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Macau, an internationally renowned gambling city, has experienced rapid growth in casino space expansion and tourism since 2002 when the new Macau SAR government liberalised gambling. Despite the impact of COVID‐19 on the city's economy over the past three years, infrastructure construction and remodelling of casino resorts continue. This study focuses on the spatial production of casino resorts and tourist identity in Macau's Cotai Strip. Methodologically, the study conducts an assemblage analysis to interpret the data collected mainly through participant observation and in‐depth interviews. The research findings show that the Cotai Strip homogenises the human and non‐human elements through the repetitive rhythms of buildings and multi‐tiered enclosed territorialisation. The identity of Macau casino tourists emerges from their interactions with other components within the Strip assemblage. The emerging identity is defined as a post‐postmodern flâneur, characterised by their programmed and controlled tourist activities and their intensified visual sensations and photographic gazes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

On September 17, 2024, Invisible Publishing will release Barrack Zailaa Rimas graphic three-volume trilogy, Beirut, available in English for the first time in Carla Calarge and Alexandra Gueydan-Turek's translation. Each [...]

Walter Benjamin's radio addresses for young people remain a comparatively neglected part of his work. New scholarship and translations have begun to address this, however. This article argues that the radio addresses, and particularly the address on the Borsig locomotive and machine works, deserve a prominent place within the critical and intellectual trajectory of Benjamin's career. A close reading of "Borsig" demonstrates how the addresses model the modes of experience mediated by and through Benjamin's master figure of the flaneur and generate the possibility for a historical pedagogy adequate to modernity. In the radio addresses, in general, and in "Borsig," in particular, the mediation of experience entirely through sound and the narrating voice requires the simultaneity of past, present, and future that resolves into Benjamin's theory of history. "Borsig" thus points directly toward the stakes of the Passagen‐Werk and Benjamin's later theoretical essays. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

En nuestros días, es frecuente conocer la práctica de artistas de variados contextos que describen su andar como un modo contemporáneo de flânerie en relación con la figura a la vez histórica y literaria del flâneur surgida en el siglo xix. A más de un siglo de distancia ha cobrado interés para las mujeres adoptar para sí el modo femenino flâneuse, dotando a este personaje de nuevos valores en relación con su propio género, tiempo y contexto. En el presente texto propongo que el devenir personaje y las sucesivas figuraciones y caracterizaciones del flâneur posibilitaron su permanencia en el imaginario artístico dando lugar a apropiaciones, variaciones e interpretaciones. En principio se señalarán algunas de las dificultades con las que nos encontramos al intentar definir al flâneur y se mencionarán ciertos debates en torno a la existencia, o no, de la flâneuse. Hacia el final del texto se abordarán un par de ejemplos de mujeres caminantes para reconocer cómo éstas retoman la tradición en la que está inserto el personaje y, a la vez, qué formas, problemas, temáticas y deseos introducen al proponerse hoy como flâneuses. Para este efecto serán clave desde el punto de vista metodológico los conceptos de tema-valor y tema-personaje como los ha trabajado Luz Aurora Pimentel, pues permitirán reconocer, por un lado, la traza del flâneur y, por otro, cómo se muestra en su tránsito hacia modalidades contemporáneas que incorporan debates sobre el género, la ciudad y sus protagonistas, habitantes y caminantes.

This project argues that the flâneur's role in the edification of modern Paris has been hyperbolized. It will reconsider the categories through which Paris has been constructed around the topos of the flâneur by using the concept of the contre-flâneur. As the term suggests, I will reexamine the represented urban space stripped of the priority typically granted to the flâneur and contrast the motion of the flâneur with the circulations of the contre-flâneurs: as opposed to the flâneur's movements, those of contre-flâneurs are purposeful, and their presence leaves a material imprint on the cityscape. Scholarship tends to link the modern idea of mobility with the aimless wanderings of the flâneur, setting aside more utilitarian and varied forms of circulation that were just as typical of the modern city. Studying the capital's contre-flâneurs opens up a new perspective on the role of utilitarian circulation in nineteenth-century representation, while bringing new participants, functions, systems, and socialities into the scholarship about nineteenth-century modernity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the intertwined urban and cultural histories of Buenos Aires, Argentina, and Montevideo, Uruguay during the early twentieth century. During the years from 1910 to 1936, Buenos Aires and Montevideo's relationship evolved from being "mirrored" and "symbiotic" into an uneven relationship as Buenos Aires's skyline and cultural commerce expanded to compare to larger metropolitan centers in the Atlantic world. This article examines how the relationship between the two cities was understood by flâneurs, travel writers, and cultural producers in the crucial period of metropolitan growth and cultural commerce for both Buenos Aires and Montevideo. The cultural connections between the two cities transpired in a wider transnational and transatlantic context of urban capitalism that spurred the construction of modern urban spaces such as skyscrapers, theaters, and department stores. The relationship between Buenos Aires and Montevideo was mirrored by neighboring and competing metropolises across the globe in the early twentieth century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Kathleen Rooney is the author of eight books of poetry, nonaction, and fiction, including the novel O, Democracy! and the novel in poems Robinson Alone. With Eric Plattner, she is [...]

The journalist Robert Sherard was committed to reworking the familiar slum-exploration narrative into a self-consciously crafted, even lyric genre. Guided by his identification as a bohemian aesthete, he employed high-literary allusions to elicit readers' compassion for the poor. When he moved from the early industrial exposé of The White Slaves of England to projects less focused on specific trades and their locales, he was forced to cover wider geographic ground and work on a tighter schedule. Granted less time to get to know poor locals, he felt wary and vulnerable among them, forgoing incognito slumming after briefly attempting it. Sherard resorted to a more conservative judgment of the poor, devising a set of signs by which to read and interpret their morality from a distance. In particular, he revived the mid-Victorian concept of moral character as a tool for understanding and justifying their degradation. At the heart of Sherard's slum writing is the tension inherent in flâneurie in practice: the desire to achieve an incisive observation of the crowd and a resistance to being subsumed in it. Ultimately, his slum prose reflects his struggles as he sought to reconcile his identities as an investigative journalist, an urban flaneur, and an aesthetic prose stylist. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite the growing interest in the recuperation of nineteenth and twentieth century imaginaries of walking as an end in itself, texts by Latin American authors that engage in this debate often go unnoticed. This article analyses two Latin American works that establish a direct dialogue with these imaginaries: Mis dos mundos (2008) by Sergio Chejfec, and Papeles falsos (2010) by Valeria Luiselli. The two writers take the tension between the outdatedness of the flâneur , the most emblematic figure in this tradition, and its adaptations by the avant-garde, as a starting point to reflect on and experiment with a practice of walking that adjusts itself to other contexts. By problematizing the assumptions and generalizations that inform this cultural legacy, they offer a critical counterbalance to the recent dissemination of apologies for walking as a beneficial activity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the paper, two different approaches to exploring the city will be considered: that of the child and that of the flâneur. These are figures that, although starting from completely different perspectives, converge in reading and interpreting the urban experience through the innocence, spontaneity and lightheartedness of the child and the search for emotions, improvisation and depth of the flâneur. The first is oriented toward adolescence and knowledge of the world, while the second engages in a kind of regression to childhood; in this, the child and the flâneur seem mysteriously to meet on one of the magic streets of our cities or on a page of a book as they live a common experience.

Walter Benjamin's and Charles Baudelaire's personage of the flâneur can be interpreted as a representation of the ambivalent attraction to the strange and unknown in the experience of anonymous city life, so characteristic for the modern age. To what extent can we interpret this role of the flâneur – given its essential qualities in these writings – as a representation of world citizenship? The thesis is that the flâneur is more a cosmopolitan in the cultural than in the moral sense of the term. To live up to the demanding moral ideal of world citizenship, the flâneur needs to change: from detached observation to more meaningful forms of inter-cultural engagement. Hence the flâneur offers some clues for the kind of ethos that is required for a cosmopolitan subjectivity as well as for how it falls short. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cities are rich informative environments. This has been dubbed the urban century with, for the first time in human history, more than half the world's population living in cities. Cities are global, smart, connected, inclusive, livable, green, sustainable, mega and communicative. The urban experience is increasingly influenced by technology. From photography to the mobile phone, augmented reality and the GPS, the person/environment relationship is altered by media technologies. Urban communication is a growing field examining communication in urban sites and urban influences on communication. What is the relationship between media ecology and urban communication? From Benjamin and McLuhan to Postman and Strate, this article explores the connections between urban communication and media ecology and suggests urban spaces and places call out for the attention of media ecologists. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Theflâneuris well-known for being the most emblematic nineteenth-century observer of urban life. Critics have often compared theflâneurto a camera eye which records everything and insisted on the predominance of sight over other senses in the cognitive process. This article emphasises the embodiedness of theflâneur’s vision, which is an experience of all the senses. Urban public space can be envisaged as a ‘metabolic space,’ in which “the links between background and figures are very unstable” (Augoyard 1991). The moving body of theflâneur, which can adapt to this changing space, seems to be in an ideal position to apprehend the metabolic body of the city. Theflâneuris not only a “transparent eye-ball” (Emerson 2003), he is “a living eye” which communicates with all the other senses and captures the whole experience of moving through the city. By looking at texts by Balzac, Baudelaire, Dickens and Charlotte Brontë, the article shows thatflânerieis a sensory activity that shapes our perception of the city as much as the city shapes our ownflâneriesby transforming our bodies into scribes who write the “thicks and thins of the urban text” (de Certeau, 1984). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay explores Siegfried Kracauer's journalistic work and urban miniatures of the late 1920s and the early 1930s, using the conceptual frameworks developed by Géraldine Muhlmann in Du journalisme en démocratie (2004), Marie-Ève Thérenty in La Littérature au quotidien (2007), and Guillaume Pinson in L'Imaginaire médiatique (2012). It argues that, in his capacity as publicist, "feuilletoniste," and sociologist, Kracauer embodies Kant's critical ideal of the public sphere, which Muhlmann identifies with the "journaliste-flâneur." Featuring the everyday in its various social and cultural facets, Kracauer's feuilletons not only focus on the ephemeral and fragmented nature of the everyday, but also foster the awareness of a modernity in crisis through the de-familiarization of surfaces, spaces, and objects. Published in the bottom of the Frankfurter Zeitung, Kracauer's urban miniatures and reportages deploy rich interventions on the crisis of Western phenomenological, cognitive, and sociopolitical space. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the modern world in which we live today, books and libraries, as places of knowledge, art and creativity, need to be expanded in all directions. In order to follow this trend, the City Library in Subotica has established a readers' club for teenagers called The Flâneurs with the aim to erase the boundaries between arts and through an interdisciplinary approach, starting from books and words, through a virtual tour inspire gastronomy of the eye and the mind in young readers. A flâneur (from the French flâneur) is a curious observer who wanders through the city with one goal: to experience the unexpected, to discover the unknown, to experience something new, but also to create something new. A flâneur is an adventurer and a poet at the same time, a humorist and an observer, a researcher and a philosopher. In a word, a flâneur is an artist who reveals and shapes the world in different ways. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Among numerous starting points for a potential analysis of the complex Victorian narrative tapestry that is Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell’sFrom Hell, one segment in particular stands apart. It is the representation of the notorious Jack the Ripper, here elevated as a key figure for both Victorian London and the violently approaching twentieth century. However, the complexly portrayed image of Dr William Gull as the serial killer cannot be contained or understood within the ‘simplifying’ frame of a criminal. What this analysis proposes is a reading of this prototypical serial killer through the prism of his interaction with the urban spaces surrounding him. Drawing on the spatial theoretical framework of authors such as Yi Fu Tuan, Henri Lefebvre, as well as the concept of theflâneur, presented and developed by Charles Baudelaire and Walter Benjamin, the paper constructs its analysis on the premise of the serial killer as a conceptually new, aggressive type of theflâneur, positioned within a supratemporal context. This direct challenge to the canonical understanding of theflâneurallows for a simultaneous coexistence of the Victorian gentleman scrutinous of the vibrant streets of London, and the obsessed killer whose actions foreshadow the looming twentieth century. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this paper, a phase erasure and format conversion of phase-shift keying (PSK) to conventional on-off keying (OOK) is proposed and demonstrated theoretically and experimentally. Using a single-pump nondegenerate phase sensitive amplification process in a highly nonlinear fiber, the 0 and 1-bits of the PSK signal obtain different gains through amplification and de-amplification. As a result, the modulation information is transferred onto the amplitude. With an optimized input power difference between the signal and idler, the signal phase information is erased with wavelength preservation after the PSA. The output constellation and eye diagrams show an effective phase erasure and format conversion of PSK to conventional OOK. The error vector magnitude is utilized to evaluate the scheme performance. The proposed scheme provides the flexibility and resiliency for future photonic networks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the main reasons for the flâneur’s celebrity in studies of nineteenth-century Paris has been a connection with art and artists. The flâneur has been championed as a model for artists who depict the modern, urban world; this has been allied to assumptions that the flâneur embodies a process of aestheticisation which corresponds to capturing the essence of modernity (and thereby modern art). This article reconsiders such orthodoxy and suggests that a more historicised account of the figure’s origins and meaning. The canonical texts habitually called on to illustrate accounts of the flâneur’s identity (Le Physiologie du flaneur, Baudelaire’s ‘Le Peintre de la vie moderne’ etc.) are reconsidered critically. The article concludes by arguing that a more solidly based history of the flâneur should, firstly, reach back into the early nineteenth century, and secondly, also acknowledge the political character of such independent scrutiny of contemporary Paris, it spaces and social landscape. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper makes the argument that new global spatialities and new governance structures in education have important implications for how we think about education policy and do education policy analysis. This context necessitates that researchers engage in new methodologies to ensure that there is a suitable link between their research problem and the methods utilised for its investigation. To this end, I suggest that network ethnography can be conceived as a ‘threshold’ methodology; a new way of looking at social relations in changing times with attendant methodological benefits and shortcomings.Here I constitute the network ethnographer ascyberflâneur, who, like the nineteenth-centuryflâneuris lured by and attentive to the ‘new’, where they embrace the convergence of space and new technologies to become a well-positioned observer of contemporary policy processes. In focusing on thecyberflâneur,this paper aims to provoke debate amongst policy sociology researchers about how we can reflect on and modify our practice to ensure we are contributing to meaningful research in the twenty-first century. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Location-Based Online Social Networks (LBSNs) are one type of many communications technologies for which users are developing new social norms. This paper examines the case of one LBSN, Foursquare, to better understand conflicts between different approaches to the use of this type of platform. Foursquare users had two main approaches to the platform, exemplified by digital flaneurs and third place regulars. While digital flaneurs have an individualistic approach to the platform, third place regulars use it foster deeper place-based social connections. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While the realities of the global city would seem to render the century-old, modernist figure of the flâneur (and the disputed flâneuse) obsolete, embodied citizens and narrators have stubbornly survived the change in urban environments and their imaginaries, continuing to populate novels and mediate creation and writing. These postcolonial, post-diasporic pedestrians, however, necessarily occupy a different place in the real and fictive worlds, and must be conceptualized and named differently, in keeping with modified urban discourses and genres. Looking at a selection of novels written by women in the early years of the twenty-first century (set in Toronto, Sydney, Singapore and London), this essay contends that contemporary urban, post-diasporic texts create embodied, located pedestrians, rather than detached flâneurs; such figures, exceeding the resistant walkers imagined by Michel de Certeau, are closer to what the visual critic Marsha Meskimmon proposed as ‘an aesthetics of pedestrianism’, a poetics involving the body as a site of learning and border negotiation, through which the stranger fetishism described by Sara Ahmed may be destabilized and contested. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An essay is presented on similarities and differences between flaneurs and strangers in terms of their city life. Topics discussed include alienation in strangers to protect themselves from harm, flaneur changing from multitude to solitude and money economy helping both to get absorbed into crowd. Other topics include city people intimate with people with similar traits and perception of flaneur about city people as friendly but competitive.

In this article, I examine the Oriental travel writing by Fürst Hermann von Pückler-Muskau as flânerie, in terms of literary historians' depictions of the nineteenth-century French flâneur and Walter Benjamin's writings. Pückler's narrator, who is placed at the center of the travel text in question, Aus Mehemed Alis Reich, bears resemblance to the flâneur in several respects, including the position he assumes within the scenarios that he depicts, his relative detachment from the events, and the anecdotal and entertaining nature of the narrative. This narrative style provided the readers of the mid-nineteenth century with both a new type of travel text and an unusual narrator, who, through his particular social status, was able to access different social spheres and enjoy different travel experiences than the majority of travel writers, who were mostly from the middle class. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is plenty of evidence that a decidedly interdisciplinary incarnation of artists and scholars with urbanist inclinations has reinvigorated Charles Baudelaire's (1821–1867) ideas about aesthetically fruitful metropolitan wandering known asflânerie. What is truly innovative about today's iteration of Baudelairean flânerie is that it takes place in cities beyond its Parisian roots, particularly in the developing areas of East Asia and the Global South. Contemporary flânerie's representative forays move well past a nineteenth-century metropolitan genus or scale. Neo-Baudelairean flânerie may be staged in megacities, but it may also transpire along an urbanizing circuit rather than just in the cities themselves. Today the walking practice is often enlisted in the name of theurban imaginary, which makes sense of urbanization on the global stage based in a collective form of flânerie. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This essay assesses Edward Thomas'sIn Pursuit of Spring(1914) as a bicycle travelogue, which anticipates the modern sociological gaze. It argues that bicycle mobility is critical to how that gaze is experienced and mediated, and contrasts this mode with urban flânerie and other forms of pedestrian travel. In extending his critical gaze in a sweep across Southern England, Thomas alludes to earlier journeys by Cobbett, Jefferies and Hazlitt, yet he presents a very contemporary perspective of modernity and its effects as it ripples out of London, across the expanding suburbs and through the transforming rural margins of the Home Counties. In the unique human-powered mobility the bicycle provides, Thomas also gains relief from mental illness and finds a space–time in which to pose existential questions about himself and modernity. In this regard, he follows his friend Robert Frost and anticipates the bicycle fictions of Samuel Beckett and Flann O'Brien. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The object of the present study is to explore Zofka Kveder's journalistic and fictional narratives in terms of the expression of the author's relation/attraction to the capital as an urban space where important social processes take place. In her writings, Kveder transgresses traditional boundaries between 'masculine' and 'feminine' space, as well as between urban and rural space. Establishing the capital as the setting of her stories, the author imbues her texts with a modern representation of womanhood. By means of narrative and rhetorical strategies, Kveder locates females in the aforementioned spaces and, in the process, offers new representations of the capital many years before V. Woolf made way for feminine flânerie. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article follows a set of developments that transformed the meaning and value of begging as a religious pursuit in colonial India. Focusing on the Muslimfaqīrs, the article argues that missionaries, colonial officials, and physicians joined together in a moral and then medical critique of thefaqīrsas venerated idlers and sanctified drug users. The moral dimensions of the critique were then taken up by Muslim and Hindu reformists. Positioned at the centre of an immoral nexus, for their British critics thefaqīrswere key to the spread of drug abuse and in turn insanity among their followers. For Indian reformists and then nationalists, this nexus also connected thefaqīrsto the moral, economic, and physical weakening of the nation. In both of these critical visions, the begging mendicant was seen as an actively harmful figure whose misdeeds ranged from promoting the inversed morality of an anti-work ethic to peddling the evils of drug addiction and rousing the riotous masses on holy days. By drawing on a range of missionary, medical and Muslim reformist texts, the article shows how from around 1870 the discourses of Islamic reform and Indian nationalism gradually joined forces with the medical and moral discipline of empire such that by the 1920s thefaqīrshad gained an assembly of powerful enemies. In this way, the colonial period is seen as a crucial period of transition in the meanings of begging and drug use that would leave the venerated mendicants of former times disempowered in post-colonial South Asia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article argues for embracing the mobilized gaze of the flaneur to explore and create blends of interpretive auto-ethnographic/biographic/-ethnomethodology writing approaches. These approaches include Mygazes, Mymethods, and Mylanguages. Mygazes are described as recursive and unselfed while Mymethods are said to be about wrong pedagogy.

While Teju Cole's 2011 novel "Open City" has been received as an exemplary cosmopolitan performance, a careful reading of the novel's engagement with memories of suffering and of its evocations of aesthetic experiences shows that it interrogates rather than affirms an aesthetic cosmopolitan program. Through its use of a flat, nearly affectless tone, it renders visible the inability of contemporary calls for aesthetic and memorial cosmopolitan practices to engage a global landscape riven by injustice and inequality. As the novel progresses, its apparent celebration of the exemplary cosmopolitan figure of the "flâneur" makes way for the decidedly less glamorous figure of the "fugueur." By mobilizing this marginal figure from the history of psychiatry, a condition marked by unwanted restlessness and ambulatory automatism, "Open City" exposes the limited critical purchase of the imaginative mobility and intercultural curiosity celebrated by cosmopolitan defenses of literature and art. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents literary criticism of the book "Paper Houses: A Memoir of the '70s and Beyond" by Michèle Roberts. It examines the memoir's portrayal of Roberts as a female flâneur, or a person who walks a city in order to experience it, in London, England. Particular focus is given to the city's role in the formation of Roberts' identity. Details on the roles of feminism, language, politics, and the body in the book are also presented.

This article re-interprets the American photographer Walker Evans's Havana portfolio from a perspective that combines psychology and geography. By taking this approach, the article intends to reflect further on a number of the photographer's developing methods and processes, which were implemented whilst documenting his visit to the Cuban capital. In this discussion a number of theoretical issues relating to the medium of photography emerge in a way that examines the relationship between photography and psychogeography. This is illustrated via an exploration of the photographer’s practice with reference to psychogeography itself and is developed with reference to the act of urban wandering and the figure of theflâneur. These inform the photographer's visual understanding of the physical presence of the city, upon which he attempts to imprint himself in a way that is both involving and deliberately disassociative. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This study aims analyzing the narrative Numa rua de Istambul (In a Istambul's street) by Lygia Bojunga, from the perspective of theoretical-critical studies about chronic and the flânerie conception. Therefore, characteristics of chronic in this narrative and the narrator as flâneur are investigated. However, before analyzing, it is presented a general vision about the work Feito à Mão (Made by hand, 1996), where the text was published, for contextualizing its production circumstances. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The saturation of mediated communication in contemporary cultural life demands that ethnographers develop alternative methods of social research. I argue that they should embrace the mobilized gaze of the flaneur to understand how postmodern, mediated experiences fit into everyday cultural practices. I also offer a number of recommendations that can guide ethnographers as they examine hyper-mediated cultural contexts. These recommendations include (1) embrace the emergent, fleeting moment; (2) think dialectically about culture; (3) represent the postmodern in “writing” culture; (4) conceptualize ethnography as partial, subjective, and self-reflexive; and (5) embrace the semiotic tradition. By adopting the methodological practices of flanerie, ethnographers can provide compelling and evocative analyses of postmodern culture that make sense of the complex cultural moment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]