Many of us have excavated from childhood memory the fact that the circumference of a circle with a radius of 2km is 12.57km. That's the outer limit of the area prescribed by the State for my exercise during the current lockdown. Thanks to 2kmfromhome.com, I know the line runs from the mid-20th century suburbs of Killester and Donnycarney through the red-bricked streets of Drumcondra and Glasnevin, via the under-new-ownership ecclesiastical lands and industrial yards of the Tolka basin, to the dockland housing of East Wall and on to the Victoriana of the Clontarf seafront.
To navigate the actual circumference would require crampons, wire-cutters and swimming togs, but with the aid of my trusty phone I’ve set 12.57km as my minimum walking distance every day.
The experience has been rather wonderful, due in part to good weather but also to the richness of the man-made landscape through which I move. I thought I knew this neighbourhood but I was wrong. The place is full of quirky shortcuts, back lanes and miniature architectural curiosities. I’ve found myself going down more than a few dead ends, which don’t really matter when you’re keeping coronavirus hours, but also have become more aware of the pernicious fashion in suburban design of the last 30 years for single-entrance estates and gated developments – the enemy of the random wanderer.
'Adept of the joys of watching, connoisseur of empathy, the flâneur finds the world picturesque'
The routes vary every day but inevitably I find myself tracing and retracing the same paths over the course of a week. There’s always something new to notice - a derelict warehouse with unusual detailing off Richmond Road, or a lovely little wildflower park near Collins Avenue. And there is always more to discover in the aesthetic detailing of this apparently banal, but actually deeply textured, built landscape.
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Unencumbered
It’s been suggested that this new, restricted way of living is leading to a revival of the concept of the flâneur, much beloved of cultural theorists of the 19th and 20th centuries. Both archetypal and ambivalent, the word appeared almost two centuries ago in Paris to describe someone who moves through the city, detached but intensely watching at the same time. It’s been a key idea in understanding concepts such as alienation, voyeurism and spectacle.
That may all seem a bit grandiose for a stroll up the Howth Road. So am I a flâneur? Not according to Cornelia Otis Skinner, who insisted that there was no English-speaking equivalent "of that essentially Gallic individual, the deliberately aimless pedestrian, unencumbered by any obligation or sense of urgency, who, being French and therefore frugal, wastes nothing, including his time, which he spends with the leisurely discrimination of a gourmet, savouring the multiple flavours of his city." She should try telling that to half the characters in Ulysses.
I do recognise some part of my experience in what Susan Sontag wrote about the visual pleasures of flâneurism. "The photographer is an armed version of the solitary walker," wrote Sontag. "Reconnoitring, stalking, cruising the urban inferno, the voyeuristic stroller who discovers the city as a landscape of voluptuous extremes. Adept of the joys of watching, connoisseur of empathy, the flâneur finds the world 'picturesque'."
In Walter Benjamin’s Marxist interpretation, the flâneur was merely grist to the mill of advanced urban capitalism. “The city was now landscape, now a room,” he wrote. “And both of these went into the construction of the department store, which made use of flânerie itself in order to sell goods. The department store was the flâneur’s final coup. As flâneurs, the intelligentsia came into the market place. As they thought, to observe it – but in reality it was already to find a buyer. In this intermediary stage [...]they took the form of the bohème. To the uncertainty of their economic position corresponded the uncertainty of their political function.”
The current version of urban life, with cleaner air and less noise pollution, feels vastly superior and worth celebrating
There’s little or no buying or selling to be done along the routes of my walks. Department stores, apparently, are dying out, while crowds are forbidden for the indefinite future. The exquisite pleasure of being in, but not of, the urban throng is hard to achieve when everyone’s keeping a two-metre distance. Some parts of the flâneur experience may belong to a long-gone mode of urban living. Others have been commodified into something else entirely; mallrats, citybreakers and music festival-goers all partake of pre-packaged versions.
But the trope also has a protean quality that allows it to resonate still after almost two centuries. The truth is that some of us just don’t care for the country (all those cows) and have little time for the goofy pastoralism which sentimentalises rural life. The current version of urban life, with cleaner air and less noise pollution, feels vastly superior and worth celebrating. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m off for my walk.
