Task 2- Walking in the City

flâ·neur/fläˈnər/

Noun:

An idler or lounger.

The second week's task was to draw a line on a map of a route I used to walk where I used to live then take the map of Brighton and beginning at the station, walk the same route on Brighton roads.
My original route was from home to the bus stop where I used to catch the bus to work every morning. After plotting the same route on the Brighton map I was surprised to see that it followed a very similar route from the station to my new home in Brighton.
I aimed to take a photo every minute and take a variety of close ups as well as wide angle shots to capture a variety of images.


French Poet Charles Baudelaire developed a derived meaning of flâneur as "a person who walks the city in order to experience it". 
The task reminded me of work I did last year which covered Michel de Certeau's 'The Practice of Everyday Life'. His argument is that there is a ‘grid of discipline’ (Highmore, 2002) everywhere which is becoming more extensive which gives a sense of urgency to discover how an entire society can resist being reduced to power and control. De Certeau’s idea of resistance however should not be understood as oppositional, but instead creative.

In the chapter "Walking in the City", Certeau explains that what we experience is created by the strategies of governments, corporations, and other institutional bodies.
Certeau writes from the 10th floor of The World Trade Center in New York. He explains that the walker at street level moves in ways that are tactical and never fully controlled by the plans of organizing bodies because of people taking shortcuts in spite of the laid out route of the streets.
This links back to Certeau's main argument that our society may be controlled and shaped by power however, we should never fully give in to this and we should find our ways to resist, escape and find poetry in our everyday lives.


The idea of taking a pre-set route from elsewhere and applying it to a different city creates a new sense of poetry to an old habit or routine. Walking this route through Brighton was so different to walking it at home in terms of landscape, atmosphere, sounds and sights. It also showed me new routes through the back roads of Brighton which can reveal very different sides to a city as I began to notice little things like graffiti or different architecture which I would have otherwise missed.