all the way down through local governments, trade unions & corporations we ultimately end up with the pedestrian as the smallest undividable particle at the bottom of the pyramid.
This insight is not entirely new. Charles Baudelaire (1821-67) already hailed the flaneur, those pedestrians who willingly ignored the spirit of the crowds of their days & strolled around town without any specific goal or destination. While the zeitgeist held being busy as the most fashionable thing, the flaneur provoked it by wandering about with a turtle on a lead that indicated the speed.
http://www.socialfiction.org/psychogeography/flaneureng.html
# posted by alvaro @ 3:22 p. m. 
