Urban Meanderthals and the City of “Desire Lines”

The avoidance of pedlock and gridlock, then, induces another breed of flâneur, with an alternative form of desire path, one resulting not from the pedestrian’s unselfconscious obliviousness to the environment, but from a precipitously induced hyper-awareness. The resulting secondary desire paths adopted by those who are suddenly diverted from their trajectories are, indeed, not aimless but forced re-adjustments; the intentions of the pedestrian are redirected as a result of their objectives being obstructed. What results, I’d like to suggest, is yet another breed of flâneur. This one we might call: Flâneur 2.0.

For this new breed of Flâneur the hustle and bustle of the crowd is not to be observed at leisure, but to be avoided. The goal is not to aestheticize urban life while absorbing it, but to instrumentalize it while attempting to direct it in the name of efficiency and speed. The crowd is not to be followed but to be deliberately avoided, the urban grid of everyday life is not to be re-inscribed but to be exceeded.

Flâneur 2.0, no longer self-consciously critical of the techno-urban imperatives that morph around him, no longer taking a derive or deviation for its own sake, finds herself unwillingly and unwittingly having to smooth out the striated grid. Driven by invisible economic imperatives (imperatives that constitute the fish-bowl he swims in), Flâneur 2.0 is thrust kicking and screaming — sometimes literally — out of his habitual orbit by the Meanderthal. Nonetheless, though briefly discombobulated, Flâneur 2.0 quickly gets re-oriented, re-doubling his/her efforts for the sake of efficiency, mobility, speed, and capital. The phrase quoted at the beginning of this paper — “Down with Dawdling!” — undoubtedly had a certain currency in Walter Benjamin’s day. But the man who first uttered it could not have imagined that it would persist, nor what it would come to mean in the age of the Meanderthal.

CTheory

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Narrative Archaeology

A fictional narrative is an agitated space.  A story world is constructed with attention to selection of detail and level of its description (setting and its establishment of tone, subtext and above all, physical place).  The traditional role of the author has been to carefully use these tools to create the other world.  The city is also an agitated space.  A city  is a collection of data and sub-text to be read in the context of ethnography,  history, semiotics, architectural patterns and forms, physical form and rhythm, juxtaposition, city planning, land usage shifts and other ways of interpretation and analysis. The city patterns can be equated to the patterns within literature: repetition, sub-text shift, metaphor, cumulative resonances, emergence of layers, decay and growth.

The city is rich with layered semiotic  systems on even a cursory, immediate reading.

There is at present a dual city to be read, the denotative and connotative city, if you will.  The city exists to navigate and “read” on a literal level of interpretation of architecture, shifts, movement, traces of past and the patterns that form as one walks through the city.  This is the denotative city.  The author utilizing the concepts and form of narrative archaeology can form a reading of the second city (the connotative city or semiotically charged) with points in street layout pinpointed to address the resonance of multiple readings and resonances of buildings, street signs, navigation, infrastructure.
Narrative Archaeology