A list of all The Flâneurs Project interviews in one page. This is an ongoing project. If you’d like to share your stories email me at hurducaspatricia@gmail.com or book a call.
Walking in Louisville With Russell Smith
I stumbled upon Russell Smith’s blog, Solvitur Ambulando, a year ago and immediately sent him an email to connect over a call, as I knew we would have some interesting conversations. Please enjoy this interview I had with him about the places he holds dear.
Please tell us a bit about yourself and about any creative projects that you are passionate about.
I’m a writer and walker in Louisville, Kentucky. In my newsletter, Solvitur Ambulando, I write about walking (30 Walks in Nature and A Notebook on Walking) and about other topics (like living with a congenital heart defect and lessons from forgotten leaders). I also interview some amazing people. I’m also working with a firm to write a history of that company – to uncover the full roots and scope of a beautiful company culture, now more than 100 years in the making.
My uncle, my brother and I have a small commercial real estate investing firm, specializing in multifamily complexes of 10 to 30 units. The business was founded by my grandfather in 1955. My dad and uncle took over when he passed away. My brother and I became involved more than a decade ago when our father passed away.
I have a wife, Kathleen, two daughters, Beatrice and Cordelia (yeah, for Shakespeare!), and two Havanese puppies, Olivia and Otis. We all enjoy walking together too. Otherwise, I enjoy reading, cooking, smoking meats on the Big Green Egg, fly fishing, rucking, tennis, yoga and strength training. And Benihana / hibachi-style cooking. Love me some Benihana!
What is your favorite street / area in your hometown and why?
Louisville boasts a wonderful array of parks and green spaces, including Jefferson Memorial Forest, the largest urban forest in the United States, and the Olmstead Park System, designed by the firm of the famous landscape architect Frederick Law Olmstead, who also designed New York’s Central Park. I live near Seneca and Cherokee Parks, two of the larger in the city. But for a city its size, and indeed for one much larger, Louisville benefits from a beautiful abundance of nature.
You have a blog, Solvitur Ambulando (Latin for “it is solved by walking”), why is walking so important in your life?
When I was 10, I underwent open heart surgery. As part of my recovery, my Mom took me to the local mall and made me walk from one end to the other and back, about a mile total. A few weeks after surgery, that walk hurt and I felt miserable. But my Mom did not let up. Every day – head to the mall and walk. Those walks played a huge role in my recovery. This introduced me to the power of walking to solve at least some of life’s challenges – in this case, physical ones.
Later, for almost 20 years, I lived in a terrific walking city, Washington, DC. My longtime roommate, Cain Pence, spent our first year there walking all over – even areas most college kids wouldn’t be found in. He would walk 6, or 8 or 10 or more miles many days. He believed that the best way to know a city comes through the feet. I joined him on a few of those early walks, but his message stayed with me for years.
When I met my wife, she walked a ton. Well, I wanted to date her, so I put my walking shoes on too!
After my second open heart surgery in 2014, walking played an important role in my recovery. I carefully but consistently ratcheted up the intensity to complete my recovery, completing a walk of 4 miles in one hour, which I’d never done in my life, on my last day of cardiac rehab.
Today, my family - and our dogs – often walk together. We come together, we converse, we come to grow new bonds, on those walks.
In addition to physical exercise and my family fondness, walking remains important to me as an emblem of the sacredness of life. Humans think. Human feel. Humans move.
We encounter others in our walks. The world – nature, cities, streams, forests – unfolds underfoot. Walking remains a primary way we go beyond ourselves.
What city brings you deep joy while walking?
For a few years early in my career, I traveled to Sydney, Australia. I loved walking around the Central Business District and the Rocks area of the city. (As an aside, my favorite teppanyaki / hibachi restaurant in the world, Rocks Teppanyaki, is here.) I found walking through the Botanic Gardens, down by the Opera House, a lovely stroll. The CBD always felt energetic and alive. My favorite barber, Gino, had a small shop; when I landed in Sydney, I’d arrive in my hotel then head out for a walk to stretch my post-Pacific-flight legs. And I would stop for a haircut from Gino. I wonder if he still works there?
Then I would walk around Hyde Park and visit the Anzac Memorial, a tribute to the Australia and New Zealand soldiers who died in World War I, and in all military operations. As an American, I found it eerily poignant and affecting. Pericles said, “the entire world is the graveyard of brave men.” In this memorial, far, far from the Western Front of Europe in the seemingly old, old days of kings and empires, that point came home to me more forcefully than anywhere else, including Gettysburg.
Please share a serendipitous moment from a walk.
Well, last October, I found that my favorite clothing store in New York, J. Mueser, and my favorite tea room, Té Company, are about one-tenth of a mile apart. I didn’t find that on Google Maps; I walked it to realize it. Pretty darn nice!
Please share a story of a stranger that you met or passed by on the streets and why that moment stayed with you until now.
Louisville has a huge homeless problem, or maybe the homeless have a Louisville problem. I’ve worked for years with St. John Center, a homeless support and advocacy group. How can we allow thousands of our neighbors to languish on the streets? In the summer of 2023, I took “30 Walks in Nature” in and around Louisville. In Breslin Park, I encountered a few homeless men – sleeping on the pathways, in the bathrooms, at various places in the park. That walk haunted me, and still does. How can we allow thousands of our neighbors to languish on the streets?
What is your personal definition of the flâneur / flâneuse?
When I think of “flâneur” I see it as the urban version of what Stephen Graham calls “tramping” in his wonderful book, The Gentle Art of Tramping. He writes, “Nature becomes your teacher, and from her you will learn what is beautiful, who you are, what is your special quest in life and wither you should go.” He then contends, by tramping, “you are gradually becoming an artist in life….You are learning the gentle art of tramping, and it is giving you an artist’s joy in creation.”
Amend his sentiments for an urban environment: “The city becomes your teacher…you are learning the gentle art of flâneuring, and it is giving you an artist’s joy in human creation.”
Like a tramp, a flâneur does not rush – despite the harried cacophony of the city. A flâneur does not aim to annihilate distance. A flâneur takes time, observes, seeks patterns and the disruption of patterns, muses, pauses, retraces steps; all as if painting the cityscape with the soles of the feet.
A flâneur uses walking to become what they are.
What parts of your hometown would you like to re-enchant and why?
I have worked in Downtown Louisville for most of my adult life. My family members have worked downtown for at least 70 years and three generations. Downtown feels like a second home for us. But for decades, Downtown Louisville has declined. Businesses have moved out and seem to keep relocating, often to suburbs out east. Much of the available office space lies vacant or has been, or will be, transformed into hotels. I keep wondering whether, in the modern city, with hybrid or work-from-home, whether a city needs a vibrant central area? Does it really?
I really appreciate the word “re-enchant” in your question. We need exactly that re-enchanting. In the middle of that word is the root, “chant,” which invokes rhythm and singing and song. And poetry. I fully know we need economic answers to downtown’s maelstrom – solutions brought about by money and business and commerce. And yet, I feel we need more than economic answers. I believe we would need to fall in love again with downtown as a place, a home, a heart of our community.
If you could name a street – what name would you choose for that street?
I appreciate streets named for nature: Chestnut Street, Walnut Street, and so on. In a way, such names help bridge the urban-nature divide. Our ancestors seemed to view coupling nature and the city as a worthy aim, even when done imperfectly. Naming streets after natural things helped, in a small way, shoot for that target. So I would name a street Nature Way; my daughter loves axolotls so she’d name it Axolotl Avenue. Ha!
If you could move to another city tomorrow (and have every expense covered, job security, a new home) what city would you choose, if you had to go with your first gut instinct?
I would stay in Louisville. Most of my family lives here. We returned here when our first daughter was born for a reason: to return to the place we knew as home. As T.S. Eliot wrote in Little Gidding:
We shall not cease from explorationAnd the end of all our exploringWill be to arrive where we startedAnd know the place for the first time.Through the unknown, unremembered gateWhen the last of earth left to discoverIs that which was the beginning.
Since first hearing that from a dear friend years ago, it has seemed full of wisdom and spirit.
If you want me to share a social media page or a website (about you and/or your projects), please share your links below.
My site is https://www.sa.life/. Over the past few years, I’ve deleted all my social media accounts, except LinkedIn. Thank YOU, Patricia! This has been so much fun!
Thank you, Russell!
Walking in Melbourne with Dean Kyte
I’ve never visited Australia, but after my brief conversation with Dean and receiving the Melbourne Flâneur zine I ordered by post, I know for sure that Melbourne is on my list of places to visit in the coming years.
I met Dean Kyte while cyberflâneuring on Airchat. If I remember correctly, he left me a voice note mentioning that he remembered my name because he stumbled upon an essay of mine years ago, back when I was still writing somewhat obscurely on WordPress. Curious, I googled his work and was immediately captivated by the attention to detail and the dedication he pours into his creations—his writing, his videos, his photography, and his entire presence as “the Melbourne flâneur.”
When my order arrived, having travelled from Australia to The Netherlands in just a few weeks, I was thrilled. I took my time unpacking everything: the zine, the postcard, the letter, and the CD, all carefully wrapped by Dean in a map of the Melbourne tram network.
The entire unpacking experience filled me with a deep sense of connection and joy. It made me slow down and savour every detail—the handwritten letter, the black-and-white photographs, and the tangible care, time, and attention that went into every aspect of it.
There are people who write, and then there are those who truly embody what they write about. I believe Dean belongs to the latter.
Below, I’m sharing Dean’s answers to some questions I sent him via email a few weeks ago. This interview is longer than those I usually share here, and it’s meant to be enjoyed slowly—bit by bit, with long pauses, allowing yourself to return and linger.
Hi Dean! Please tell us a little about yourself and your creative projects.
My name’s Dean Kyte. I’m a Melbourne-based writer, filmmaker, and flâneur. I craft fine literature: I translate the poetry and prose poems of Charles Baudelaire from French and I also write my own prose poetry, capsule essays and literary fiction based on my flâneries in the towns and cities of Australia. I release the pieces as short videos on Vimeo and as audio tracks on Bandcamp.
My major creative project is The Spleen of Melbourne, which is a collection of prose poems and literary crime ficciones based on scenes of contemporary Melbourne life. I released the first version of The Spleen of Melbourne project as a CD of spoken word tracks accompanied by atmospheric soundscapes at the beginning of 2022, and last year I released the most popular track on the album, a short story called “Office at night”, as a CD single. Both the album and the single are illustrated by my analogue street photography of Melbourne, which often inspires my writing.
The next iteration of The Spleen of Melbourne project will be a Blu-ray Disc of 25 short films and videos which will enable viewers to take random, thematic flâneries through a virtual Melbourne. Eventually I plan to release The Spleen of Melbourne as a book featuring 50 prose poems illustrated by my photography, and with some kind of augmented, immersive capability that allows people to not only read the prose poems, but to listen to them as digital audio tracks or to watch them as ‘cinepoems’.
I’m also currently writing and producing episodes of a specifically fictional sub-project of The Spleen of Melbourne, a long-form audio narrative. The “Office at night” single is an experimental preview for that podcast. Whereas The Spleen of Melbourne is influenced by the French prose poems of Charles Baudelaire collected in Le Spleen de Paris, “Office at night” and other ficciones for the forthcoming podcast are written in a style I call the ‘nouvelle démeublée noire’—the ‘unfurnished dark short story’—which I’ve developed based on the principles of the French Nouveau Roman set forth by Alain Robbe-Grillet.
When did you first come across the concept of the “flâneur”?
I’m not sure. I believe I had some vague sense of the notion of flânerie when I was living on the Gold Coast in my early twenties. The conceptual relationship between writing, pedestrianism, and the rare and random experience of fugitive beauty in the urban environment which makes life almost bearable under conditions of technological, capitalistic modernity formed a nexus of concerns that my thoughts were continually circling around in those years.
Between 2004 and 2007, I wrote film criticism for magazines on the Gold Coast, and I called my journeys by foot and public transport to various cinemas on the Gold Coast and in Brisbane ‘adventures’. The experience of the movie was part of a continuum of altered experience which encompassed the journey to and from the cinema—the whole substance of the day, in fact.
Every marvellous moment on those rare days of my life seemed connected in the fine, diffuse fabric of an altered state. I wanted to live whole days of my life in such a state—a permanent floating world of Keatsian Truth and Beauty. Through the apprenticeship of film criticism, I began to develop an æsthetic lifestyle philosophy, and one day late in 2008, I decided to learn French and go and live in Paris.
I spent the summer of 2009 living there, and I would certainly have known what flânerie was by that time. I believe that, through my new-found access to and slowly growing competence in the French language, what I had previously called ‘adventures’, I progressively began to more properly call ‘flâneries’, but I’m not sure.
As best as I can make out, the first time that the word ‘flâneur’ appears in any of my published writings is in an article I wrote on the work of the Belgian photographer Rémy Rusotto (@slab_remyrussotto on Instagram) in January 2012. In that article, I described Rémy as having a Baudelairean ‘flâneur æsthetic’.
The concept of flânerie is also mentioned six times in my first book, Orpheid: L’Arrivée, which I published in December of that year. Orpheid: L’Arrivée was based on my experiences as a flâneur in Paris, so I had clearly acquired an understanding of the concept sometime during the three years or so it took me to write the book.
What I now call my æsthetic lifestyle philosophy of flânerie has undergone two ‘crystallizations’, two solidifications and refinements since.
The first occurred in 2016. Halfway through that year, I left the small country town of Bellingen, on the North Coast of New South Wales, where I had been living, to come to Melbourne for the first time. Melbourne is the most European city on Australian soil, and when I decided to permanently settle there towards the end of 2016, the idea for The Spleen of Melbourne project began to form in my mind.
Then, in 2019-20, when I launched The Melbourne Flâneur vlog and The Spleen of Melbourne project began to firmly come together in my mind, the æsthetic philosophy of flânerie underwent a further solidification and refinement until now the lifestyle philosophy I’ve developed over the last twenty years contains well over 350 ideas and sources that I regularly draw on in my prose poetry, fiction, and critical writings.
What drives you to create—whether it’s writing, filming, or taking photographs?
I’m driven to create poetry in words and images out of the banal prose of everyday life by the same things that drove the first philosopher of flânerie, Charles Baudelaire, to write poetry—what he calls, in the first section of Les Fleurs du mal, the twin poles of ‘Spleen et Idéal’.
In Modernity, we are torn between these poles of Baudelairean Spleen (which I define in The Spleen of Melbourne as a ‘sinister tristesse’, a combination of ‘bilious melancholy’ and ‘choleric sorrow’) and the desire for ‘the Ideal’—a floating world and an eternal life of Truth and Beauty. ‘Modernity’ is a dark conceptual complex composed of what I call the ‘Satanic Trinity’ of Science, Technology, and Capital. These things, Blake’s ‘dark, Satanic Mills’, promise us the Ideal but deliver us only Spleen—a discontented ennui with modern life.
Despite all the progress brought about by the wonders of Science (Baudelaire’s Satan Trismegistus) and its two handmaidens, Technology in the material sphere and Capital in the social, the dandy-flâneur experiences a ‘dark enlightenment’ where he realizes that life within this Foucauldian grille, the ‘carceral liberty’ of the Lawrentian ‘Machine’ of Modernity, is not really worth living.
Thus, as I conceive him (and as I conceive myself as a Parisian flâneur exiled in Melbourne), the dandy-flâneur is an ‘æsthetic terrorist’ to the bourgeois order, a man who goes out into the public square and blows up his own life daily in a vision of Truth and Beauty where he himself is the chef d’œuvre, the Magnum Opus and the Lapis Philosophorum—the elegant end of his own Art, the anonymous yet spectacular cynosure of all passing eyes in the street.
The dandy-flâneur is Poe’s ‘Man of the Crowd’—he is ‘the type and genius of deep crime’. In his incarnation as an homme de lettres, the dandy-flâneur is the most intransigent résistant to the technological, capitalistic Machine of a Modernity in exponential, existential decline: he is an undercover spy ‘sousveilling’ it; he is a saboteur covertly undermining it from within by his Non serviam.
The peak of Modernity was World War II; that was when Faustian logic of Western civilization arrived at its ‘Final Solution’: the totalizing enslavement and extermination of humanity by the Machine. So, like Baudelaire before me, I am driven to create poetry in words and images out of the banal prose of everyday life, to assert my unsubmitting humanity against the Machine as an act of underground resistance, as an act of ‘æsthetic terror’ against the invidious, bourgeois interests of scientistic, technological capital.
Man cannot live by bread alone, and the dry bread of Science, Technology and Capital do not really nourish the human soul, even though they make our material lives progressively easier and more comfortable. Faced with the jail of this progressive liberty, the dandy-flâneur, as Baudelaire shows us in Les Fleurs du mal and Le Spleen de Paris, wanders the streets of the modern megalopolis that is Paris in search of an ever-renewing novelty—what Guy Debord called ‘the Spectacle’.
And the psychological rent, the cognitive dissonance between the Spleen of life that the ‘marvellous’ Spectacle of Modernity engenders and the sublime spiritual Ideal that we actually desire drives the ‘positively maladjusted’, non-conforming dandy-flâneur towards the spiritual suicide of a salutary madness: At the end of Les Fleurs du mal, Baudelaire literally cries out to Death, the ‘old captain’, to execute him with its poison. to lift up the anchor and cast out, in this endless quest for heightened, novel experience, on the final possible flânerie ‘[a]u fond de l’Inconnu pour trouver du nouveau!’—‘[t]o the depths of the Unknown to find… something new!’
So, that’s why I have been driven these past twenty years to work out the hyperobjective ‘problem of Modernity’ in the three dimensions of my flâneurial prose poetry, fiction, and critical writings: I am seeking a Dantean ‘Vita Nuova’—a ‘New Life’ for myself. What drives me to create is that quest for ‘something new’. Flânerie is a means of æsthetic investigation of the dark, pathological complex of Modernity. It’s also a set of guerrilla strategies of resistance to it. And it’s an æsthetic means of finding solutions to the ‘Final Solution’ of Faustian Modernity.
As far as I am aware, the only two writers before myself who have truly understood the æsthetic philosophy of flânerie and have made it the basis of their whole existences are Charles Baudelaire in the nineteenth century and Walter Benjamin in the twentieth. Baudelaire identifies more with the conceptual figure of the dandy, Benjamin more with the conceptual figure of the flâneur, and in my work, I have sought to reconcile the two into a single conceptual figure, the dandy-flâneur, which I embody as the prism for investigating the hyperobjective problem of Modernity.
I see myself as being in a direct line of intellectual descent from those two gentlemen. All three of us are prophets of our centuries: In the nineteenth century, at the very start of Modernity, Baudelaire predicted the exponential decline of the myth of linear, technological Progress we are now experiencing. In the twentieth century, Benjamin, as a German Jew at the height of Modernity, was forced to commit suicide—by poison—precisely to avoid the Final Solution of being enslaved and exterminated by the Machine. And in the twenty-first century, I stumble around postmodern Melbourne as a Parisian in exile, a ‘refugee from Modernity’ amid the ruins and rubble of a dark conceptual complex, the hyperobject of Modernity, which is coming down around us at an exponential rate.
So, it’s been given to a Frenchman, a German Jew, and an Australian from the New World to embody the beginning of modern decadence, the peak of it as symbolic scapegoat, and the new man who might potentially emerge from the rubble of postmodern decline.
As a writer who has mapped out a considerable corner of the hyperobjective problem of Modernity through my æsthetic philosophy of flânerie, I have a profound sense that if I can solve the problem for myself of ‘how to live’ under the oppressive conditions of a Machine that does not simply want to grind our bones to dust but own our souls as well, without giving in to it, then I will also be solving the problem for a great many other artistic ‘refugees from Modernity’ who are also seeking an alternative lifestyle to a globalized Western civilization which is now in exponential, existential decline.
What is the most rewarding part of your work?
The reward is yet to come.
Like Baudelaire, I focus on the noir side of life, on spleen and ennui, on the fundamental dissatisfaction I feel with the big con of a modern life I have never bought into because I do not believe that we are anywhere close to hitting rock-bottom in the decline of our globalized Western civilization. Before we can get past this to a New Life, we must face the externalities of the old one honestly; we must address the darkness in ourselves.
To feel Baudelairean Spleen, to really feel this ‘sinister tristesse’, this ‘bilious melancholy’ and ‘choleric sorrow’ I invoke in The Spleen of Melbourne, is to honestly mourn the deception—and la déception—that lies at the heart of the modern myth of Progress. It’s to go through the stages of grief for our dying civilization.
Most people are still at the stage of denial. Our bureaucratic and technocratic overlords, who earnestly believe that they are running the Machine, are at the equally delusive stage of bargaining with it. I’m at the stage of depression, and I’m determined, like Baudelaire, to go to the blackest depths of my despair and grief about a modern life I never even believed in so as to find the light of something new.
The reward for me will be to see and experience the hopeful green shoots of a new, networkcentric culture. That’s the ‘New Life’ I am seeking to pioneer for myself and to share with others—if my strategies of resistance prove ultimately to be successful rather than quixotic.
To be a writer, an homme de lettres, in the increasingly oral twenty-first century is to be a truly quixotic figure for whom the dark, Satanic Mills of Modernity have no need. I am actually an impediment to the Machine, a stumblingblock grinding its gears—the foundation stone for a qualitatively new order of life that the bureaucratic and technocratic builders have rejected as possessing no quantifiable value.
In his capacity as Poe’s ‘Man of the Crowd’, the dandy-flâneur is a prophetic figure of the future who is pushed, by his society, to the absolute margins of it in the present. And yet, he is nevertheless at its secret centre, a ‘célébrité anonyme’ overlooked by the panoptic forces of techno-bureaucratic capitalism but laterally recognized by other edges in the peer-to-peer network who ‘grok his vibe’.
So, having to labour undercover against the oppressive sensemaking régime of a corrupted Science, and the corrupt Technology and Capital that are derived from it, the most practically rewarding thing for me is to sell my work in a parallel economy, to gain underground readers, viewers, and auditors of my ideas, and to be able to go on resisting and not submitting to the final, inhuman—and anti-human—logic of the Machine.
As a ‘poet in prose’, I am not a ‘mainstream, bestselling author’ but necessarily a ‘côterie poet’. As such, I require ‘the côterie’—the parallel social network of the literary salon, the exclusive group of readers who are as avant-garde in their taste as I am in my style, people who ‘get me’, who appreciate my effort to resist the Machine, and who support that quixotic gesture. It means a very great deal to me to discover receptive and supportive edges in this parallel network and I try to cultivate generative relationships with these people. That is where I find my greatest reward.
Which parts of Melbourne speak to you the most?
It’s difficult to say. I have a much wider experience of Melbourne than most Melburnians because I thoroughly live out my values as a dandy-flâneur: I am truly a refugee. I live out of a suitcase, and in any given month I can be living in several of the most disparate suburbs.
That said, when it came time to choose a location where the protagonist of the forthcoming podcast would live, I chose a particular neighbourhood in Fitzroy North, in the City of Yarra, as the principal locale for the narrative.
Fitzroy was the first suburb of Melbourne, established in 1839, four years after the city’s founding. The inner-city suburb of Fitzroy is well-known in Australia for being very ‘alternative’ and ‘artistic’, and the whole of the City of Yarra, which adjoins the City of Melbourne on its eastern boundary, is very ‘bourgeois-bohemian’ and extremely left-leaning in its politics. This makes it a rather odd place for the protagonist of the serial to reside: As the character in the forthcoming podcast who is most like myself, who is, in fact, my ‘Golden Shadow’, the idealization of my dark side, this dandistic ‘Man of the Crowd’ who casts out on his daily peregrinations around Melbourne from a certain terrace-house in a certain street in Fitzroy North is certainly not sympathetic to the political persuasion of his neighbours.
I’ve often ruminated in my wanderings around Fitzroy and other parts of Melbourne that lean progressive how I came to situate him there in Yarra, and I can only conclude that, in these élitist enclaves which are most aligned to the pathologies of Modernity, which are most partisanly on the side of technocracy, bureaucracy, academia, media, and surveillance capitalism, a fashionable figure who most resembles ‘the type of person who ought to live in Fitzroy’ finds his greatest liberty as a résistant to the established order right in the carceral heart of the Spectacle.
Are there any cafés, restaurants that you visit often?
I acquired the habit of writing in cafés in Paris. In the evenings, I used to go to Le Cépage Montmartrois in the rue Caulaincourt and drink a demi of beer as I wrote in my cahier. In Orpheid: L’Arrivée, I described Le Cépage as ‘le sein d’or’—‘the golden bosom’—and that is what it will always be to me: the moment I saw it I knew that I had arrived at the place on earth which is my heart’s home. For me, it will always be the greatest café on earth, and the experience of it has coloured my experience of cafés in Australia, for I am always seeking another ‘sein d’or du Cépage’.
In the little town of Bellingen, where I lived from 2014-6, I found something approaching it: When the friends who introduced me to the town took me immediately to what was then The Vintage Nest in Hyde Street, I knew I was going to stay and live in Bello. There’s a scene in my 2016 book Follow Me, My Lovely… set in The Vintage Nest shortly before it changed hands (and changed its character) which is one of my most memorable experiences of it and, I think, one of my finest pieces of writing about the part of flâneurial life that takes place in cafés.
Almost every day for two years, I was a conspicuous figure in what then became Hyde Bellingen, being indulgently allowed by the managers to write for hours over a long black. Even now, whenever I go back to Bello, I regard the Hyde as my ‘office’ there.
I have other such ‘offices’, cafés I habitually adopt as places to write, in towns and cities all over Australia. In Melbourne, I can recommend places in many suburbs, but in the City itself, the area that most reminds me of the cafés I knew in Paris is Flinders Quarter. Degraves Street is the laneway that most reminds me of my evenings ‘au sein d’or du Cépage’, and you will not infrequently find me seated on the terrace of Café Andiamo or in the window of The Quarter, writing in the evenings. In the mornings, if I’m in the City, I’m mostly to be found on the terrace of Caffè e Torta, located at the Little Collins Street end of the Royal Arcade.
But even though Australia has acquired a Continental taste for coffee, it’s really a land of pubs. So I’ll give an honourable shout-out to my Sydney watering-hole, The Carrington Hotel (or ‘The Carro’, as Australians are wont to call it) in Surry Hills: If I’m in Sydney, you’ll often see me nursing a Guinness in the window as I write or read a French book.
In your opinion, what city in Australia is severely underrated for urban exploration?
Rather than the cities, one should try to get out into countryside to understand what Australia really has to offer in terms of an antipodean adaptation of Parisian flânerie. Distances in Australia can be vast, so this is not always practical.
Victoria (of which Melbourne is the capital) is the second smallest state in Australia and is equivalent in size to some European countries, so the distances are more manageable. A two-, three- or four-hour train trip in any direction out of Melbourne will take you to some delightful regional towns and cities.
But I cannot put the case too strongly for the little country town of Bellingen, on the New South Wales North Coast. No place on earth except Paris itself has been more significant to me in my flâneurial life and writing. It was, in fact, the place where I began to practically implement—albeit in a highly reduced and circumscribed way—the tenets of my æsthetic lifestyle philosophy based on what I had discovered and learned in Paris. Before I was ‘the Melbourne Flâneur’, I was ‘the flâneur of Bellingen’!
As soon as I arrived in Bello, and for the two years or so that I lived there, people told me I wouldn’t stay long, that I would go to Melbourne, that, in my suits and snapbrimmed hat, I ‘belonged’ down there rather than among the barefoot hippies and flannelette-clad country-folk. Though I didn’t believe them at the time, they were right.
But if I had to describe Bellingen, I would say that if you took the map of Melbourne and folded it down to just two small streets—Hyde and Church Streets—you would have Bello, the most cosmopolitan city you will find in an Australian country town. I used to flâne in a daily circuit up one side of Hyde Street, around the war memorial, and back down the other, and I felt almost as satisfied with life as in the days when I used to flâne up the Champs-Élysées, circumambulate the Arc de Triomphe, and stroll back down the other side of the greatest street in the world. In Melbourne, a flânerie up the so-called ‘Paris End’ of Collins Street still does not fill me with quite as much joy as a flânerie up Hyde Street does.
Bellingen was colonized by hippies in the early 1970s following Australia’s answer to Woodstock, the Aquarius Festival, an alternative lifestyle festival held at Nimbin, a small town some 200 km north of Bello. As an Aquarian myself, as someone fundamentally oriented towards a better collective future for humanity through realization of the individual, it’s perhaps not a surprise that Bellingen should resonate with me. It’s the one place apart from Paris where, time and again, I have had flâneurial intimations of the networkcentric ‘New Life’ I am seeking as a flâneur. It’s the place on earth where I’ve been the most consistently happy for the longest period of my life.
Strange to say, but at night that little country town is as beautiful and romantic as la Ville Lumière. I think I demonstrate as much in Follow Me, My Lovely…, which charts an entire flânerie I took with a Norwegian tourist over the course of some nine or ten hours. That was only one of several romantic experiences and altered states of being I’ve had in Bello which have showed me, as Paris did, what life could be like if we lived in a perpetual state of Truth and Beauty.
Is there a part of Melbourne you would like to re-enchant?
The ‘enchantment’ of Melbourne lies precisely in its quality of degradation. This is a theme I return to in The Spleen of Melbourne project. In one of its dimensions, Convolute P of The Spleen of Melbourne, entitled “Petra”, is devoted to prose poems that deal with Melbourne as a site of ‘modern ruin’.
As a city rapidly built in the nineteenth century on the spoils of gold, Melbourne overtook Sydney as the principal city on the Australian continent. It maintained its financial, political and cultural primacy over Sydney well into the twentieth century. But following the Olympic Games in 1956, in a sustained campaign of what can only be described as ‘civic vandalism’, the European-style city that had been built during the ‘marvellous’ period of Melbourne’s wealth was gradually taken apart by Whelan the Wrecker, a local demolition company.
Whelan the Wrecker is the baron Haussmann of Melbourne: Just as Haussmann made Paris the world’s first modern city by vandalizing its medieval heritage, so Whelan the Wrecker made Melbourne the post-modern city it is today by gradually tearing down its modern heritage.
In less than 200 years of civic life, Melbourne has gone from being a grid of rough dirt tracks scratched on the rive droite of the Yarra River to a decadent postmodern megalopolis. If the Paris of baron Haussmann was, as Walter Benjamin contends, the ‘Capital of the Nineteenth Century’, then I would argue that Melbourne, rather than being the ‘seventh city of the British Empire’, was in fact ‘la fille aînée du Second Empire’ (‘the Elder Daughter of the Second Empire’). Gold was discovered in the hinterlands of Melbourne in the very year that Napoleon III was dissolving the Second Republic; the city’s rapid modernization commenced apace with the institution of the Second Empire and the modernization of Paris under Haussmann.
To this day, survivals of Second Empire-influenced architecture that have escaped Whelan’s wrecking ball can be found in Melbourne’s streets. For me, what gives the city its enchanting quality is its ‘genteel shabbiness’, the profound sense I get of tripping among modern ruins—vast lacunæ in the landscape of buildings I know to have been there once but which I cannot see, ‘holes’ that have been filled with the architectural wreckage of postmodernity. I love to stroll through suburban streets and see the paint peeling from the rows of poorly maintained terraces with their fractured urns and defaced mascarons and rusty cast-iron awnings. The street art and graffiti that interacts with the battered façades—and which is always changing—are like the layers of moss growing over the toppled columns in a painting by Lorrain.
I wouldn’t ‘re-enchant’ a part of Melbourne; for me, it is enchanting. Just as Baudelaire laments the medieval Paris falling around him to Haussmann’s hammer in “Le Cygne”, for me, it’s the sorrowful vision of what has been lost—and what has miraculously survived—that makes Melbourne surreally ‘marvellous’ and enchanting.
If you could name a street, what name would you choose?
I mentioned the neighbourhood in Fitzroy North which forms the principal location for the forthcoming audio narrative. I have actually renamed one of the streets at the intersection where my protagonist’s apartment is located in the podcast, substituting the surname of one of the original Fitzroy City councillors of 1858 for another who does not have a street to his credit.
But in real life, I think that, if I were to name a street, I would have to have a specific street in mind, and I cannot think of a street in my flâneurial experience whose name I would want to change. That seems too grave a responsibility. The names of streets have a particular incantatory power for me, in life as in my writing. The naming of specific streets in my flâneurial experience, the precise description of them, and the fact that readers can theoretically navigate their own flâneries, street-by-street, from the names and descriptions I provide are distinguishing qualities of my flâneurial literary style.
I have such a vast experience of streets in this country! I travel so far and so often that I can talk to people about specific streets in towns and cities with the offhand candour of a local. And when I factor in the map of Paris and the streets I know there, the streets of my flâneurial experience compose themselves into a map of my cognitive life—a vast city that is ‘Australia’, one in which the actual cities are reduced to suburbs, the towns to neighbourhoods, and the whole continental ‘city’ is linked cheek by jowl to Paris.
One thing I love about Parisian street names is the honour that is done to great people. Le Cépage Montmartrois, for instance, is located in the rue Caulaincourt. M. de Caulaincourt, the duc de Vincence, was a diplomat to Russia during the First Empire. He has a very small cameo in War and Peace. The street bearing his name intersects with the rue Lamarck, whose namesake my high school biology teacher taught me had come up with a discredited theory of evolution in advance of Darwin. At the corner of the cemetery, just before the viaduct, it also intersects with the rue Joseph de Maistre, the arch-conservative philosopher who Baudelaire claimed had taught him—along with Edgar Allan Poe—how to think.
It is often the case, as that last example indicates, that the French give the full name of the honoured person when consecrating a street to him or her. And they are not ashamed to dignify their streets with the names of foreign statespeople:—think of the avenue Georges V, the avenue du Président Wilson, etc. Anyone who has done anything great in the world earns a place in the French patrimony, and if you are a foreigner who has done a specific service to France, you are doubly honoured with a street name. They are a very generous people in that regard.
We don’t name streets after courageous foreigners in Australia, and we are even very niggardly in naming streets after the local heroes we do dignify with that honour. Thus, in this country, you find a lot of surnamed streets that are meaningless to the locals, and even in Melbourne, it is forgotten who Nicholson, Napier, or Learmonth were, even though just about every suburb has its Nicholson Street, its Napier Street, or its Learmonth Street.
If you could move to another city or country tomorrow (with all expenses covered and financial security guaranteed), where would you go if you had to rely solely on your first instinct?
My first instinct is always to return to Paris, to resume my life of oisiveté—of what I call ‘productive indolence’—in the first city of flânerie. I still crave the churning Spectacle of cosmopolitan novelty; I still crave a permanent, floating world of Truth and Beauty such as a writer can only consistently discover with the turning of random streetcorners in Paris.
It’s been sixteen years since that summer and I’m now entering my middle age. The world is a great deal more unsettled than it was then. We are entering an era of volatility that I call, in my flâneurial philosophy, ‘the Noir Place’—conditions of radical ambiguity such as the French knew during the Occupation, the period they call ‘les années noires’—the ‘dark years’, and from which experience of totalizing bleakness and blackness the term and concept of ‘film noir’ originated.
In the years since I was actually in Paris, my knowledge of the French language, literature and culture has only deepened, and I’m gratified that my vlog, The Melbourne Flâneur, is progressively becoming, year after year, one of the most consulted resources on French literature and the culture of flânerie in the English-speaking world. I’m humbled that people in the U.S., England, and Canada—as well as in this country—are looking to the southern-most corner of the globe where Melbourne lies for guidance on Parisian flânerie and to un petit écrivain australien as a reliable authority on the sources in French literature that inform it.
I recently wrote a post on The Melbourne Flâneur called “The Frenchness of Australian life” in which I expressed some of my sense, at mid-life, of coming to terms with the fact that I will probably never see Paris again, and that as I walk the streets of the cities and towns in this country, I carry a virtual Paris, and the chalice of French culture, within me, through and above the Aussie throng. I impose a fundamentally French—a fundamentally Parisian—vision on the streets that I walk.
Hemingway rightly says that Paris is a moveable feast, and that if you are lucky enough to have been there as a young man, then you carry the city with you for the rest of your life. Returned to Australia, and having slowly integrated the lessons of my Parisian experiment in flânerie into an æsthetic philosophy of living that allows me to imaginatively transform the cities, the towns, the country of my actuality into the Paris I am exiled from, to find poetry in the prosaic banality of Australian life, I begin to understand at mid-life that my destiny is perhaps to be the first ‘Franco-Australian writer’.
At the moment, when I share prose poems from The Spleen of Melbourne or the nouvelles démeublées noires from The Melbourne Flâneur with my fellow countrymen, they regard this ‘Parisian vision’ of contemporary Aussie life in Melbourne as some form of ‘surrealism’: they recognize the photographic precision of the places and the people in my words, but the application of a French literary style makes the places and the people ‘new’ to them. Suddenly the banal, prosaic, genteelly shabby local Melbourne scene becomes sophisticated, exotic, European—‘Parisian’, in a word.
Rather like Henry James—himself un grand flâneur—I wonder if my destiny as an homme littéraire is not to effect—as he did from an American angle and perspective—an Australian reconciliation with Continental Europe in my writing, to shift literary English out of the dead grasp of America and down into this hemisphere, to renovate—to ‘renouvelate’—the entire English language by finally reconciling it with French.
There is something pioneering in the character of what I am doing which I have only discovered in the years since Paris: As a literary bridgehead to our collective future as a networkcentric superorganism with a global consciousness, I am seeking the ‘New Life’ for myself and hope to find it in this young country yet ancient landscape of the ‘New World’. A friend of mine in Bellingen told me recently that Hegel says in one of his lectures that behind the rising primacy of America in the early Modernity of the nineteenth century lies the even more distant silhouette of Australia looming up on the historical horizon. Perhaps it is in my destiny as an antipodean flâneur to bridge the Anglosphere and the Francosphere, the New World and the Old in a ‘nouvelle écriture’ that today reads as postmodern and surreal but may one day strikes the eyes and ears of the coming culture as ‘classical’.
(… All that said, in this Jamesian Austral-European literary reconcilation, Italy is also a country that calls to me very deeply—particularly Venice, Florence, and Naples.)
Is there anything else you’d like to share—a poem, a book, or any other thoughts?
It’s perhaps worth sharing my other social media accounts. I have a small presence on X @TheMelbFlaneur, but the place to really interact with me is on AirChat. I see great flâneurial potential in AirChat as a social medium and I’m an active presence there. I’m very open to engaging with people who reach out to me directly for intelligent, good-faith conversations, and to participate in collective sensemaking activities scoping out potential solutions to our common existential problems, so I invite people to chat with me directly on AirChat @themelbflaneur.
And, of course, the very best place to discover more of my work, my philosophy, my books and what I do is on my website:—deankyte.com. You can subscribe to follow The Melbourne Flâneur vlog there, and I try to regularly post substantive articles on French literature, flâneurial cinema, film noir, and other aspects of my æsthetic philosophy of flânerie.
Thank you, Dean!
Walking in Amsterdam With Caroline van Sprang
I met Caroline van Sprang at an & The Table dinner a few weeks before my US visa appointment in Amsterdam. As soon as we sat down, we instantly connected, sharing stories about the cities we’ve lived in and how our surroundings shape our thoughts and the way we love.
I told her how important this particular event was on my calendar because it symbolized the freedom to visit and experience a place that had always been on my mind—a place that had felt out of reach for so long. Caroline asked if I’d like to celebrate together after my appointment, and I was so touched by her thoughtfulness.
We met again a few weeks later, just half an hour after I received the news that my US visa was approved, and we enjoyed a slow, delicious lunch at Carmen in Amsterdam. During our conversation, I was captivated by her awareness, her intellect, and the warmth she carries within her. For all of these reasons, and more, I’m grateful and excited to share this interview with her below.
Hi, Caroline! Please tell us a bit about yourself and any creative projects that you are passionate about.
Caroline. 25. Half German, half Dutch. Curious. Ambitious. Passionate. Full of dreams. Nostalgic and melancholic. Aware.
Community is what I care about most. Bringing people together and feeding off each other’s energy. That’s why I host gatherings—tables for women who have yet to meet. Our conversation topics vary: friendship, family, community, freelancing, and figuring out the next steps in life.
The latter is on my mind. I’m treating it as a little quarter-life crisis. For me, it’s about wanting more—something significant. Is that an illusion? You tell me.
I’m a dreamer. I always have been.
But it’s only recently that I’ve met people who have turned their dreams into reality and motivated me to do the same. There it is: the power of people and interaction. Community. We feed each other.
Together with my dear friend Sophie Saddington, I host a book and dinner club in Amsterdam. We’ve done some classics—of which I’ve read none. I do the cooking anyway; she asks the sophisticated questions. Our next book is on food—my pick. Understandably, I’ve been consuming it like a tingling mango sorbet on a hot summer evening.
Which cities bring you deep joy while walking?
Every city has its own charms. While in Berlin, the people are so interesting to watch that it doesn’t really matter what your surroundings are. Oh, but avoid it in winter! I found Rome so aesthetically pleasing that walking was all I did—well, I ate a lot of lobster too. I found Madrid very beautiful as well! I guess more so than Barcelona. At the end of the day, it’s about the company you walk with, right?
I’m a big biker. My last visit to Paris was all about biking, and in Amsterdam, I mainly use my bike too. It’s fast; images fly by, and in daily life, it’s convenient.
Lately, I’ve been walking to my office instead of rushing there by bike. Surprisingly—or maybe logically—I’ve made so much eye contact with people. It’s something I never really thought about before! There’s a form of awareness in walking that isn’t there in cycling, taking in every step of the road while going somewhere—or just wandering. I’m very pleased to have discovered that.
One of the things I look forward to when I start dating again—whenever that may be—is walking side by side, holding hands. Doing so is such an act of love; matching paces, pointing out things you want the other to see. It’s like making love to one another while inviting your surroundings to join in. A trio?!
Gosh, hopefully, I don’t sound weird!
If you could bottle Amsterdam into an idea or a feeling, what would that idea/feeling be?
I’ve left this question open for a long time. I don’t have an answer.
My relationship with the city has been complicated for such a long time. Others love it here; it’s a capital city known all over the world. They look at me with longing whenever I mention that the city famous for its canals is my home. The city has something promising—open and free. We’ve got pride, loads of weed, and ladies in the red-light district.
But diving deeper, diving local, the city is losing its charm. Locals have had to leave due to expensive living costs. Whoever is to blame for that—including me—hasn’t been giving back enough. Cities thrive by taking and adding something to the table. Right now, there are only legs left; no board, no food.
So maybe, deception then? I slept badly. Maybe that’s why my answer is so depressing.
What places do you love in Amsterdam?
My friends’ places. The way you live says a lot about you.
I started race biking recently, riding through areas I’ve never seen before. A lot of nature—cows, horses, the water. It’s wonderful.
The cinema and I are close. I go a lot, mainly watching fiction. By immersing myself in it, I get a taste of escape.
What’s the best meal you had in Amsterdam?
What makes a meal good? Is it the company, the food itself, or the mood while chewing?
It must have been a meal I had when I was in love for the first time. Or, wait. The best ones were those I wasn’t able to eat—my stomach filled with butterflies.
How would you define your relationship with Berlin vs. the one with Amsterdam?
That is one hell of a question.
Berlin feels like home. When visiting Frideau—the neighborhood I grew up in—a warm sense of belonging starts filling up all the emptiness that Amsterdam has created. Or maybe it’s Almere—the small, modern city I moved to after leaving the German capital.
My little sister called me the other day. In the midst of switching schools, she visited Charlottenburg, the neighborhood in Berlin where she grew up. “My body relaxed; this is my Kiez. You know what I mean, Line?” I knew what she meant. I left Berlin naïve—I was a kid. Amsterdam changed that. It made me a woman, touched and aware. Conscious of the bad.
Berlin makes me want to have children; Amsterdam does not. Berlin makes me feel invisible; Amsterdam makes me feel too seen.
Why not move?
What places in the world that you visited so far felt the most intellectually nourishing?
This one made me think for days.
Intellectually, like studies? I did those in Amsterdam.
But if you ask me about my senses being nourished, I’d choose Italy. They have style over there—the richness in flavor, in art, in colors, and in architecture. To me, that is nourishment.
If you could move tomorrow to a different city, anywhere in the world, where would you go?
Paris. Don’t ask me to elaborate. I think all of my life-fears would just vanish in the beauty and bustle.
…Coming back to this two days later, I changed my mind. No cities for me. I want silence. Give me Tuscany; nature and calmness.
Anything else that you would like to add? A story, a memory, a note for readers.
When I was eighteen and had absolutely no clue about anything, I traveled to Bali. That’s the thing everyone does when feeling lost, right?
Well, and so I went, thinking I would reinvent myself—become someone who is content, enlightened. I forgot that I had taken myself with me. The thrill of being somewhere new doesn’t last beyond your sense of self-worth.
Whenever I pack my bag nowadays, I make sure that I’m aware of the fact that I’m packing myself, just as I am. A new place, a different environment, can bring out something exciting in me—a wave of naïve energy—but it’s always me experiencing that.
P.S. In my handbag, there’s always a bit of space left for my alter ego.
Thank you, Caroline!
Walking in Vilnius, Walking in Rome with Kerry Kubilius
Today I am sharing an interview that I conducted with my friend, Kerry Kubilius. I met Kerry in October, in Spain, during an EU fellowship for women entrepreneurs. We were both part of the Aranda de Duero cohort, living for one month in the Julia Hotel.
I was immediately drawn to Kerry's observational nature, her capacity to enjoy the fine things in life, and her ability to truly listen. For those reasons and many more, I was very keen to ask her a few questions about the cities that she enjoys to explore on foot.
Hi, Kerry, thank you for taking some time to answer these questions for The Flâneurs Project! Please tell us a bit about yourself and any creative projects that you are working on.
I’m an American living in Vilnius, Lithuania. I grew up in the Midwest, but I developed an interest in the region of Eastern Europe early and cultivated it throughout my education and career, so eventually moving to Vilnius as a person of Lithuanian heritage felt natural.
One project I’m currently excited about it is the relaunch of my discussion group series, which seeks to talk about topics relevant to our time and humanity and attract people who are curious, open-minded, and interested in learning and self-development.
How do you feel exploring Rome on foot in comparison to Vilnius?
I’m drawn to cities I can walk, and both Rome and Vilnius are eminently walkable, but it’s their size that’s different. Vilnius, has a relatively compact area to explore on foot. In Rome, I found myself wondering how many months or years it would take to truly discover every walkable nook and cranny. Both places have the benefit of being flat, at least in the center, with sidewalks present if not always wide enough for need.
What is your favourite street / area in Rome and why?
Rome unfolds joyful surprises around every corner, from a cheerful lemon tree in an enameled pot to ancient ruins standing as a testament to history to squares harmonious in their architecture to mosaiced basilicas glittering with artistry. And each change with the light, whether morning, afternoon, or the golden hour before sunset.
I very much enjoyed strolls through the Villa Borghese Gardens, where Villa Borghese keeps safe the completely transcendent Bernini sculptures. Just being in proximity to them inspires awe.Rome
What café or restaurant did you visit the most often in Rome?
A little restaurant, all of 12 tables, operated near the apartment I was renting. When I sat at the bar, I could see through the windows to the kitchen the big batches of beautiful, fresh potato chips the cooks would fry up.
I’d order burrata, a side of chips, and a glass of lovely red wine, and I was moved to gratitude for such perfection in simplicity. The sublime crunch, the balanced saltiness of those chips, still warm from the fryer!
The next year I visited, the restaurant had changed ownership and the chips were gone from the menu. It felt like trying to visit a friend who you’ve suddenly discovered has moved to an unknown address.
Please share a serendipitous moment from a walk in Rome.
This story is more mysterious than serendipitous, but it does highlight the benefits of walking.
And I did walk everywhere while in Rome. My usual pattern was to choose a destination and use Google maps to discover what potential sights I could see along the way. One day, I was visiting the House of Owls, a mid-19th-century house decorated with Art Nouveau elements. My walk took me past a walled enclosure. Out of curiosity, I followed the wall until I found the gate standing closed. Inside was a well-groomed garden and the implication of a house set back from the road, but the general sense was one of deep and quiet privacy.
My later research revealed that inside that enclosure was the house of a prince, and the house had not been open to photographers since in the 1970s. It was not a “sight” per se, but it certainly tempted the imagination. Was the old prince tottering around inside? Did he have any family? What will eventually happen to the house and grounds?
Please share a story of a stranger that you met or passed by on the streets and why that moment stayed with you until now.
I was about to cross a busy street in the Prati area of Rome. As a woman was in the middle of crossing, the walk light turned red. A car stopped and honked at her, completely unjustified – all the other cars were still stopped. She halted in her tracks, looked the driver in the eye, and gave him the middle finger for a beat of five. She was not going to be bullied, and she was not going to apologize.
Whenever someone tells us to move out of the way, that they’re more important or more powerful, we should all channel that woman.
What is your personal definition of the flâneur / flâneuse?
A flâneuse is someone curious and keen on observation who takes joy in the small gifts of her surroundings. She’s interested in feeling the rhythm of the place she’s in and understanding its character with an unhurried approach.
In what area in Rome or Vilnius did you not feel safe?
I’ve honestly not felt unsafe in any particular area of either city. However, I do feel unsafe having to share pedestrian ways with bikes and electric scooters. In some seasons, taking a walk feels risky. I really feel for older adults, children, and anyone with mobility impairments, for which the risk of collision is greater and potentially more damaging.
What part of Vilnius would you like to re-enchant and why?
I would like to re-enchant the old town area of Vilnius. During one of my first years here, I turned the corner and a bunch of Napoleonic soldiers poured out of the back of a van as a part of a movie shoot. I avoid the chaos and the prices of the old town area for the most part these days, so I miss such encounters.
If you could name a street – what name would you choose for that street?
Let’s live on streets named for concepts and qualities that uplift us and give us hope: Possibility Lane, Heartfelt Way.
If you could move to another city tomorrow (and have every expense covered, job security, a new home) what city would you choose, if you had to go with your first gut instinct?
I would like to say Rome – and I know well that visiting a place is different than living in it – but right now, for today, that’s what I’ll say. The answer could be different tomorrow or one year from now. Maybe I’ll live in an estate in the middle of the city enclosed by walls with a chef who makes me fresh, perfectly seasoned potato chips and a gate that is always open to friends not afraid to give the middle finger to anyone trying to push them around.
Walking in Chandigarh with Vinish Garg
I connected with Vinish online through Twitter DMs. We both share a passion for urban design and urban narratives, so I'm delighted to feature an interview with him on The Flâneurs Project.
Hi Vinish! Please tell us a bit about yourself, where do you live now, where have you lived before, and about any creative projects that you are passionate about.
I am Vinish Garg, a digital products consultant with many years of experience. I live in India's most beautiful city—Chandigarh. I grew up in Punjab, but when I moved to Chandigarh at the age of twelve, it transformed my perspective on life: the structure, merit, and how a city functions as a system of many sub-systems.
During high school, I studied science, and in college, I pursued literature, computer science, and journalism. These diverse fields revealed to me many intersections between digital products and real life. For instance, navigating a website to find information is similar to locating a person or specific information within a physical building. Additionally, the courage and timing required in journalism can be directly applied to product and design leadership roles.
I aim to bring a more holistic, systematized, and people-centric approach to our digital processes. This involves prioritizing message design and information design models first, then building technology to scale and amplify the collective message and intent.
One of my passion projects is interviewing people; I have previously run a series of interviews and am currently working on a new project called Around. Around is a digital service designed to support individuals through the bereavement journey, helping them build memories and engage in deep, thoughtful conversations. It also assists in finding vendors for grief-related services, legal matters, funerals, and post-life planning tools.
In conjunction with this project, I am running a series of interviews where I invite industry experts to share their thoughts on the challenges and opportunities in deathcare and bereavement. Here is the first episode of the series.
What is your favorite street / area in Chandigarh and why?
Chandigarh has many beautiful streets, and I love walking along many of them. My most immersive walking experience is on Jan Marg, from Sector 16, across from Sector 17, and then in Sector 10, across from Sector 9.
This road has an exclusive and beautiful walking zone parallel to the main road. When I am in Sector 16, I have the Rose Garden on one side and Sector 17 on the other. The greenery makes it an even more charming experience—the vastness of the space, the colors, and the views all around make me forget about paying bills, buying my son's shoes, or renewing a subscription.
I feel connected to nature's network, like an ecologist.
It's as if I am a train slowly moving on the rails, with multiple eyes watching the outside world through its many windows.
It feels like there are no boundaries, no constraints, and no points of stopping.
What café and restaurant have you visited the most often in Chandigarh?
Since I do not consume alcohol in any form, I have visited a few coffee shops in the city. The one I frequent most often is Cafe Coffee Day in Sector 9, Panchkula.
There is ample space for car parking and a wide corridor to walk through before entering the café. It’s less about the coffee and more about the kind of audience it attracts. Sometimes I see two designers or engineers discussing a project, a couple of students working on an architecture model, a journalist interviewing someone on the phone, an elderly couple enjoying their coffee, a realtor closing a property deal, or someone just sitting alone. I can observe a diverse crowd within a few minutes, sometimes overhearing their conversations, noting their food choices, their vocabulary and etiquette, and their body language when someone else joins their table.
I love the smell of everything in this café. As for the coffee, I enjoy their Dark Frappe, accompanied by spinach and corn garlic bread.
Please share a serendipitous moment from a walk.
While I was in college, I used public transport and noticed that my city bus often took the route via Jan Marg. One time, a classmate who lived near my house suggested we try cycling to college—it was almost 4 miles from our homes.
I agreed, and while cycling on Jan Marg one day, I stopped and suggested we walk with our bikes alongside us. We did, and it became a daily practice. We would cycle from home and then walk along this stretch, sometimes alone if either of us were absent for any reason.
I was sixteen at the time, and while my classmate was immersed in calculus, Faraday's laws, or hydrocarbons even on the walks, I was captivated by the urban design, the curves in the landscaping, the lawn mowing machines, the grids and navigation, the squirrels, and sometimes the dew drops.
Sometimes it was foggy, or bright, sunny, and sweaty, or even drizzling—we experienced it all, observing people enjoying crossing the chasm in every situation.
What city in the world brings you joy whilst walking?
I love Helsinki, Prague, and Copenhagen. There's an untouched beauty to Europe that draws me, and I'd love to wander those streets. Beyond Europe, Wellington or Christchurch in New Zealand also hold appeal.
These cities evoke a sense of tranquility, as if one could move about freely without the weight of deadlines. They are clean, pedestrian-friendly, and seamlessly blend with nature while maintaining their distinct character and themes, whether it be art, colors, design, interactions, or the intricate sub-systems within their urban ecosystems.
When I speak of nature, space, or theme, it encompasses architecture as well. I admire the harmony present in these cities.
What is your personal definition of the flâneur / flâneuse?
A flâneur makes me feel like a student of the environment, which involves studying our collective life and interconnected systems.
We learn by observing how someone makes way for the elderly, crosses a road, crushes dry leaves with their shoe, or how a child splashes in a small pond of water when it rains. I appreciate how a girl walks past a vendor without responding to their calls to buy something, or how people adjust their steps when moving from larger tiles to smaller ones, sometimes holding hands. Everything provides insight into their minds.
A walk offers a blank canvas for inspiration and pattern-finding, and sometimes even meaning.
Often, it reminds us of our past—whether it's writing poetry, doing pottery, scaling mountains, diving into pools with friends, or hiding in the library. Or the moments spent with our parents or grandparents who are no longer with us. It encourages internal expression.
I believe that regular walks on the right streets can help us understand the people around us and the world better. It uplifts our spirits.
Walking is a profound education, and I wish we could receive certificates that go beyond our Fitbit targets—meaningful rewards for walking alone or walking with someone, even in silence.
What part of Chandigarh would you like to re-enchant and why?
Chandigarh's fundamental character has remained relatively unchanged over the past three or four decades. Naturally, the city adapts to new challenges posed by a growing population, an exponential increase in the number of cars, and the evolving expectations of its citizens, such as the demand for digitally-centered governance touchpoints. However, the city administration has been judicious, intelligent, and committed to preserving its core character and theme.
I aspire to restore the equilibrium between walking zones, cycling paths, and areas for cars. The city should prioritize long-term planning by investing in more car-free zones and creating more cycle-friendly and pedestrian-friendly areas, akin to what we see in Amsterdam, Copenhagen, and various other European countries. I am not advocating for a ban on cars in the city, but we can certainly draw inspiration from ideas presented in this The Guardian story. Furthermore, it would be beneficial if town planners are cognizant of the historical context of street designs and urban planning, considering factors related to commuting, pedestrian pathways, and vehicular traffic.
As an addition to the wishlist, it would be wonderful to have small mobile corners serving as public libraries for students, featuring books exclusively focused on urban design and civic planning. For instance, "A City is Not a Computer" by Shannon Mattern, among others, could be included. Twenty years ago, walking through Sector Seventeen in the city evoked a sense of art and culture; however, today, it has become more digitally-oriented. I wish we could draw inspiration from Helsinki to strike a delicate balance between modern art and technology.
If you could name a street, what name would you choose?
I would rename a street to Le Melange—a fusion of Le Corbusier's city and a blend representing the cross-cultural footprints of the city's character, art, and technology, in a few pre-identified zones. This street should serve as a global reference.
At this stage, I'm not entirely certain, but I may consider borrowing your concept (with proper credits, of course) for my service—Around, to organize solitary walks or companionship walks for survivors and the bereaved. It could potentially turn out to be quite lovely.
If you could move to another city tomorrow (and have every expense covered, job security, a new home) what city would you choose, if you had to go with your first gut instinct?
Amsterdam—it's a city of completeness. If you're aware of any flaws or gaps in the city, that's precisely what contributes to its sense of entirety. Here, completeness signifies wholeness.
What places do you crave when you're visiting a new city?
The most important aspect is to discover an open street café, offering an outdoor dining experience where I can enjoy food while observing people walking by or cycling around. Here's a related and intriguing story.
Imagine a place bustling with people, where you're relishing your meal under the open sky, with no immediate walls enclosing you.
Additionally, I relish visiting their university—you glean profound insights into a city and its culture by observing its students as they navigate through libraries, parks, and food establishments.
A university serves as a captivating intersection where the city's present meets its aspirations, shaping the students' journey forward. The scent of books, grass, tea, and the essence of achievement make it a truly distinctive space, especially for newcomers to the city.
Vinish wrote me this note and asked me this question:
I love this project and let us say that after doing fifty or a hundred posts, you want to stop or to take a break. What you would like to feel at that time, thinking of the possible gains or takeaways or the outcomes of this project. How would you describe that feeling. If I ask you to make a drawing, what shape will you draw to answer that question. You can use an image or illustration to support your answer.
My answer to his question:
After fifty posts, I hope to gain more clarity about the direction of this project. Right now, it feels like an almost obsessive process of collecting and publishing personal urban stories, with the main goal of connecting flâneurs through these narratives.
I imagine that once I hit the fifty or hundred post mark, I'll feel more connected to global urban stories and the unique ways we experience our cities and our lives.
Thank you, Vinish, for sharing your stories with us!
Walking in Basel with Christoph Hess
I met Christoph Hess online but I never had the opportunity to meet him in person. This will change in two months when he will join me and other flâneurs in The Hague for The Walk & Talk weekend getaway. I was always curious about his favourite places in Basel and around the world, so I am very happy to share his answers below.
Please tell us a bit about yourself, where do you live now, where have you lived before, and about any creative projects that you are currently working on.
I live in Basel now, after growing up in Zürich. I also lived in Bern and Lucerne. During my studies I spent time abroad in London and Nairobi.
A creative project I work on every day is cooking – maybe because my mother is from the Ticino region where I believe food has a higher priority than elsewhere in Switzerland.
What is your favourite street / area in Basel and why?
Rheingasse on the Kleinbasel side: it's a historic, multicultural street located right next to the Rhine.
What café and restaurant have you visited the most often in your city?
Please share a serendipitous moment from a walk.
When I discovered a bookshop called Müller Palermo in Kleinbasel (run by a lady called Iris Müller) – right after planning a trip to Palermo.
What city brings you joy whilst walking?
Palermo.
Is there a city that you terribly miss?
San Sebastian.
What places do you crave when you're visiting a new city?
I always have Arthur Miller's quote in mind:
"A good newspaper is a nation talking to itself."
So I like to spend time where newspapers are sold and read (ideally in languages that I understand) to dive into the current joys and challenges of a city.
What is your personal definition of the flâneur / flâneuse?
A person who aligns a moving body with thoughts that are on the move as well.
What part of Basel would you like to re-enchant and why?
There might be parts of the city below today's surface which date back to the earthquake in 1356.
If you could name a street, what name would you choose?
There are too many streets with names of men in Basel. Here is an idea: Let's name a street after a baby girl who will be born on January 1st, 2025 and make this street a place for debates about the future.
If you could move to another city tomorrow (and have every expense covered, job security, a new home), what city would you choose?
Taipei because it might soon face the same sad destiny as Hong Hong when China moves forward with its plans.
Anything else to share?
See you soon in The Hague! 😄
Thank you, Christoph! So happy that you will join us in The Hague this summer!
Walking in Vienna with Olga Yakimenko
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.
Please tell us a bit about yourself, where do you live now, where have you lived before, and about any creative projects that you are passionate about.
I was born in a country that no longer exists (USSR, now Ukraine), already a foreigner with my Russian parents, and was to remain a foreigner for the rest of my life: I moved to Cyprus at an early age, then moved to Russia at 12 (where I technically spoke the language, but otherwise stuck out) until going to Austria for a couple of years as a student in my late teens. After Austria, I returned to Moscow to study design, worked as a newspaper correspondent in the arts and culture section, and then completed my degree in the United Kingdom. I stayed there for a decade in spite of spending almost all of those years in dehumanising conflict with the Home Office, and finally moved to Vienna a month before Brexit was finalized in January 2021.
Throughout this time, I learned about art and retrained as a film-maker, working as an editor, videographer, producer and director. Things got weird in 2020 during the pandemic, when I began paying attention to narrative mechanics and the perception of vision and sound.
Having spent time working in science communications, I worked on cultivating my own theories of how people respond to stories, and resolved to create work that had a positive impact on audiences. At the moment, I am developing my first feature film: a sci-fi neo-noir about love, death, and consciousness set in modern-day Vienna.
What is your favorite street / area in Vienna and why?
I set up home in Vienna in close proximity to 2 places I cared about: the Danube river, and Prater Park (largest park in the city; after being used as royal hunting ground in 1560, it was made accessible to the public in 1766, although hunting was not nixed until 1920). I frequently go on long walks and runs to think, feed crows, and watch water ripples.
What café and restaurant have you visited the most often in your city?
I'm most fond of 2 restaurants: a local joint named brösl ("crumbs") where they serve local and seasonal food (and where one can sit in the quiet street on warm days; such a pleasure!), and Café Landtmann, where I sometimes go to meet with family (they have very nice cake, and allegedly somewhat fancy clientele, although I wouldn't know).
Please share a serendipitous moment from a walk.
I once performed a magic ritual with a friend in Hampstead Heath on my 35th birthday, the details of which cannot be shared. :-)
What city brings you deep joy whilst walking?
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. Thankfully, despite believing that I deserve to die, I have enough life in me for three people, and so for me it is ideal to be in a place that is less alive than me. But that is because I have work to do. If I did not, I'd feel differently.
What is your personal definition of the flâneur / flâneuse?
I do not have one! But I suppose I see the flâneur as a kind of hyperchameleon – taking on the colours and contours of the areas that she walks on and through.
What part of the city you live in would you like to re-enchant and why?
I regularly re-enchant Prater, and Danube Island as I walk through them. One small daydream I nurse is to one day create strange objects in the woods so that young people may find them, and speculate on their mysterious nature. The world is ambiguous and strange and forever mysterious – but this mystery requires constant renewal, conscious effort on the part of the people who recognize its importance.
Unfortunately it appears that despite Vienna's glamorous reputation, not very many efforts have been made to take note of its older, more eldritch customs; this is probably in great part due to the history of its architecture (large parts of the city were established at certain points, punctuating the history, with not much else happening in the few gaps that are left). I see ghosts everywhere I go, but not enough. Give me more spirits! Who haunts where?
Danube Island is a recent construction: it is the result of a major re-working of the city from the 1970s, when a canal was dug through Vienna out of flood-related concerns. The displaced earth was used to create a long, skinny island in the Danube... and I want this island to be much, much more magical than it is. I've been feeding crows there as well as in Prater, so perhaps my crow army will assist me in this task one day...
If you could name a street, what name would you choose?
Hello!
If you could move to another city tomorrow (and have every expense covered, job security, a new home) what city would you choose, if you had to go with your first gut instinct?
Gosh... "London" is a tempting response, given the main issue of living there is the nosebleed prices. But I'll be a little more creative and choose San Francisco, because I think that's where many of "my people" may be found. I'm lonely here. Vienna (and Austria more generally) pushes weird people out like the body rids fingers of splinters – they are foreign materials. Once I run out of beautiful work to do, I don't know what I'll do with myself.
Thank you, Olga! I cannot wait to see you again in person in The Hague in July and to plan a San Francisco 🇺🇸 trip with you!
Walking in Philadelphia with Helena Jaramillo
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.
Please tell us a bit about yourself, where do you live now, where have you lived before, and about any creative projects that you are passionate about.
I'm Helena Jaramillo, a software designer currently living in Philadelphia, and the co-founder of a tool called PamPam that helps people make and share maps and guides.
I'm originally from Ecuador and have called many cities home: Syracuse, NYC , San Francisco, Boulder, Zurich, London, Quito and Guayaquil. In the past, I also made a website for wandering called wanderprompts.com.
What is your favorite street / area in the city that you live in and why?
In Philadelphia, my favorite route to walk is to go up from south to north, up the 9th street market, past Queen Village up to Society Hill. 9th street market is a market street with Mexican and Italian vendors, where you'll see every kind of person.
Then, in Queen Village, you can pick up a record, go to a shop or grab a beer. And then up in Society Hill with houses from the 1700s and tiny cobblestone streets. It feels like walking through multiple generations in one afternoon.
What café and restaurant have you visited the most often in your city?
There's a restaurant near my house in Philadelphia that we lovingly call "the home pub". That's not the actual name, but it's a place where you can just be comfortable but also have a great plate of mussels and glass of wine or beer. It's cozy and dark on the inside with old timey Italian American photos, and in the summer time you can sit outside and just relax. It faces this pretty ugly parking lot and supermarket, but it doesn't really matter. It's just unpretentious good food and that's what I need most.
Please share a serendipitous moment from a walk.
When I was a teenager in Boulder, Colorado , I'd walk about a mile to school. There was a pretty large hill going up to the school, and right at the top there was a beautiful view of the mountains and a pond below. I remember once, just as I was arriving at school, a song I liked very much came on, something like "New Slang" by The Shins.
It was very cinematic and I just layed down on the hill in the grass and enjoyed my post-walk moment.
What city brings you deep joy whilst walking?
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.
What is your personal definition of the flâneur / flâneuse?
For me, being a flâneur is about taking your time. Taking your time to decide to go for a walk, and then being open to being slow, stopping, turning.
The slower your walk, the more disruptions and tangets it has, the closer you are to being a flâneur.
What part of the city you live in would you like to re-enchant and why?
Like many other cities, Philadelphia gets uncomfortably hot in the summertime, and it desperately needs more places to cool off. It's not a specific part of the city, but I'd love to make sure all the public pools were made available to everyone.
If you could move to another city tomorrow (and have every expense covered, job security, a new home) what city would you choose, if you had to go with your first gut instinct?
Right now, I'll pick Mexico City. I haven't visited yet, but I'd love to go. It looks beautiful, I'm sure the food is amazing, and I'd love to be somewhere where I could speak Spanish again.
Thank you, Helena! I hope to meet you soon in person in Philly!
You can follow Helena on Twitter and create a map of a walking experience with PamPam here.
Walking in Austin with Catherine Woodiwiss
I'm beyond excited to finally feature my friend Catherine's urban stories on The Flâneurs Project. I asked her a few questions related to her walking experience in Austin, the city in which she currently lives. Austin will most likely be my first US city to (ever) visit, sometime in October this year, so I already know that I will fall in love with it.
Hi, Catherine! Thank you for taking some time to answer (in writing) these questions for The Flâneurs Project!
Please tell us a bit about yourself, where do you live now, where have you lived before, and about any creative projects that you are passionate about.
Hello! I love this project — I’m excited to contribute to it. I call Austin, TX home … I was born in North Carolina, raised in Illinois, went to undergrad in Maine, and spent a decade in DC, with shorter stints in Romania, Ireland, Oregon, South Carolina, and the Czech Republic along the way.
I’m building the Social Healing Project, a project for people healing from major loss. We can’t heal from major upheavals alone, and yet our systems and social norms are set up as if this is the case. Our “so obvious, it’s invisible” thesis is that healing is relational. We gather scientists, artists, and designers to help develop healing resources, then invite in and iterate on those resources with a broader public of participants.
I’m also helping to build Liminal Learning, a program and methodology for young people aimed at helping them explore and develop lives of meaning and purpose. I host recurring gatherings for creative folks in Austin; I act and sing and play fiddle; and I write whenever I can.
What is your favorite street / area in Austin and why?
I live in East Austin, my favorite part of town — there’s such a vibrant sense of things happening here, and you can really see multiple generations of Austin in the architecture. There’s a long history of blues and jazz in this part of town, and while it’s gone through many cycles of gentrification, there are still some beautiful historic sites, beloved hole-in-the-wall music venues, walking trails, and lots of neighborhood art pop-ups and festivals.
My favorite street is probably a little stretch of 12th, from Hillside Farmacy past Nickel City and Try Hard along to Vintage Wine & Books. But it’s hard to really pick a favorite because there are so many micro-streets like this scattered throughout the city, which is otherwise residential and kind of sleepy.
A friend recently compared Austin to a farm-to-table restaurant where all the best ingredients are scattered across a huge field and you have to slowly collect them yourself. Everything is here to make for an amazing neighborhood experience … it’s just that none of the really great stuff is together in the same place!
What cafés and restaurants have you visited the most often in Austin?
I’m in a season where I have a lot of autonomy over my time and where I do my work, so I love finding spots to suit particular creative and deepwork moods.
For sketching, journaling, and dreaming, I go to Swedish Hill (temporarily closed — bad news for my dreams). For reading, Vintage or First Light. For writing, Palomino. For day-job work, Try Hard, Civil Goat, or Hanks. For switching into deepwork on my purpose projects, a booth at Love Supreme (taking over from my previous go-to, Salty Sow). For a cocktail with friends, Ah Sing Den or Honeymoon. For co-working/conversational brunch with collaborators on the weekends, Bouldin Creek Cafe, Aba, or Casa de Luz.
First place I take every visitor to town: Patrizi’s. Second place I take every visitor: Este, Loro, Birdie’s, or Licha’s.
Please share a serendipitous moment from a walk in Austin or any other US city.
I used to live in Washington DC, which is scattered with roundabouts — traffic circles randomly dropped onto the rigid city grid, that suddenly slingshot you around to a new street or neighborhood on a different angle. They’re obnoxious to navigate, but their symbolism is pretty lovely … a friend & I started an experience design company years ago on this metaphor! So, I’m big on serendipity, and new connections born of inconvenient interruption.
Unfortunately…that doesn’t happen super often in most US cities, Austin among them. We are built for cars, which means serendipitous-encounter-by-walking just doesn’t happen that often. I’m a big fan of looking for it wherever I can, in more walking-friendly cities like New York and New Orleans.
That said, I walk the nature trail by my house every morning, and I’ve started walking it in the evenings, too. I love how every detail of the gardens and trees, bugs and wild animals, wind and light changes depending on season and time of day.
I walked on this trail alllll the time during 2020, and once I came across a very cute man walking barefoot, with his dog, and a manuscript sticking out of his back pocket. Obviously I made up an excuse to say hi and we ended up walking the trail together a few more times after that. He’s now lost to the mists of that time … I wonder if I’ll ever encounter him again.
What is your personal definition of the flâneur / flâneuse?
To me, the flâneuse is the perpetually-curious, the lovingly-observant … wandering through collections of human life and out into the wider world, whether digital or physical — open and responsive to life but emboldened with courage and sense of self.
An observer, a collector, a student, a curator, a messenger, a teller-of-tales!
In what city in the US did you not feel safe?
I’ve mostly felt safe in every city. In one house in DC, we’d sometimes hear gunshots in our back alley; someone was stabbed to death down the street the night we moved in. That was a little unsettling. Still, the neighborhood was friendly and as long as we didn’t walk alone after nightfall, it felt safe most of the time. And I loved the other places I lived in while there!
What part of Austin would you like to re-enchant and why?
Rainey Street. It’s long been a party street but (if I remember this right? It’s been a while) it used to be lined with beautiful old houses converted into bars, many of which have now been revamped into the “samey” Austin aesthetic — picnic tables, astroturf, generically trendy hotel lobby, generically themed party bar. We can’t bring the historic architecture back but we could re-enchant it into something much more beautiful, grounded, unique, contextual, walkable, and neighbors-friendly!
If you could name a street, what name would you choose?
There are some good efforts to rename Austin streets that were named for Confederate generals and pro-slavery politicians. I’d love to name a street after Molly Ivins, famed no-holds-barred (and wickedly funny) Austin journalist.
If you could move to another city tomorrow (and have every expense covered, job security, a new home) what city would you choose, if you had to go with your first gut instinct?
Two first gut instincts! I love Istanbul. My best serendipitous encounters have happened there, and I’ve always wanted to spend more time exploring it. Istanbul in some ways is the total opposite to Austin — to me, Austin has safety and free mobility and big spacious skies and beautiful weather, but very little walkability and few places to wander and be enchanted; Istanbul is the MOST beautifully enchanted labyrinthine city to wander through but as a woman it feels much less safe and freely mobile, especially on my own. Still, it’d be amazing to do it for a while.
Other gut instinct? London. I know, people are strongly divided on this city — but every time I’ve visited, I’ve found new places to love about it, and if all my expenses (!!) are paid for? That’s the spot. I could spent a few years getting lost in it, easy.
Thank you, Catherine! If you want me to share a social media page or a website, please share your links below:
@chwoodiwiss (Twitter & Insta)| catherinehwoodiwiss.com
Walking in New York, Walking in Amsterdam
I met Sumanth in person in Amsterdam in 2023. We walked aimlessly for a while until we sat on a bench and Sumanth started sketching a building that we were both facing. I was very inspired by his drawings and the habit of carrying around a notebook to capture the urban moments that we want to remember.
Some weeks ago I sent him a few questions that I always wanted to ask him about New York, the city he currently lives in, and his walking experience in Amsterdam. His written answers are shared below.
Hi, Sumanth! Thank you for taking some time to answer these questions for The Flâneurs Project! Please tell us a bit about yourself and about any creative projects that you are passionate about.
My name is Sumanth. I’ve lived in New York City for over 8 years. I grew up in India. My parents moved a lot so I’ve been in a fair number of cities, but I spent most years of my childhood in Pune and Hyderabad. I also spent a year working in Delhi after college.
I’m a software engineer by trade but am always busy with music or creative coding projects when I have the time. I’ve been performing and releasing music as Reckoner for nearly a decade now. As a kid, I sketched a lot. The habit faded away with age, but I’m returning to it by keeping a sketchbook and being as prolific as I can be.
What is your favorite street / area in New York and why?
It keeps changing. Currently, it’s Vanderbilt Ave in the Prospect Heights neighborhood of Brooklyn. A few of my friends live there, which means I’m in the area very often. Some of my current favorite restaurants are in that area too, and all of it is very close to the public library and Prospect Park.
Also, I recently discovered a used bookstore on that street that’s open until 11pm – I often wander in after dinner. It’s really nice being in a bookstore that late.
What café or restaurant have you visited the most often in New York?
I’ve been a sucker for diners for the longest time. In a city where time is expensive, diners offer the luxury to linger and catch up. There are some old friends that I only ever meet at diners these days; it affords us the hours we need for catching up. I also stop by at diners to decompress after a particularly stimulating social event like a big party or a show I needed to play at. They are a simple, tranquil and beautiful place. Not at brunch though – diners during brunch is a wild place.
More recently, I’ve been visiting this Guatemalan cafe in my neighborhood called Ix. They have great hot chocolate and soup, which is perfect in the cold weather. I’ve also unwittingly formed the tradition of dropping by there for soup every time I’m back from a trip. The waiters and all the staff know me personally. I’ve also made a couple of friends there. It’s lovely.
What do you miss about walking in Amsterdam / The Netherlands?
I remember really liking the tile work on the sidewalks of Amsterdam. There was also something pleasant about walking through narrow streets, in the cozy protection of buildings flanking me on either side.
Amsterdam is a cute, small city – mindlessly walking for a while like a New Yorker can get you really far. It’s gratifying when that happens.
What city brings you deep joy whilst walking?
I’m not really sure, and I want to avoid thinking about it in order to keep it that way. Paradoxically, the reason I enjoy walking is, to a good extent, that it liberates me from the need to feel joy or pleasure or anything of that sort at all. On a walk, I can just be; I can keep it moving. There is an odd comfort in allowing my body to operate on autopilot and take me somewhere without having to put much thought or emotion into it. I’ve tried sitting down to meditate, and walking feels so effortless in comparison.
Walking with people is also when I feel grounded and most myself – it’s easier for me to have conversations without getting too into my own head. I often catch up with friends in the city over walks. Some of the best dates I’ve been on have involved walks as well.
Please share a serendipitous moment from a walk.
Last Christmas, when some friends and I went for a walk in the park, we found a group of people congregating on one side of a lake. They were talking about the birds that lived in the lake – two swan families that had hated each other and often needed human park volunteers to separate them during fights. The conversation then drifted into discussions about migrant birds from Canada that stop by in Brooklyn on their way further south. These birds also bring their predators with them, much to the inconvenience of the native Brooklyn dwelling birds.
The whole discussion got me very excited – I had learned to look at my neighborhood through a very different set of eyes. If you’d asked me last year, I may have used phrases like “ascended onto a new plane” to describe how I felt in the moment.
Please share a story of a stranger that you met or passed by on the streets and why that moment stayed with you until now.
I don’t think I can pick one stranger but back in 2016, when I was going through a distinctly remarkable period of loneliness, I had made the decision to talk to at least one complete stranger every day just to break the cycle. This led to some very interesting conversations in trains, stations, at stores, cab rides and at the university. I eventually stopped doing it for some reason but I fondly remember that period as a time when I was uncannily open and learned a lot about people I would normally never cross paths with.
What is your personal definition of the flâneur / flâneuse?
Living in New York means that I’m often rushing on my walks with a destination in mind, so flâneuring becomes a rare activity that I only ever indulge in while showing a friend around, or sometimes during a date.
For a few years, I have been stepping out to do urban sketching, which has been an interesting exercise in paying close attention to my surroundings in a dense urban center, and making a mental note of the visual forms so I can put them down on paper. It taught me to see the city differently than I was used to.
I’ve carried this habit on when I travel, and I try to spend some time sketching in every new city that I visit. In Amsterdam, this means sketching all the bikes locked to the rails on bridges, or the giant hooks at the top of facades, In Antwerp it means quickly figure-drawing large groups of people gathered outside a bar catching a smoke before heading back in. In Istanbul it means attempting to draw intricate tile patterns in mosques or capturing the image of a cat curled up, asleep in a cafe. I see it as an act of “taking in” my surroundings as mindfully as possible.
What part of New York would you like to re-enchant and why?
Clinton Hill in Brooklyn would qualify for that – I spent a very dark portion of my life there and I’d love to undo that by tangibly changing the neighborhood. It is a beautiful part of the city marred by bad memories that I’d like to undo, or perhaps rewrite.
If you could name a street, what name would you choose?
West 18th Street in New York. I would name it “Sword and Thread Way”. I spent a lot of time walking those streets and figuring life out. I’m better off for it.
If you could move to another city tomorrow (and have every expense covered, job security, a new home) what city would you choose, if you had to go with your first gut instinct?
I’d say Utrecht, NL. I’ve been there twice and spent a week each time. I love the quaint center of the city, and its proximity to the university. There is a pleasant calmness to Utrecht that I haven’t felt anywhere else. The city is also well connected to the rest of the country, and has a vibrant art scene. I have joked to friends about marrying a professor someday, and receding into a quaint college town. Utrecht conveniently fits that pipe dream.
If you want me to share a social media page or a website, please share your links below. Thank you!
https://blog.acrosspolyethylene.com | Instagram: @reckoner165
Walking in Leiden, Walking in Barcelona with Alina
I met Alina Jitari in a cosy café in Cluj-Napoca, Romania, almost ten years ago. We were both volunteering at the same student organisation and we started chatting over mulled wine at the NGO's winter gathering. We both remember that we quickly forgot the world around us and that we talked and talked and talked for hours.
There are so many serendipities and heartfelt, goosebumps-giving conversations that connected us throughout these years in which we lived apart.
Since last year we finally have the chance to live again in the same country, in The Netherlands this time. Alina is that kind of friend with whom, whatever happens, wherever we live, I know that we will last a lifetime.
I have asked her a few questions some weeks ago about her walking experiences in Leiden, Barcelona, and around the world. Below you can find her written answers.
Hi, Alina! Thank you for taking some time to answer these questions for The Flâneurs Project.
Please tell us a bit about yourself and about any creative projects that you are passionate about.
I am originally from a small town in northern Romania, but I am currently living in The Netherlands. I moved here last year (2022), after spending more than 5 years in Barcelona. Maybe this says something about my way of bringing extremes together.
In 2023, I decided to work with more engagement on my artistic project ‘Picking Colours’ where brushes, colours and a bit of creativity compose a visual story about the small things in life.
Besides this, I am an economist, a flâneuse, a curious reader, and, for sure, a searcher for meaning in life.
What is your favorite street / area in Leiden and why?
Even if most of the time I find it difficult to choose a favourite something, once I saw this question I already visualised Pieterskwartier. To be more specific, I am always walking through Pieterskerk-Choorsteeg with a feeling of equilibrium.
Leiden is decorated with over 100 poems on the buildings. The Pieterskerk-Choorsteeg street starts with one of Pablo Neruda’s poem and when you move further there is a feeling of balance between movement and stillness, similar to the moments when you leave behind a metropolitan area and let yourself be absorbed by the silence of a tiny street.
What café or restaurant did you visit the most often in Barcelona?
In a city with such great diversity I was most of the time tempted to try new cafés and restaurants, to get in touch with different cultures, enjoy their food and lifestyle without taking a plane to another country.
Camelia Art Cafe is a cosy place where you can enjoy a lovely cup of coffee.
What do you miss about walking in Barcelona?
I would say that I miss the element of surprise.
Some sort of dynamism is present in Barcelona’s streets. Every neighbourhood has a different personality given by the architecture, mix of culture, position and history. And even if you know an area pretty well, everytime you can be surprised by something.
What city brings you joy whilst walking?
Porto is a city that I could visit a million times. The rich history is floating in the air combined with the scenic views from every corner.
Seen from across the Douro River, it seems that the city is a stairway to heaven, getting lost between iconic buildings, vibrant colours and the ocean side is such a complex experience. You might think that you are walking in a different city at every moment.
Please share a serendipitous moment from a walk.
Arriving in Lanzarote, my favourite island from the Canary Islands, made me feel more aware than ever that an ending implies a new beginning.
I was walking surrounded by the volcanic landscape, the peculiar rock sculptures and the sensation that I am on another planet when I realised that without destruction this place couldn’t exist.
No doubts that these treasures are in front of our eyes and this moment of serendipity made me feel more connected with nature, but also brought me a level of acceptance regarding the cycle of life.
Please share a story of a stranger that you met or passed by on the streets and why that moment stayed with you until now.
This story took place in Mérida, one of the most important Roman cities in Spain.
I saw an old man in front of an antique store. It happened to be the owner, an archeologist and art history professor.
Engaged in a one hour conversation, it seemed that we were old friends that found each other after a long time. In that hour, I discovered everything about a stranger that spent 20 years in Syria, his lovely French wife, his mother and his pure passion for cooking, inherited from her, different career paths that felt so organic in his life and, of course, what brought us together - a passion for art and history.
We said goodbye with a hug because it seemed natural to do this. Now that I am thinking, I am not sure if he is a stranger or a momentary friend.
What is your personal definition of the flâneur / flâneuse?
I would say that a flâneuse is somebody who experiences a connection with a place by simply enjoying the small things, by observing without a purpose. Maybe a meditative state in movement.
What part of Leiden would you like to re-enchant and why?
What I love the most about Leiden is the wonderful balance between city and nature.
I would like to re-enchant the courtyards known as ‘hofjes’ in Dutch, to see the historical city centre from a different perspective, crossing the Rapenburg canal with a boat and chasing Leiden's poems displayed on the walls.
If you could name a street – what name would you choose?
Such a good question that makes me think about what a street could bring us. Wandering on the streets I found meaning, connection, peace of mind.
I would choose ‘Finding Street’ because it could be a great reminder that when you step outside and embrace what is meant, your findings will change you forever.
If you could move to another city tomorrow (and have every expense covered, job security, a new home) what city would you choose, if you had to go with your first gut instinct?
After searching so long for a new country and city to live, I honestly cannot think about another place to move to. Also, I have found here a rhythm that is synchronised with my own.
Anyway, if I looked many years ahead, I would probably choose a village in the south of France.
If you want me to share a social media page or a website (about you and/or your projects), please share your links below:
Picking Colours - https://www.instagram.com/pickingcolours
Thank you, Alina!
note from Patricia: Alina and I are planning a weekend trip in Paris together this year, and I cannot wait to get lost in that city by her side. I am sure we will both find our very own versions of that "Finding Street".
Walking in Kuwait-City with Anwar
I met Anwar in an online Interintellect salon when the world was experiencing the first lockdowns in 2020. I was living in Switzerland back then, she was living in Kuwait. She joined some of my salons on art gallery curation and storytelling, and I joined her salons on writing.
Anwar is a wonderful listener, a very attentive observer, and a lovely human being. I was very happy when she accepted to answer these questions for The Flâneurs Project.
Hi, Anwar! Please tell us a bit about yourself, where do you live now, where have you lived before, and about any creative projects that you are passionate about.
My name is Anwar. I’m a full-stack developer and a pianist. I’m currently living in Kuwait which is the same country I was born in. I wish I could say I’ve lived in multiple places before, but my life is deeply rooted here.
My main creative project for this month is achieving excellence in performing my repertoire which includes pieces by Bach, Mozart, Grieg, and Chopin. It’s challenging, yet fun to witness the contrast between the different eras and highlight it!
What is your favourite street / area in Kuwait and why?
I easily get attached to certain places. Me and my husband gave our apartment its own special name - whenever we enter the area, we don’t say we’re almost home, but call it by its name as if it was a whole being.
The area is very quiet and residential-friendly. We have three beautiful parks around us. A beautiful and cosy café that we just discovered. Everything I need is in Kaifan!
What café or restaurant did you visit the most often in Kuwait?
Without a doubt: The Hub Cafe. If I want an excellent coffee, I’d go elsewhere. If I want comfort and focus, you’d find me at The Hub having tea with a scrumptious cheesecake. They have beautiful outdoor seating which overlooks the street and a seaview, as well as a gorgeous rooftop which feels to me like a very meditative bar (I witnessed all those changes in the cafe over the years, and almost no change there is disappointing).
It’s a place full of good memories and I’ve been going there through the many different phases of my life. I experienced many different things for the first time in that cafe. The two most significant ones are: me waiting nervously for my first music composition class, and my first conversation about getting married to who is now my husband!
It’s our sanctuary when we need to write, talk, or just have a good time. And I could go on and on with the funny, romantic, or wonderful things that happen there!
Side note: After I wrote this, me and my husband found a very close and cosy restaurant/café (5 minutes away from our apartment) called Bakehaus. It will be our ‘The Hub’ from now on. The atmosphere, baked goods, coffee, food, and everything there feel and smell like heavenly perfection. It’s a wonderful place for a writing or a studying session, a date, or anything else I could think of! I can’t write more about it because the memories there are yet to be created!
Please share a serendipitous moment from a walk in Kuwait.
I remember walking aimlessly with a close friend of mine in Kuwait City at night. We walked across different streets and areas within the city. It was a lengthy walk, so we got hungry but decided to continue the exploration of both abandoned and crowded places.
Our curiosity got the best of us and we denied our hunger until I saw a strange dark building that looked like it was under minor construction. I tried to sneak a peek through the glass, but my friend held me back and wanted us to move forward. As I turned my back, a gentleman in a suit came out calling us to invite us in.
It turns out to be a restaurant that was preparing for their opening next month. He told us that since we were that curious about it, they wouldn’t let us go until they served us food and drinks from the menu they’re working on and give them a review.
That night, both hunger and curiosity were serendipitously satisfied.
Please share a story of a stranger that you met or passed by on the streets and why that moment stayed with you until now.
I was on an early morning walk with my father in AlShaheed park. We decided to take different directions since each wanted to have a significantly different pace of walking.
As I walked alone, an old lady who was sitting on a bench called me in a way as if she knew me. I trusted her genuine tone and went closer to her. She started shooting casual questions like how am I doing and how things are which got me confused. I truly felt like she knows who I am with her warm grandmother-like tone she was using with me. I wanted to be polite, so I sat next to her to continue the conversation and go with the flow. We had a good conversation for around 20 minutes, I kissed her forehead (it’s a way to show respect towards the elders here), and went on my way.
I continued my walk and went around that same bench again after some time. Her daughter, as I assume, approached me and said something along these lines: ‘I saw you sitting next to her, and I just wanted to thank you for your patience and kindness’. Apparently, the woman has been suffering from Alzheimer’s and she probably mistook me for someone else, or for any possible reason.
When I left I had happy tears filling my eyes, and I was genuinely happy that I took a different direction from my father in walking just so that I could give her hopefully good company. The feeling of being in the right place and right moment, and knowing that I did the right thing, is why it stayed with me.
What is your personal definition of the flâneur / flâneuse?
When walking with curiosity and observation becomes an innate part of the person’s nature and routine, I think that’s a flâneur / flâneuse.
I noticed that people who love walking in general aren’t very timid in reaching or sticking to a destination - it’s bravery and a joyful thing to get lost.
What brings you joy whilst walking?
A book comes to my mind called ‘In Praise of Wasting Time’ by Alan Lightman which I think answers this question even though it’s not specifically about walking. A wasted time in its most positive sense solidifies our creative thoughts and the inner self - the best medium for a good wasted time to me is walking. Lightman mentioned how doing nothing at all can be the best thing. That is why many composers and philosophers had their invisible light bulb on top of their heads during their commute time.
Kuwait is not a friendly place for walking, so I usually need to park my car somewhere first to start my walk. This lifestyle has made me remember streets and areas in a fast motion due to the driving. Even though it’s a curse, it still made me appreciate the beautiful contrast of observing areas in terms of speed of motion - in a slower walking-speed motion.
I enjoy walking for the sake of walking. And I welcome whatever that comes with it: a serendipitous moment, an invisible light bulb over my head, a deeper observation of the world, or a good conversation with good company.
Is there any area / street in Kuwait where you feel unsafe?
In a general sense, it’s about the time more than the place. Almost everything in Kuwait shuts down at or near midnight. It always feels a little odd when I travel to other countries and it still feels safe at night!
In a more specific sense, I lived in AlJahra for almost three years and I felt unsafe there for most of the time. The population isn’t as diverse as other cities, and I rarely see women walking alone. Perhaps you’d think that I know the area very well having been there three years, but I know nothing about it because I never felt comfortable exploring it. I’d drive everyday to Kuwait City and start my day.
What part of Kuwait would you like to re-enchant and why?
Ah I wish I could boil it down to one or two places, but in the last 10 years many beautiful old buildings that are rich with history and memories have been torn down only for commercial stores to take place which you can repetitively see every three kilometres across the streets.
If you could name a street – what name would you choose for that street?
I cringe a little when I write this down, but it’s ‘Happiness Street’.
I saw a sign on a street in Bahrain during my commute that said ‘Happiness St.’ or ‘شارع السعادة’ in Arabic. It truly felt like it was a happy street! The sunshine with the clouds, the seaview, and the white buildings harmonised together. The name didn’t feel like it was enforced in a utopian way, but its serenity spoke the name.
This wouldn’t be my first instinct to name a street, but that’s what came to my mind!
If you could move to another city tomorrow (and have every expense covered, job security, a new home) what city would you choose, if you had to go with your first gut instinct?
Graz, Austria! I went there in July this year for about a fortnight. In that fortnight, I got to know a few people there, and remember some people’s shifts at their work because I repeatedly saw them walking across the same café I sit in for my morning coffee everyday. It felt like a warm village - everyone knew each other.
It’s far away to be considered touristic, which is a bonus. I haven’t seen many commercial stores like in Vienna, another bonus! Every café, every bar, every clothing or antique store looked like a small home business.
Most people there only speak German. I only knew a few words here and there, but I didn’t feel lost at all. I know that I don’t have to put an emotional effort to feel at home, because it felt like home immediately when I landed there.
If you want me to share a social media page or a website (about you and/or your projects), please share your links below:
Thank you, Anwar!
Walking in Dallas, Walking in Napoli with Alex Viviano
Hi, Alex! Thank you for taking some time to answer these questions for The Flâneurs Project! Please tell us a bit about yourself and about any creative projects that you are passionate about.
My name is Alex. I’m 31 years old and have lived in Dallas, TX now for the past six years. I originally grew up here, but moved to Austin, TX for university.
Between finishing university and moving back to Dallas, I’ve had the chance to live in a few places:
Madrid (6 months)
Paris (6 months)
Santiago, Chile (7 months)
New York (7 months)
Mexico City (6 months)
Rome (3 months)
With a few additional shorter stints between Houston, Lisbon & Porto, and Milan
What is your favourite street / area in Dallas and why?
The Lower Greenville area where I live! If you exclude cities like New York, Chicago, San Francisco, and a few others, most of the United States, including Dallas, has the reputation for not being very walkable. In most cases this is a fair assessment. But if you look, there are little pockets of joy. From my apartment, I have three different bar/restaurant areas that are less than a ten minute walk. For example, I have five or six coffee shops that are less than a twenty minute walk. Just last night I walked to a wine bar to meet my dad to buy a few cases of wine for the family’s Thanksgiving celebrations later this week.
Above all, though, the people who live in my neighbourhood all seem to love walking as much as I do. Around 5 or 6pm each evening, the streets are full of people out taking evening walks, meeting for drinks on restaurant terraces, or going for a run.
What café or restaurant did you visit the most often in Madrid?
This is an easy one! La Bicicleta Café in Malasaña, just off the Plaza de San Ildefonso, has been a staple of mine for almost ten years. When I lived in Madrid, I would go almost every day.
Since leaving Madrid, I’ve been back in the city for various reasons probably 15 or 20 times and I usually find an excuse to go back to La Bicicleta on each visit. Very little about the cafe has changed. There is still the same graffiti on the wall in the bathroom, the same harmonious mix of Spaniards and expats, even the wifi password is exactly the same (pericodelgado). There is a sort of magical energy about the place that’s hard to describe.
What city often brings you joy whilst walking?
I hate how cliche this is going to sound, but the term flâneur originated in Paris for a reason. There is no better city to go for a walk. Back when I lived in Paris, my favorite areas to walk in were the 6th and 7th arrondissements and the Jardins de Luxembourg.
Another underrated walking area is the 13th. The Butte-aux-Cailles is one of my favorite lesser-known areas in the city.
Please share a serendipitous moment from a walk.
My favorite flânerie of all-time took place while I was staying in Napoli, in the south of Italy. It came at a strange moment in my life where I was suffering from severe corporate burnout and doing a bit of solo travel. I started around the Villa Floridiana in the Chiaia neighborhood and walked back towards the Piazza del Plebiscito in the center of town.
The crazy route that Google Maps took me on led to a walk I’ll never forget. I went up and down steep, narrow streets that looked to have been forgotten decades ago, around dark alleys that were completely shaded from the afternoon sun, and up stairs that led to stunning views of the Gulf of Naples. Almost miraculously, I somehow ended up reaching the Piazza del Plebiscito as-intended but to this day I wonder if I accidentally passed through some sort of sci-fi continuum and went back in-time for an hour.
Please share a story of a stranger that you met or passed by on the streets and why that moment stayed with you until now.
Frankly, nothing comes to mind here. I guess I have something to look forward to!
What is your personal definition of the flâneur / flâneuse?
I think my definition is somewhat close to the “official” definition. It’s somebody who walks for the pleasure of it, without a set plan or destination.
What part of Dallas would you like to re-enchant and why?
Dallas is a much newer city, even for the United States. When compared to European cities, Dallas is still in its infancy. That said, I’m not sure there is much to resurrect here. It’s much more about letting the city continue to develop and age, like you would leave a sauce on the stove to simmer so as to allow the flavors to blend.
If you could name a street – what name would you choose for that street?
Perdu way - I love the ironic nature of the concept of being lost. There’s lost in the literal sense, when one is no longer following the path from point A to point B. However, in most cases, being lost is subjective, and I think there would be something satisfying about plugging “Perdu way” into Google maps as one’s final destination.
If you could move to another city tomorrow (and have every expense covered, job security, a new home) what city would you choose, if you had to go with your first gut instinct?
Ah, not this question! I’ve been asking myself this for the last ten months as I’m currently in a remote work situation and seriously considering moving. For today, I’ll say London, although depending on the day you ask I might tell you Madrid, Milan, New York, or Amsterdam.
If you want me to share a social media page or a website (about you and/or your projects), please share your links below:
an article that was published after my time in Portugal (link here)
my business website (link here)
link to my instagram (link here)
Thank you, Alex, for your time answering these questions!
Walking in Paris with Christophe Porot
I have asked Christophe Porot a few questions about his walking experiences in Paris. Christophe is a philosopher who is currently based in France and travels quite often to the US.
What is your favourite street in Paris and why?
I thought about doing research to answer this question, because the truth is the streets blur together in my mind as I stroll in familiar neighbourhoods. Rousseau, the great and revolutionary philosopher, once said that his mind does not work without his legs. In other words, walking was essential to thinking for him. The same is true of me, walking merely opens a portal to a realm of reflection and I stop paying attention to the surroundings around me. I keep a minimal level of monitoring of movement for safety over time, but can only describe my favourite streets of Paris through proximity, though I never register the name. Near the Sorbonne, where I am currently writing my thesis, there is a street that walks you into the Luxembourg Gardens. This, because of the destinations on either side, is my favourite street in Paris.
There is a moment when you transition from the bustle of a youthful neighbourhood, addled by stressed out students, into the tranquillity of the gardens. A supreme delight pours over my being as I walk from an urban jungle into the tamed garden, and I have to be honest that I’m a bit of a consequentialist about walking. As I slip into mental reverie routinely on my walks, I often forget the path and do not attach myself to the immediate scenery. The quality of the destination the walk brings me to, after minutes or hours exploring the magical world of thought, is the metric by which I judge the legitimacy of a walk. I can hardly think of a more enchanting street than one that links my favourite library to my favourite garden; a street rich with ambient noise from curious students, safe enough to comfortably let my mind wander about, and serving a purpose that can not be reduced to the pathway but is expressed by the connecting points the pathway enables to be related to each other. The blur of motion between the library, where I’ve just indulged in philosophical literature for hours, and the gardens, where I’ll marinate in reflections for the hours to come, is the most enchanting street to me. A rose by any other name would smell just as sweet, so I’ve never noted down the street name, but I have taken account of its allure.
If you could name a street in Paris, what name would you choose for that street?
You might laugh at the ridiculous ambition of my response, and the willingness I have to humiliate myself through it.
I would love to see a street named Christophe Porot, the name my late mother gave to me. Marcel Proust suggested that, if a little dreaming is dangerous, then the cure is to dream all the time. I dip my toes into the concrete world as routinely as needed, to ensure my autonomy and preserve a hygiene of life that enables continued flourishing. But at every moment, every opportunity, I run back into my dreams which melt the reality around me so that I might dramatically reshape it in the forge of my imagination. Up to this point, these radically ambitious dreams have served me well. They’ve infused my life with purpose, and guided me out of darkness. I spent three years down and out in a mental hospital, in such a debilitated condition many people assumed I would be there for life. While shrunken and discounted by the vast majority of my social connections, I forged dreams to get out of the hospital, to revive my intellectual career, and to be stable and happy over time. All these dreams came true, so the remaining dreams I’ve carved out are even more ridiculous, lured on by initial success, and I dream of contributing to cultural and tangible life enough that some tiny street in Paris bears my name as a memory of my presence in the city long after my bones have dissolved underground.
I know this kind of response is out of touch with the way most people pursue their ambition, cloaking themselves in humility, but I feel my journey has been humble enough and my comeback story matters not only to me but to those similarly afflicted by despair and mental conditions which render living difficult. So I dream on, and dream big. But it’s not because I dream of the recognition, I never actually invest in the hopes of posthumously having a street named after me, it is that I dream of living a life so fruitful that a street could be named after me.
What café do you visit the most often in Paris?
There is a cafe called the ‘Tabac de la Sorbonne’ nestled between two, and much more popular cafes, next to it on both sides. I initially was drawn to the modest atmosphere, the unpretentious decorations in a city full of pretentious decorations. But like many experiences worth repeating, the social delicacy is what keeps drawing me back. Whenever I’m in Paris, I make my return to the cafe de la sorbonne, where all the staff knows me by name and celebrates my fidelity to their cafe. I come in, order many double espressos, and read or write for hours. Sometimes, when I’m in a state of flow, the waiter will notice an empty double espresso near me and refill it without questions; this awareness of how easy it is to be snapped out of focus, and how necessary it is to keep the caffeine coming, reflects a kind of acceptance of me and my peculiar ways. Few things are more precious than feeling accepted as is; even if you need to grow, a foundational self trust will contribute to being able to progress in life. The widely popular attitude of self hatred and suspicion doesn’t, in my opinion, serve us as well as a primary self acceptance, followed through with gentle self criticism in the direction of progress. So to walk into an environment, in a grey city, where smiles light the pathway to my routine orders, and accommodating behaviours account for the experience within, is to be absorbed by acceptance so obvious it turns into self acceptance for the duration of my stay.
Another perk, I am often unbothered by my typical social connections there, as the cafe is a kind of cave for intellectual hibernation; a place hip folks pass by on their way to L'ecritoire or another cafe deliciously located and sumptuously decorated. But, for me, the bartenders and waiters who know my name, and my order, offer me an oasis where I can write, think, and share a few laughs without fear.
Do you have any favourite food markets in Paris / Burgundy? What street food do you enjoy the most?
In Paris, no. One of the beautiful features of Paris is how accessible every desired item is. You can stroll through the city, google search whatever you seek, and find it within hours at the most. Burgundy is more particular. It is a landscape tilled by working folks but blossoming with high end restaurants for culinary tourism. As such, there are outdoor markets, including in my village of Saint Gengoux, where the most amazingly fresh and delightful produce is available for cheap. Chefs and locals shop together. They say good cooking starts with good produce, and I’ve got that part nailed down. Now, I just need to learn how to cook better!
As far as street foods, I love many. I used to love Taco trucks in Los Angeles, though I don’t even understand the French interpretation of a taco. It’s like an alien sandwich in France, they literally just invented something new and call it a taco. But I have an appetite for street food. As someone who rarely drinks, I don’t stumble my way into the street vendor's workplace and slop through an order. I walk with pride and deep respect for their craft, ask recommendations and follow through with compliments usually. There is a place near the Isle de Saint Louis I recently discovered. Burgers and Kebabs, simple as that. But, oh my, the execution is flawless and the sauce pouring is generous. I sometimes measure street food by how willing my host is to give me extra sauce for the fries. It’s a small act, but it means a lot to me.
What is your personal definition of the flâneur?
This is an interesting question, I was not aware that there were many competing definitions at stake. However, I presume a definition that involves a sense of the meaning, and relative worth, of a flaneur might be a rich way to respond. To me, a flâneur is someone who enjoys the luxury of observing without deep attachment; who can march or stroll through a city merely downloading the data of how life appears as they go. In many ways, it can be seen as a disgusting privilege but I have a kind of defence of privilege, when used well. Cicero famously wrote on the subject, regarding leisure time. For him, in the absence of a class of folks who had leisure time, there would be no philosophy or poetry or deeper arts as these things don’t express our practical demands but rather demonstrate a wise use of leisure time. One may come from emotional or material wealth as a starting point for the ability to have leisure time, but one must find a way to have time to think so that they may offer their two cents on life itself.
I loosely believe something similar may be said of the flâneur; sure, their disinterested approach to a life felt viscerally by those they observe is repulsive on one level, but on another level it enables them to comment, to be historians in motion, and to fabricate, if paired with reflection, an account of where society is and, perhaps, where it should go. The question to me is never about whether an act reflects privilege but whether an act reflects wisdom. There are many acts that are both privileged and unwise, like reinvesting your funds into elaborate trips and luxury items uniquely to be able to brag about the places you frequent and the brands you can afford. But to grasp that you are lucky enough to think through society, to observe carefully, and to contribute to the dialogue about how we are living is something deeply important to undertake whether or not it reflects a certain level of privilege. I should say that many philosophers might point out that the sheer level of privilege one experiences undermines one’s ability to understand oppression and other phenomena in play with the balance between collective and individual experiences through society. I won’t comment on this angle yet, but I will say that a wise account of how to use privilege sets up a goal to aspire towards, to share with those who have not tasted the relevant luxury.
If you believe privilege is to be spent on increasing status, then I am on board with everyone else for a dramatic revolution. But if privilege brings forth leisure time and thinking time, paired wisely, then I encourage more of a widening of the circle, a loving collaboration in the place of a revolution, to bring as many folks as possible into the “privileged experience” so that everyone can join and we can, collectively, think through our shared destiny. Maybe we need both; the revolution and the loving collaboration.
In which other cities have you lived before? Which of those cities was so far the most rewarding for walking? (rewarding in the sense of inspiring, awe-inducing, joyful)
When it comes to cities, I was raised in Los Angeles and ventured through Minneapolis, Oxford, Boston and finally Paris before settling on a life split between rural and urban sites. I have to confess, my answer is in the abstract, but I would imagine Los Angeles has the most potential to be a great walking city. It is a place where people drive two miles to go take a walk indoors on a treadmill. So the culture of walking your way through life has not sunk in there yet. They say it is further a lonely city, because you spend a lot of time alone in your car. This is a catastrophe to me, and I want to suggest that the potential bliss of strolling through the eclectic scenery, the natural miracle of mountains within view of the beach, and the floral life which perfumes many streets, could transform Los Angeles into one of the greatest walking cities known. That is, of course, if people would step out of their cars more often.
In what ways is walking in Paris different than walking in Burgundy?
Paris is ideal for a witness to society, for someone who loves being consumed by idiosyncrasies and little shops. It is, in this sense, not for me. As I said in response to the first question, my favourite street in Paris is the one that leads into a garden. The whole of Burgundy, by contrast, feels like one giant garden. I walk through my mediaeval village en route to silent vineyards, rolling green hills, flowers bursting with life around me. A car may pass by every hour or so, but for the most part Burgundy is a place where I am completely permitted to be lost in thought, for hours or longer. Paris, for the sensitive mind, constantly snaps me out of focus as a speeding cyclist, or loud commotion will inevitably take away how mesmerised I am by reflection itself. Nonetheless, I think it is crucial to be exposed to the interaction of powerful forces crossing each other through city life. Had I not spent most of my life in urban settings, I might be less enchanted by the walking experience in the countryside. So, for many reasons, I am an advocate for Parisian and city life generally. When it comes to walking, which I perceive as an intimate encounter with our deepest thoughts, I advocate for utter tranquillity which is most easily adopted outside of the festive cityscape.
Do you have any favourite walking souvenirs? (souvenir in the sense of a token, a memory, a photograph)
My favourite walking moment, memory, is when I was walking through Burgundy one gentle afternoon trying to formulate a philosophical puzzle and a potential solution. I was arrested by a beautiful orange moss on a tree, so vibrant I thought it would make more sense to see this under the influence of a hallucination. Yet there it was, before my sober mind, nakedly orange and alive before me. I stopped walking, and watched it, relegating my philosophical processing to the subconscious. The moment I stepped away from the tree, and this was a few months ago, the philosophical puzzle and its solution poured forth in my mind as clearly as the empty blue sky above. It felt like I collaborated with nature, and nothing makes me happier than turning off my conscious mind for a moment, so the real power of intuition might go to work.
Please share a story of a stranger that you met on the streets and why that moment stayed with you until now.
Well, here it comes, the invariable cliché. I met my current partner in Paris– she was smoking a cigarette discussing American literature at L’ecritoire, the hip cafe mentioned earlier. So I couldn’t resist, I asked her for a lighter, introduced myself, and began a conversation that has lasted ever since. After hours spent in dialogue about life, we walked our way partially through the city, and into a cosy bar where she asked me questions about whether I believed in God and what my intent was towards her. I was in a performance mode that evening, playing with words like toys, and told her just to look at the passion in my eyes, before asking if she would let me take her on a real date. To my surprise, and the surprise of everyone I tell the story to, she found my language of passion charming. I think falling in love under the Parisian lights is a well explored territory, and won’t bore you with further details of my own encounter with the experience. I will just say that Paris is an excellent city to roll the dice of love.
Which is in your opinion the “perfect” city for aimless walking?
Paris has to be up there when it comes to cities. But I’m not a major fan of walking through cities. I invariably find myself in parks and gardens which mimic the countryside. Walking is an enabling mechanism for me, grounded through its relationship to thinking, and I have to say that I would simply enjoy a quiet and long walk through rolling green hills over a city anyday. Nonetheless, through personal experience, for those who love the gentle chaos of aimless city walking, Paris is about as good as it can get.
Thank you, Christophe, for your time answering these questions!
Walking in Brașov with Anca Bunescu
In 2022, my sabbatical year, I lived a few months in Brașov, a small mountain town in the heart of the Carpathians in Romania. While living there, I asked my friend Anca a few questions about flânerie in her hometown.
What is your favourite street in Brașov and why?
Oh, straight to the difficult questions! 😊
It’s always hard to choose a “favourite” something, even more so when the choices are unlimited and equally great. However, the dearest streets will always be the ones of the hill I have grown up on. During the last few years, Mihai Eminescu Street held a dear place to my heart. Whenever I decided to take a walk and avoid the crowds in the city centre, the fact that my hill still offered great walking possibilities has been such a relief. A thing I often think about: what is in the closest proximity to one can be the most overlooked thing – it is very true in this case.
For more than half of my life I lived without questioning what is happening on the other side of the hill, or on the other end of the street. Once I became curious to go outside of the known, into an unknown that’s right there, in plain sight, I was fascinated. It’s the mix of architecture and styles, the views, the one abandoned villa which always makes me pause in front of it every time I take a walk.
Agnes Varda said: “If we opened people up, we’d find landscapes. If we opened me up, we’d find beaches.”
I started thinking: what would we find if we opened me up? Now I know the answer: we’d probably find streets and houses of Brașov.
What is your personal definition of the flâneur?
I picture the flâneur as someone who feels at home while being on the streets. Someone who practises walking without any purpose and finds extreme joy in it. Someone who learns about the world while losing himself/herself in it, in the most literal of ways possible.
Please share a serendipitous moment from a walk.
This did not happen in Brașov, but in a small, famous German town called Rothenburg ob der Tauber. We were visiting the town last year together with my brother, shortly after I moved to Germany. It was a sunny April evening, and the city was filled with sunlight.
At some point, I stopped to watch the landscape, and while doing that, a woman approached me and asked: “It’s breathtaking, isn’t it?” We chatted for a while, told her we’re not from here, we would like to see more of the city, and she said: “I could show you guys around, if you want to, as I’m a local!”
It was great to have her around. We went through towers and through thick walls, we climbed some only-by-locals-known stairs and we listened to good stories. It’s the unknown and the unplanned that gives you such gifts.
What part of Brașov would you like to re-enchant and why?
There is plenty to be re-enchanted in Brașov. Decades of negligence have affected this city deeply, leaving some of its most beautiful buildings in horrendous states.
If I could pick where to start, and could be a little egoistic in the process, I’d start with the citadel, which holds an important place in my heart. It’s not only a historical place, but one of those where people would gather, where elders could take walks or pause for a coffee, where kids would run and play, where medieval or little music festivals would take place. I remember when a good friend of mine celebrated her birthday there, it was one of the most exciting places for us kids to play hide and seek through walls and towers, to make up stories of knights, of witches, of ghosts, to make crowns out of flowers. I might be egoistic, but I want the people – kids, adults, elders to all have access to it, again.
What café did you visit the most often while living in Brașov?
There are places which correspond to different periods of one’s life – and I find it true even for cafes.
Cafeteca was my most visited café in high school. It was not only the proximity to the school, but also the atmosphere, the cosiness, the big windows that account for the first experiences of people watching. It was well known and loved by many. The last time I went there was around three years ago. Its location has changed since then, but the good memories will always stay.
For the moment, one I visit often when I am home is CH9. I love the house it’s located in, the attic which is the best place for reading on large, comfortable chairs, the tasty coffee and the friendliest personnel.
Thank you, Anca!
Walking in London with Indy
I virtually met Indy at an Interintellect salon and our first conversation on Discord started from Indy’s curiosity about my previous work on the flâneuse, the female counterpart of the flâneur. During my studies in Berlin I wrote my MA dissertation on the concept of the modern and postmodern flâneuse in literature, therefore I dived deep into this topic for academic reasons but also out of pure curiosity and personal interest. My first Interintellect salon in October 2020 was entitled Peripatetic Flânerie: A Philosophy of Walking (Aimlessly) in which we explored the concept of the flâneur from Baudelaire, Poe, Benjamin to cyberflânerie.
When Indy told me about his upcoming salon on re-enchanting the city I was thrilled. One major topic that will be explored at his salon is our relationship with the City – a very timely and important topic. Yesterday (while on a train back home from Zürich) I thought about a few questions I could ask Indy and that could offer us a glimpse into his relationship with the city of London.
What is your favourite street in London and why?
An interesting question – of course it’s not easy to choose and yet at the same time many of the streets I like, I like for only one or two things. Today I’ll choose Chapel Market – that’s the name of the street, but as you’d guess there’s also a daily market there. In the week it’s always busy, full of people buying everyday items, food and household goods. On Sundays there is a specialist food market, with a wider (if more expensive range of foods.) The Angel end of the street has some typical big store outlets, but as you progress, there are more small and odd places. There is also a very diverse range of little cafes/restaurants. In particular there’s the original vegetarian Indian buffet which is a staple of everyone’s student years – but my favourite place is Copperhouse Chocolate – a specialist hot chocolate cafe. You see, I can’t drink coffee, it gives me a migraine, so hot chocolate is very important to me. I knew the founders in passing when they had a stall at Broadway Market and I was one of their first customers at the new cafe.
What is your personal definition of the flâneur?
Someone who wanders through the city and observes the rhythms of life there – taking part sometimes, but also knowing about the bits that they only pass by. In children’s stories in particular there are figures like Tarzan, who know their area of the jungle or forest in a deeply intimate way. The flâneur seeks to develop a similar sense of the city.
Please share a serendipitous moment from a walk.
Walking up from Skoob (a cramped but extensive second hand bookshop) towards King’s Cross, our way was blocked by a conspiracy of road maintenance (pavements dug up) and a large truck which had become stuck trying to turn around. So we slipped up a side street, walking along and then a cyclist came down the road. It was an old friend, who had come into King’s Cross from Cambridge (where he lives) on his way to a meeting. I hadn’t seen him in a long while and we had just been talking about him in the bookshop. Just a tiny moment, but my thanks go to the inept truck driver who thought he could turn around in that cramped street.
Please share a story of a stranger that you met on the streets and why that moment stayed with you until now.
I met a man on Aldersgate, he was a little lost, looking for the Indian visa processing centre which is not far North, but just far enough from the Tube station to be a little confusing. He was old and handsome in a faded and not entirely tidy way. In his black shoes, smart black trousers held up with braces over a striped shirt and unruly beard he gave me a picture of who I might be in some thirty years time. I gave him directions and watched him walk purposefully and quite steadily off up the road.
If you could name a street in London – what name would you choose for that street?
I’m feeling politically mischievous today so I’d like to rename “New Globe Walk” which runs up from the main road to the new Globe Theatre by the river. I’d call it “Shakespeare Sarani” because that used to be one of my favourite roads in Kolkata.
What part of London would you like to re-enchant and why?
If I could wave a magic wand I would re-enchant Oxford Street. Not only will it need it after the pandemic – traditional retail has been hit hard, but even in recent years the diversity of the street (compared to when I was young) had faded badly. Mega brands have their place, but in Oxford Street many had each spawned multiple outlets and squeezed out not only the variety but also the stopping points, the places to take a moment. Yet, it has always been and I suspect will be again one of the places where you cannot help but feel the sheer vitality of a large movement of people, not in a space in some common action, but a gathering of many individual motions.
What café did you visit the most often in London?
At this moment I wish I was one of those quantified life people, who could open up an app and find out where I had “checked in” most often. I’d like to say Timberyard, which was a local cafe with everything I could need… (great people, hot chocolate, good wifi and a great croque monsieur) but while I went there a lot in the years it was open, it burned brightly and then closed when the building was renovated. (They reopened near Covent Garden, but it’s a little too busy for me there.) I also go to the above mentioned Copperhouse quite regularly. The truth however is that the cafe I visit most is the Barbican Cinema Cafe near where I live. Why there? Because it’s almost always on my route home, the hot chocolate is ok (of course!) and the people watching is just fantastic. Being part of the arts centre, there are always different people coming through, meeting friends, work meetings and then cinemagoers buying the strange gourmet popcorn they sell. I do sometimes meet friends there, but in a way it is too close to home for that – I mostly go when I just need to “be” for a little while and watch some people pass by.
Thank you, Indy!
Walking in Berlin With Alex Bodea
February 2018, on a street in Berlin (Kurfürstenstraße 21–22), art gallery: The Fact Finder. This is the first The Flâneurs Project interview documented in 2018. Original title of the interview: The Art of Fact-Finding.
If we have two things in common, Alex Bodea and I, it is our love for art and our curiosity, both of which turned our questions and ideas into a flowing conversation. My initial approach was to get to know her art, her relationship with our city (Berlin), and her view on “flânerie”.
This is the first The Flâneurs Project interview.
Fact-Finding
A: I have opened this gallery to create a context for my practice and for other artists working with “fact-finding”. The profession of “fact-finding“ is mostly encountered in companies where people are sent to investigate, to look into details in some matters regarding the activity of the company. From an artistic point of view, fact finding is about working with first-hand experiences, not with references.
The important thing to keep in mind is that the truth is not the ultimate goal in this process. The interpretation of the data (the facts) can be scientifically rigorous or can be as free as possible and can include exaggeration of details, figments of imagination, and even lies, as long as it is not purposely presented as the truth (it should be visibly playful).
P: It is an artistic process, where the ultimate goal is not the collection of data, but how we choose to see and present this data.
A: Yes, many artists use this process of collecting data, to make out of it something of their own.
P: I also gather information in many notebooks, about different details such as the name of the streets I walk on, persons I meet on the street, or even feelings that I felt at a given time during the day noticing something while walking.
A: And do you go through them, do you re-read them, do you “use” them?
P: Yes, in short stories, photography, collages, The Flâneurs Project. I love taking photographs of street names.
A: So, basically, you are undergoing a fact-finding process.
P: Yes, we can also define it that way. One of the reasons I came across your website is because of the word “flâneurism” in the description of your gallery:
The Fact Finder is an artist-run space dedicated to works that rely on unmediated, first-hand experiences the artists go through while aiming to better understand a specific topic, fact or everyday life aspect. Field research / immersive journalism / flâneur-ism / archiving / voyaging/ empathising are examples of the processes we regard as fact-finding missions, among others. Our focus is on works involving a long-term commitment and preferably having an archiving/serial character.
The Flâneuse
A: Flânerie is a way of fact-finding. Most of the data I collect is by walking down the streets. You can compare my method with street photography, but the difference lies in the instruments / I use drawings and visualisations in order to capture a certain moment in time.
P: Did you collect data also by filming? I came across a video of yours filmed in the S-Bahn in Berlin.
A: I never collect data through video. That was a documentary I made about “investigating” the streets, collecting facts for my drawings, which I call visual notes. I was a flâneuse back then, and I think I still am. In my view, the flâneur is a person that enjoys walking and spends a lot of his/her time on the streets and by definition he knows a lot about the city. In my case it is a little different, I do not enjoy it so much to be out and about in the city, but I love collecting data, details, and making connections.
P: What about the flâneuse? In my MA thesis I write about “gendered spaces”, and how women did not have complete access to different spaces and areas of the city in the 19th and the 20th century.
A: As a female flâneur I do not feel restricted in any way these days. I never had problems on the street because of my gender, at least not here in Berlin or back home in Cluj- Napoca. But … (a pause of some seconds) probably we as women are already quite careful not to walk on a poorly lighted street, or we take another route if we see at night a silhouette in the distance. In this case, the initial plan of flâneurism is changed.
Berlin | New York | Cluj-Napoca
Personal note: My favorite street is Auguststraße near Rosenthaler Platz.
P: Berlin is a walkable city also from a flâneuse point of view. I feel safe — of course there are certain areas where I would not go alone in the middle of the night, but during the day I enjoy these areas because of their unique atmosphere and diverse architecture.
A: I agree. But if we look at New York, I feel that we could not be as free as in Berlin. In some spaces yes -during the day-, in other spaces not so much, and some streets and areas in New York are definitely out of question (high rate of criminality).
P: What do you think about Cluj-Napoca?
A: I was born and lived in Cluj until I moved to Berlin and I think it’s safe.
P: Yes, it feels safe, but there are also spaces/streets where women are harrassed on the street. For example, I experienced sexual harassment more than once while I was walking on Horea street.
P: Do you have a favorite street/area/café in Berlin? Why Berlin?
A: First of all, Berlin is a “liveable” city, especially from a financial point of view. On another note, I wanted to change the medium/ the environment. I love streets which have a downhill trajectory (rare in Berlin, like Methfesselstraße). My favorite park is Görlitzer Park because it’s flat.
Art
P: How would you define your art?
A: Key words that summarize my art…The force behind it is curiosity, and sometimes also the drive to be someone else. I also want to relive some experiences, to collect data which is turned into a drawing in the intimacy of my house. I never begin drawing on the spot.
P: Do you use text in your art?
A: Yes. It’s very important. All my drawings have a text, the two cannot be taken apart.
P: Thank you, Alex, for your time and for your thoughts.
Walking in Sibiu With Silvia Paizan
Please tell us a bit about yourself and any creative projects that you are passionate about.
I’ve been calling myself an illustrator and graphic designer, but these labels don’t fully capture what I do. What I love doing is immersing myself in a project, idea, or place until its essence reaches my bones, allowing me to translate it visually. This could be through illustrations, a visual identity, a mural, a website, or the kitchen layout in my rental apartment. I’m looking for a more fitting label (any suggestions?).
The creative project I’m most passionate about – and that has driven me crazy – is figuring out how to be both creative and grounded. (If anyone has figured this out, please reach out to me!) I’m still trying to answer this simple question: how can I support myself financially doing what I’m best at when what I’m best at is being in constant transition? I’m attempting to share crumbs of this process in my newsletter on Substack (6-month due post is coming soon haha).
I hope that more and more people will start searching for the soul of things, now that AI can replace any streamlined, predictable creative processes.
Which cities bring you deep joy while walking?
I grew up in the countryside, in a small village on a hill in Oltenia, so any city fills me with wonder but also makes me feel tense and somewhat unsafe. I’m still a village girl at heart, and while exploring new cities offers me a sense of freedom and endless possibilities – like I’m no longer stuck in a village, I’m roaming free – what brings me the most joy is returning to places I’ve visited before.
Walking on familiar streets gives me a sense of complicity, as if the street and I share a secret that others don’t know. Maybe this is the genius loci you’ve written about? I cherish my memories of walking in Athens, London, Porto, and Barcelona.
Where do you enjoy walking in Sibiu? What are the places that you frequently come back to?
Sibiu is a small town where you can cross it in any direction on foot in about an hour and a half, so it’s hard not to revisit the same places frequently. I enjoy walking in the 3 Stejari neighbourhoods during spring, and keeping track of what flowers bloom when. I also love strolling through the old town at night, where we can still see the stars, and the charming, old houses make it feel like a fairytale.
Even the communist-era neighbourhoods like Hipodrom, Ștrand or Vasile Aaron can be surprisingly charming - fierce (and loving) grandmas or grandpas have transformed green spaces around their blocks into personal gardens, growing onions, tomatoes, marigolds, asters, roses, Brussels sprouts, and irises, very homesteady. Sadly, recent street renovations and new parking lots are taking over these gardens, but there are still some left. Enough for wildlife to find shelter – when I walk at night I often stumble upon hedgehogs, frogs, foxes, and last week I saw a ferret! (Writing this, I realise I haven’t strayed too far from the countryside I know and love, haha.)
Oh, walking along the Cibin River is also quite pleasant. It crosses a rather industrial area, but the willows on each side make it feel peaceful. I hope the beaver is still there.
Do you have any favourite memories of encounters with strangers on the street?
I have a few favourite memories of encounters with strangers. One was with the Spanish Zorba in Barcelona, who shared a bottle of wine and danced with us after our backpack was stolen. Another one was with a stranger I spent six hours with during a layover in Bergamo when I was travelling alone for the first time. However, the encounters that impacted me the most were actually with the same “stranger.”
The first happened in Sibiu in 2019. I was walking with a friend when we passed by three people carrying musical instruments. We invited them to join us at a music hub where we were planning to practice drums. Long story short, they were from Argentina and Colombia, and had been traveling for a while, earning their living by busking on the streets. A few days later we went to a symphonic concert where one of the guys unexpectedly met a friend he had made in Mexico the year before. (Seriously??)
They all ended up staying at my place for a few days, and we had a magical time together. It felt so natural and free to hang out with them that I eventually decided to quit my uninspiring corporate job, and started freelancing.
The second encounter was in Bordeaux in 2023. It was my last day in the city, after a long and tiring week when I had pushed myself to spend time with people I felt disconnected from. I was taking a long walk back to my hotel, intending to mind my own business and avoid any further interaction, while questioning whether leaving the people I was travelling with was the right decision. When I passed a busker playing the violin who looked like one of the guys I had met in Sibiu in 2019. We had barely kept in touch since, and I had no idea where he was or what he was up to. I stayed until he finished his song, then called him, “Martin??”
We spent the rest of the day together, attending a small jazz festival where a friend of his was playing, and hanging out until late. Again, it felt so natural and inspiring. I don’t usually believe in a higher power orchestrating our lives, but moments like these make me feel like the universe is giving us clues about what the right path might be. Walking back to my hotel at night, I felt overwhelmed by the serendipity of it all and by the regret that I hadn’t left the group earlier. I should have followed my instinct from the beginning. I could have met Martin much sooner – he had been playing in the same spot for days.
What city will be your next adventure?
I recently bought a one-way ticket to Copenhagen. I’ve never been to Scandinavia before, so I’m super curious to see how this trip will unfold. This is both a personal and professional adventure. While I’m not expecting to permanently move to Copenhagen or Denmark right now, I need to take a step forward that feels more permanent than just going somewhere for a week. I struggle with explaining to people what I’m good at, and all the energy I use tailoring my CV to fit into a mould that doesn’t represent who I am isn’t worth it. I connect better with people in person. I also need to fill myself with life and real, visceral inspiration. A place I’ve never been before should give me that, right? Denmark feels like a good next step. We’ll see how this goes.
If you could name a street, what name would you choose?
I think it would be fun and useful if streets were named after what makes them recognizable or memorable now, rather than their historical uses or random people's names. For example, on Cetății Street, there’s a window packed with creepy dolls, and many people actually call it Creepy Doll Street. One of my favourite streets is called Constantin Noica, but most people refer to it as Chestnut Street. Centumvirilor Street is a great place to catch the sunset if you're walking in the old town, but nobody remembers that word. How about calling it Golden Hour Street? Piața Aurarilor (Goldsmith Square) could be called Crazy Cats Square. Calea Dumbrăvii (Way to the Forest) is a good name, let’s keep it.
If someone would like to come and write for a week in Sibiu, what places would you recommend?
I love writing and scribbling in cafés and small bars or restaurants, and Sibiu has plenty of options (for a small town).
For coffee, I’d recommend Arhiva de Cafea și Ceai – not very touristy, offers great freshly roasted coffee at decent prices, and is a favourite hangout and work place for local introverts.
Charlie’s is a good choice for a nice brunch and a comfortable writing session – I prefer the location on Avram Iancu Street.
Wine Not? is perfect for a nice glass of wine in the evening and people-watching.
Flow Taproom for nice Romanian craft beer and a very laid-back atmosphere. You’ll find here all kinds of people, from tipsy locals reading and chilling to curious tourists resting their feet. There’s a particular table with a great view for people-watching (and/or writing), without too much disturbance. They sometimes organise small street concerts or parties.
I don’t eat out much, but I like Basak, a casual Korean restaurant conveniently close to the taproom.
Consommé is also worth a visit; it has a nice vibe and is accessible yet away from the touristy area. The service can be a bit hit or miss, but the food is good, so it’s worth a try.
For groceries, Băcănia Albota (for local meat or dairy products, but they have other goodies too), and the farmers’ markets (the most picturesque one is on Friday morning in Piața Huet).
In what cities did you feel that your imagination was abundantly nourished?
By far, my imagination was most abundantly nourished in Bucharest. I lived there for a year, and the city's many quirky corners, nooks, and old houses provided endless inspiration. Although the general vibe is often one of “this could have been so beautiful,” – largely due to the way the communists shaped the city’s aesthetic – if you walk and pay attention, you'll still find moments where someone has transformed a stark corner into a space with genuine character. These moments constantly invited me to imagine what beautiful things could exist—or once existed—there.
If you could move to a city tomorrow, and have everything covered, what city would you choose?
Copenhagen for now 😀.
Thank you, Silvia!
Walking in San Francisco with Kev
Please tell us a bit about yourself and any creative projects that you are passionate about.
My name’s kev. I grew up in France, mainly split between Paris and Lyon. I left the country 15 years ago to move to Singapore first, and settled in 18 different cities across 4 continents since then.
Today I’m a father, a husband and a builder. I have two boys who turned 5 and 3 yo a few months ago. I’ll celebrate my 19th anniversary with my wife -Mathilde- at the end of Oct. And I celebrated last summer 10 years of building stuff with her and our 3rd co-founder, Max.
My main creative project is Objet. We embed memories into clothing. We threw two soirées -parties with a french touch- in SF already, a third one is coming in Dec. and we’ll get one in NYC before thanksgiving too. I’m also one of the people behind Krak - the world’s biggest skatespots database and archive online.
Another creative project I’m quite excited about is Subvert -a collectively owned Bandcamp successor- that’s about to launch very soon. I’m not behind it but definitely want to be a part of it.
Which cities bring you deep joy while walking?
Hmm, that's a good question. Thinking about this I realise I’m too curious not to enjoy any proper walk. Like even in the least walkable cities I’ve been to -let’s say LA, Jakarta and Buenos Aires- still, I genuinely enjoyed walking.
But back to your question, I think it’s also less a matter of -objectively speaking- the city itself and more about the emotions and memories attached to the specific area.
Like two cities that bring me deep joy while walking could be Singapore because this has been my first time really far away from home, independent, in Asia and living full-time with my girlfriend as two young people full of dreams in their very early twenties so of course, every time I go back there and walk, I’m in a deep joyful state.
NYC would be the second one. I travelled there for the first time when I was 18 yo, alone with my grand-pa -who’s been like a real father to me. We spent a whole week over there and I was just so excited I couldn’t even sleep. I think I’ve walked every street of Manhattan -from Wall St. to Central Harlem. As a kid of the 90s I also feel -still now by the way- that NYC encapsulates so much of my cultural influences. It feels like the whole world is living in a few square miles.
Why do you want to move to San Francisco?
There are many reasons but I’d say the most important one is: SF tends to focus constantly on what’s next. The general mindset over there is: ‘let’s build the future’. Which implies two subtleties: (a) the future has to be built, it doesn’t just happen; and we better lean forward rather than backwards and (b) WE -you, me, random unknown people, all of us- get to build it. And I love this.
Also, since we’ve two young kids as well, it’s not only about us anymore. We want our kids to be surrounded by a ‘sure, you can do it’ mentality. We’ve already spent the whole summer over there and I can’t even describe what happened in their head when they saw their first Waymo -fully-autonomous car. Their minds literally went crazy. They’re still so excited today to mention it to their friends. I can tell you it expanded their imagination 100x; which is so much more powerful than anything else at their age -i mean: beyond love and attention of course.
What desires of yours do you think will be fulfilled in San Francisco?
As much as I’m in love with this move already, I’ve to say I don’t expect SF itself to fulfill any of my desires. Maybe I grew wiser as well haha. What I mean by that is: after living in 18 cities across 4 continents over the last 15 years, I realized there is no such thing as a paradise on Earth. Everywhere is a trade-off. What matters most then becomes: which kind of challenges do we want to face in our daily lives? This answer can be very singular -hence we can’t all agree on what place would be absolutely perfect or at least better for most- and the answer is also evolving depending on the stage you are in your life. For example, we’ve spent 3 years in Lisbon and we loved the place as a couple with no kids and then with a baby but we ended up hating it for young kids. I wrote about it -and specifically its urbanism- after our last week spent over there a few months ago.
Back to your question. A possible answer would be directly related to your previous question. So one thing I hope out of this new life in SF would be: make our kids truly optimistic; and give them the energy, naivety and hunger to build the future.
If you could bottle San Francisco into an idea, what would that idea be?
Utopia. Beatnik. The summer of love. Silicon Valley then. Maybe it’s something about the ‘Far West’ too. San Francisco being so new, being a place where people ‘end up’. So many people come from everywhere else, the rest of the US of course but also Asia, Africa, South America, Europe. Since we’re all immigrants there, who chose this place, it feels we’re more intentional, we connect faster and deeper to each other.
You have lived in many cities around the world; which city felt almost in sync with you?
I’m not sure I can answer this one. Have you read the multitudes of self by Nick Susi? This was typically my own version back in the day -through the angle of the clothes I’d choose to wear today or tomorrow. So there is no single version of ‘me’. Which means, there just might be no city on Earth really ‘in sync’ with me. Or at least with a stable, non-changing version of me.
Now, that being said, I can tell you every moment I truly felt ‘in sync’ with a city and one version of myself. Berlin was for instance the best partner, ever, for the ‘clubbing-let’s-party-all-night-long’ me. I feel in sync with SF every time I want to think more ambitiously about what I’m building. As a clothing and craft connoisseur, and just a lover of beauty in general, Paris has a special place in my heart. Surprisingly for most maybe, the skateboarder in me also feels in sync with Paris, as well as London, NYC and Barcelona. That skateboarder -coupled with the long-time video game fan I’ve always been- felt very in sync with LA 10 years ago.
I want to move to the US one day; what would you advise me?
To give it a try and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. The US are fascinating. My grand-pa used to say: ‘this is the country of all extremes’. Which I find true. And which is why the US as a whole are hard to grasp. This is a country the size of a continent. I mean, especially for us as Europeans, most nationwide statistics don’t make sense at all. If we’d want to compare the whole US, let’s talk about the whole of Europe. Otherwise, if someone wants to consider France only -or Germany or any other european country- well, let’s talk about California then, or New-York, or any other states but not the whole of the US.
Most of this country is empty too. So you can imagine all the different realities. Cities are also experienced very differently. Neighborhoods feel so much more identity-defining. I wrote about it here in the last paragraph. This is something I personally like in SF for instance, walking around Marina or The Mission just feels like you’ve changed countries, literally. It also means you can talk to two different San Franciscans and hear two different realities re: their daily lives.
Back to you and your question, my advice would be to go spend some time over there, as soon as possible, to experience as many neighborhoods as possible to really nail your favorite one. I can’t recommend enough home-swapping. This is how we’re able to spend one -sometimes two- month straight somewhere else -even now as a family of four- without breaking our budget. We mainly use both these platforms by the way: Kindred -following my referral code would give you 5 credits right away, with one credit = one night anywhere- and HomeExchange -here as well you’d get points by following the referral link.
So, want to move to the US? Hell yeah but where exactly: Sunset, Bernal Heights, Boerum Hill, West Village, Venice Beach?