From Flâneurs to Navetteurs: Perceptions of Urban Space through the Commuter of the Contemporary City

Abstract

The flâneurs of the twentieth-century Paris traversed the city subconsciously through spontaneous walks, who perceived urban space as a mnemonic mechanism that provoked sensational experiences charged with intimate imagination. Oppositely, the urbanites of the twenty-first century Shanghai navigate the city by rapid underground transportation with a sense of immediacy and intentionality that dissimulate sub¬conscious urban experiences. To identify this contemporary counterpart to the flâneur, I have adapted the French word navette, which extrapolates the meaning “shuttle” to describe a transportation method between locations with singularity and rapidity. In contrast to the flâneur’s invocation of stroll¬ing, the word navetteur captures the eidetic experience of directionality and intentionality by commuting with under¬ground metros. This paper investigates Parisian flâneurs and Shanghai’s navetteurs’ perceptions of urban space through a surrealist theoretical framework and finds that the Parisian flâneurs craft a surrealist phenomenon in urban space with the city opening up as a mnemonic mechanism that evokes dreams and imagination; whereas the navetteurs of Shanghai recollect the city with fragmented metro stations covered with signage and perceive the city with a sense of estranged exteriority that confines their urban perceptions with detached conformity. This paper further compares the changing and transformative urban perceptions between flâneurs and navetteurs and investigates the enigmatic relationship between navetteurs of Shanghai and flâneurs of Paris, specifically with the cases of Tadao Ando’s Shanghai bookstore and Hector Guimard’s Paris Métro entrances, and generally with its implications to contemporary cities to understand urban space through human movements and imagination. Consequently, this paper argues for the return of the flâneur as a method of reminiscing perceptions of urban space in surrealist experiences through which we can revisit our intimate relationship with the twenty-first century contemporary cities and ruminate on the predicament of the contemporary urban life.