Pg. 5: George Perec, writer, also sat at the café de la Maurice on Place Saint Suplice, the same one that Elkin is sitting at, wrote down the comings and goings in order to get his readers to notice the quotidian or what he called the “infraordinary” which is what happens when nothing is happening
Paris had places where something could happen or something has happened, Elkin observed (places she lived and visited before had future tense)
Pg. 6: “In Paris I would linger outside, imagining stories to go with streets. In those six months, the streets were transformed from places in between home and wherever I was going into a great passion. I drifted wherever they looked interesting, lured by the sight of a decaying wall, or colorful window boxes, or something intriguing at the other end, which might be as pedestrian as a perpendicular street. Anything, any detail that suddenly loosened itself, would draw me towards it. Every turn I made was a reminder that the day was mine and I didn’t have to be anywhere I didn’t want to be. I had an astonishing immunity to responsibility, because I had no ambitions at all beyond doing only that which I found interesting”
Elkin had to walk around to understand where she was in space, how places related to each other
Began as ‘lounging’ usage (1840), someone slipping the bounds of responsibility
Male voices in the streetscape commentary
It’s because of the social conditions of women in the 1800s (when the ideas of the ‘flaneur’ were codified)
1585 was the earliest mention, Scandinavian noun ‘flana’ or person who wanders
Doesn’t catch on until 1800s and it is gendered
1806 - M. Bonhomme
1829 - a man who likes to do nothing
Balzac’s flâneur had two forms
Pg. 14: mid and low classes were in the street, David Garrioch talks about this
Late 19th century, women of all classes enjoyed public space
Pg. 15: 1890s saw the arrival of the New Woman, bicycle, girls worked in shops and offices, leisure activities became more popular (depended on safe semi public space)
Pg. 18: descendent of Baudelarian flânerie is happening today, operates by dérive or ‘drift’
Radical poets and artists “The Situationists” invented ‘psychogeography’, strolling meant drifting and detached observation meant critique of post-war urbanism
Architecture and topography create its “psychogeography contours”
Pg. 18: “Urban explorers use the dérive to map the emotive force field of the city, and the way architecture and topography combine to create its ‘psychogeographical contours.’ Robert Macfarlane, a masterful writer-walker of the countryside, offers this summary of the practice: ‘Unfold a street map of London, place a glass, rim down, anywhere on the map, and draw round its edge. Pick up the map, go out into the city, and walk the circle, keeping as close as you can to the curve. Record the experience as you go, in whatever medium you favor: film, photograph, manuscript, tape. Catch the textual run-off of the streets; the graffiti, the branded litter, the snatches of conversation. Cut for sign. Log the data-stream. Be alert to the happenstance of metaphors, watch for visual rhymes, coincidences, analogies, family resemblances, the changing moods of the street”
Iain Self likes the term ‘deep topography” better
The psychogeographers of the 1800s were all men
Pg. 21: “I walk because I like it….i like being able to stop when I like, to lean against a building and make a note in my journal, or read an email, or send a text message, and for the world to stop while I do it. Walking, paradoxically, allows for the possibility of stillness. Walking is mapping with your feet. It helps you piece a city together, connecting up neighborhoods that might otherwise have remained discrete entities, different planets bound to each other, sustained yet remote. I like seeing how in fact they blend into one another. I like noticing the boundaries between them. Walking helps me feel at home. There’s a small pleasure in seeing how well I’ve come to know the city through my wanderings on foot, crossing through different neighborhoods of the city, some I used to know quite well, others I may not have seen in a while, like getting reacquainted with someone I once met at a party”
Pg. 21: “Geographer Yi-Fu Tuan, a space becomes a place when through movement we invest it with meaning, Elkin walks because it gives her a feeling of ‘placeness’
Pg. 22: “She is going somewhere or coming from somewhere; she is saturated with in-betweenness….she may take the bus or the train when she’s tired. But mostly, she goes on foot. She gets to know the city by wandering its streets, investigating its dark corners, peering through facades, penetrating into secret courtyards. I found her using cities as performance spaces or as hiding places; as places to seek fame and fortune or anonymity;…as places to declare her independence; as places to change the world or be changed by it”
A flâneuse is saturated with in-betweenness
What are the list of the women that Elkin uses in her book to illustrate her point?
William Levitt built (the originator of suburbia) identical one-storey houses on equal-spaced quarter-acre plots from pre-cut lumber. Standardization is what made them cheap to build and cheap to buy, and the pace of sales (as many as 1,400 homes in a day in 1949) shows how much demand there was.
It’s because of zoning laws that suburbanites are buffered - residential, commercial, and industrial are kept strictly apart making you drive everywhere, leisure becomes wider
Suburbs didn’t start off like this (bedroom communities clustered around railway stations)
Because of the automobile, towns were connected to each other by motorways with no easy way to get to one another on foot
1929: grid layout of the city template was replaced with curving streets of the city
Pg. 32: Marc Augé, non-places
What we build determines who we are and who we will be
Pg. 35: “There was a church on the corner. Was that east? Or west? I had it in my head that I wanted to go west but how could I know which direction that was unless I started walking, and I didn’t want to waste a minute of time, I wanted to go where I was going, even if I didn’t know where that was yet”
American adventure of the open road is tamed by the American dream