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In one city a man leaves his house in the morning and aimlessly roams the streets of a working-class district, dragging behind him what looks like a homemade toy dog on wheels. The clattering pooch is made of magnetized metal, however, and as the man makes his way through the chaotic and dirty streets, he slowly begins to collect the cast-off metallic flotsam of the city through which he passes. In another city, a second man appears in a public square. He is impeccably attired and cuts a dashing figure. He too is accompanied by a small pet on a leash, in this case a live lobster. The man graciously adjusts his pace to that of his crustaceous companion, his stroll through the formal walkways slowed to nearglacial immobility. The eccentric perambulations of the two men, one in Mexico City and the other in Paris, appear, at the telling, to be somehow coordinated, but are in fact separated not only by geography but by an irreconcilable gulf in time as well. The first, the Belgian-born artist Francis Alys, began his street-sweeping walk in Mexico City in 1991. The second, the romantic poet Gerard de Nerval, had a bit of a lead, performing his head-turning promenades through the open-air arcades of Paris's Palais Royal in the 1840s, a full 150 years earlier.
The flaneur is arguably the first great cultural type of modernity, a figure summoned into existence with the rise of the modern city, appearing on the scene, as Walter Benjamin--the primary archaeologist of the flaneur--noted, at precisely the moment in the early 19th century when cities were becoming bursting metropoli, when everything that was happening in them had become too complex to keep track of, and too fascinating to ignore. "For the first time," wrote historian Rebecca Solnit in Wanderlust: A History of Walking (Viking Press, 2000), the city had become "strange to its inhabitants." The flaneur thrived in this strangeness, flourishing in the random encounters and enveloping, anonymous flow of the crowd that mesmerized city dwellers, the restless spectacle that modern life was becoming. Contradictory and elusive, the figure of the flaneur has been variously defined. For Baudelaire he is...