A Sense Of Place
updates from Paris, The Hague, Vienna, and Philadelphia
Welcome to The Flâneurs Project. This post is part of our Longing for Places series. By subscribing, you’re supporting my writing and becoming part of our small community. Paid subscribers are invited once a month to an online gathering, 🌎 Mapping Places, where we share stories and map our next adventures, supporting each other in our quest to discover more of the world.
These past weeks have been quite eventful. I’m preparing for two gatherings, one in Paris, and one in The Hague. There are two more interviews published on The Flâneurs Project, exploring Vienna through Olga’s eyes and Philadelphia through Helena’s imagination.
There’s one particular topic that I keep returning to: the various types of relationships we develop with the cities we live in. To me, writing about cities has always felt like writing about love. So, if words usually come pouring out of me on paper or on screen when I write on Substack, this time I had to extract every single idea with a little bit of resistance. This essay on city-relationships is a labor of love, so it will take some time before I finally press that publish button.
In the meantime, I am also writing a short post about a past solo trip to North Berwick and exploring the topic of the so-called “griefcations”. The North Berwick piece will be published soon here on Substack.
Until then, I hope you will enjoy this curation of upcoming gatherings and snippets from interviews about the places we inhabit and the places we desire.
Salon in Paris in May: A Sense of Place
On Sunday, the 26th of May, Jenni Dawes from The Paris Chapter and I will host a gathering in Paris. We’ll be diving into the topic of place and identity: how where we choose to live shapes our desires, perceptions of the world, and who we feel ourselves to be.
If you long to move to a new country, if you’ve moved through many in your life, or if you’re curious to hear how different cities around the world have shaped the lives of other people, join us.
I met Olga for the first time in an online Interintellect salon in the pandemic. A few years later I met her in person at St Giles House, in Dorset, at The Realisation Festival. Since then we had a few conversations on the city as a character, on the genius loci of places, on how we move and think through cities.
It's a great pleasure to publish Olga's urban stories and her thoughts on Vienna on The Flâneurs Project.
Patricia: What city brings you deep joy whilst walking?
Olga: Now that I no longer live in London, walks there feel different, more exotic – there is a greater degree of separation.
Every great city is haunted. Just how many ghosts you will see as you walk through the city depends on how much life flourishes in the present. Even after the rise in property prices (and feelings of gloom) and Brexit, London continues to exert a kind of psycho-magnetic field for me: everything is significant, beautiful and terrible at once.
I can sit on a hill in Hampstead Heath and watch people walk their dogs from a distance, and it won't be immediately apparent that it isn't 1880 anymore. Even during the years I spent quaking at the fear of being kicked out of the country, when I walked through residential streets, it didn't matter if I felt glum or small – I never forgot that I was alive, partly because I could feel London's hot breath, waiting to swallow me up like a starving dog.
I like living in Vienna, but the ghosts are less translucent here – the past rules over the present. To me, Vienna is a city of the dead.
You can read the full interview here.
Walking with Helena in Philladelphia
I met Helena for the first time in Twitter DMs. I was already very much in love with her project PamPam, a tool that enables you to create beautiful maps around the world. Ever since our first conversation, I wanted to ask her a few questions about her walking experience in Philadelphia and I am very happy to share her stories on The Flâneurs Project.
Patricia: What city brings you deep joy whilst walking?
Helena: My first internship was at a small startup in the West Village in NYC, and anytime I walk back in that neighborhood, I'm transported to being young and hungry. There's something extremely energetic about exiting through the Subway station and coming up to a neighborhood like that, and then strolling over to Washington Square Park - which feels like the world's plaza.
Walking through a street in NYC is an all consuming, 360, technicolor experience, the sounds, the people watching, the small sidewalks, you can't escape it in the best way possible.
You can read the full interview here.
Last week, I pinned all the interviews I had collected over the past months for The Flâneurs Project on a PamPam map. I remember craving such a map-making tool a long time ago, and I am so grateful that it has become a reality.
Last but not least, I would like to share that I am organising a Walk & Talk in July in The Hague, where I am currently based. It will take place over a weekend and my main goal is to connect people that have a deep love for places. It’s an experiment this year, and I hope that it will grow into a yearly tradition.
If you are curious to learn more, you can read more information about the gathering here.
Thank you so much for reading.
Onwards,
Patricia