23.3.05
PEDESTRIAN CULTURE THROUGH THE AGES
"...Baudelaire used the work and biographies of the before mentioned British writers to arrive at the his image of the flaneur, the distinguished pedestrian slacker. Largely through Walter Benjamin's articles on the subject the tortoise speed of the flaneur has become an icon in the 'time war' against the accelerating rush of western civilization. In reality the flaneur portrayed as an agent concerned with socio-political problems is largely Benjamin's own interpretation of the actual facts. Baudelaire's flaneurs were stoned out of their heads from hashish. It was under the influence of this drugs that they took so long to go nowhere and found so much hilarious interest in even the most boring aspects of things.
Protest marches are the most obvious link between urban pedestrianism & politics, but historically the most powerful links between the two can be found in the exploration of nature. The adventures Thoreau undertook as a recluse in the Concorde for instance or the British eccentrics and vagrants who, travelling by means of their 'shank's pony', in the 18th century sought to commit the new crime of trespassing in resistance to the privatisation of common lands. This was in the same time that "Foreigners were struck by the size of Englishwomen's feet, a consequence of the English addiction to walking" as Donna Landry explains in her brilliant essay 'Radical Walking'. The most prolific example however remain the German Wandervögel..."
Protest marches are the most obvious link between urban pedestrianism & politics, but historically the most powerful links between the two can be found in the exploration of nature. The adventures Thoreau undertook as a recluse in the Concorde for instance or the British eccentrics and vagrants who, travelling by means of their 'shank's pony', in the 18th century sought to commit the new crime of trespassing in resistance to the privatisation of common lands. This was in the same time that "Foreigners were struck by the size of Englishwomen's feet, a consequence of the English addiction to walking" as Donna Landry explains in her brilliant essay 'Radical Walking'. The most prolific example however remain the German Wandervögel..."
PEDESTRIAN CULTURE THROUGH THE AGES
http://home.hetnet.nl/mr_15/186/italo.calvino/constrained.html# posted by alvaro @ 8:20 a. m. 
