A One-Hour Flâneur Walk to Make Your Own City Strange Again

Around 1840, if Walter Benjamin is to be believed, it was briefly fashionable in Paris to take a tortoise for a walk through the covered arcades. He reports it in his unfinished study of those arcades: the idlers liked to let the animal set the pace. Progress, they felt, ought to accommodate itself to a tortoise. It is one sentence in a vast pile of notes, and it is hard to shake. A man in a good coat, a reptile on a lead, and an entire city treated as something to be looked at slowly.

That man was the flâneur, and Charles Baudelaire gave him his portrait. In “The Painter of Modern Life,” published in Le Figaro in three instalments at the end of 1863, he wrote that for the perfect flâneur “it is an immense joy to set up house in the heart of the multitude.” The crowd was his element. He was at home everywhere and, he added, hidden from everyone.

Nobody I know can afford the tortoise, but the underlying problem is ours. A city you have lived in for years has quietly stopped being visible.

Why does a familiar city go invisible?

Because your routes are optimised. You take the fastest way to the station, the shop, the office, and your attention narrows to the few cues that keep you on track: a light, a bus number, the corner where you turn. Everything else is filtered out as irrelevant. This is efficient. It is also how a place with ten thousand details becomes a corridor.

It also fits a thought that comes up in the research on sensation seeking: some boredom comes less from having nothing to do than from meeting nothing new. The streets may not have changed. Your sampling of them has shrunk to a few hundred metres of repeated tracks.

What did the Situationists add?

A century after Baudelaire, a small band of Paris radicals decided to make this attention into a method. Guy Debord’s “Theory of the Dérive” appeared in the Belgian magazine Les Lèvres nues in November 1956. A dérive, or drift, was one or more people dropping “their relations, their work and leisure activities” and their usual reasons for moving, and letting themselves “be drawn by the attractions of the terrain.” He called the study of how places pull on us psychogeography.

Debord’s dérive could last a full day, though he allowed that it could be a few hours or even a few brief moments. He was serious — even grim — about it. Most of us do not want to wander for a day with a theory of unitary urbanism. We want an hour that will not cost us the evening.

So here is a dérive-lite. It has three rules, and the rules are the point. A walk with no structure at all tends to collapse into your usual loop with a coffee at the end.

The three rules

1. One hour, no errand. Fix both the start and the end time. The limit is what allows the purposelessness. Without it, the walk either becomes a chore you abandon or a sprawl you resent. No destination, no phone navigation, no audio.

2. Let a rule choose the turns. At each junction, take the street you have used least, or never used. If you have used them all, go left at every third corner. The rule matters because your habits will always argue for the usual way, and you need something to overrule them.

3. Stop when something snags. A stairwell, a bricked-up window, a smell of frying onions at ten in the morning. Stop for thirty seconds and look properly. Look up too. The upper floors of most streets are another country, and almost nobody visits it.

At the end of the hour, stop where you are. Then do the one piece of homework that makes the walk count: write down three things you had never noticed. Not “the light was nice.” A specific sign, a specific wall, the fact that the baker has a second door. Within a week of doing this a few times, I would expect the list to get easier, because you will have started looking for it.

If you want company, Debord recommended small groups of two or three. A friend on the walk also gives you someone to compare notes with, and it is a rather better reason to meet than another hangout with no shape.

Does it work?

I cannot tell you that it raises wellbeing, because I have not found strong controlled evidence that a dérive-style walk does. What exists is a long tradition of writers describing the effect, which is not the same as a trial. The walk is also very cheap. One hour, no equipment, a notebook. If it does nothing for you, you have lost an hour of walking, which is not a bad thing to have lost.

Early light suits it better than any other time. The streets are half-empty, shopfronts are still shuttered so the architecture shows, and no one is rushing you. The trouble is getting out of the door, and a witnessed wake-up helps there. DontSnooze has you record a short video when the alarm fires and shows it to a few friends, which is a small audience, but often enough to get a pair of shoes on.

Baudelaire’s flâneur wanted to be everywhere at home yet unseen. Try instead to be the person who notices that the shop you pass every day has a small carved owl above its door. You may have walked under it for six years.

If you would rather see your city from above than from street level, the overview effect exercises start from a rooftop.