When Women Walk, Does the City Change?
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A man wandering Paris in the 19th century was not a creep, he was a flâneur—a gentleman stroller, aesthete, and part-time philosopher of sidewalks. He drifted through boulevards and arcades, hands in pockets, staring at strangers without fear of consequence. Charles Baudelaire adored him; Walter Benjamin turned him into a critical metaphor; every male academic since has used him to sound smart at parties.
But women?
They didn’t get to saunter. A woman lingering too long in the arcades was not a
“detached observer”—she was “loitering,” suspect, maybe selling sex.
Respectable ladies did their walking escorted, fast, and preferably to the
shops. If the flâneur was free to dissolve into the crowd, the woman was the
crowd, scrutinized, surveyed, never anonymous.
Enter the flâneuse—a
concept as debated as whether skinny jeans are still acceptable. Scholars like
Deborah L. Parsons (Streetwalking the Metropolis, 2000) ask: Can
there even be a female flâneur? If so, what does she look like? She’s not
the aloof dandy with a monocle; she’s closer to Baudelaire’s rag-picker,
elbows-deep in the city’s refuse, turning scraps into art. Virginia Woolf, Jean
Rhys, Djuna Barnes, Amy Levy—women who turned walks into literature, who mapped
modern cities with an eye attuned to both possibility and peril.
The
flâneuse, in Parsons’ telling, isn’t detached. She can’t be. She is body-first:
dodging stares, negotiating safety, carving out a new subjectivity in streets
built for men. Walking becomes a way of writing herself into existence.
Fast-forward
to now. Replace arcades with subway stations, arc lamps with LED streetlights,
and the flâneuse still walks. Lauren Elkin’s 2017 book Flâneuse reframed
her as subversive: women who stride through Paris, Tokyo, London, New York,
headphones in, pepper spray at the ready, claiming streets.
And
yet—cities are still designed as if she doesn’t exist. Caroline Criado Perez
calls this the gender data gap in her bestseller Invisible Women: Exposing
Data Bias in a World Designed for Men. Translation: most urban
infrastructure still assumes the “Reference Man.” Here’s how that invisibility
plays out:
Try pushing
a stroller down a cracked sidewalk – cliché picture right. How about, trying to
find a public toilet at night that doesn’t resemble a horror movie set. Snowplows
in Sweden once cleared roads before sidewalks—efficient, if you assume everyone
drives. But 79% of winter injuries happened on sidewalks, and 69% of the
victims were women. Why? Because men commuted by car; women walked, often with
kids or groceries. The fix? Prioritize sidewalks. Emergency visits plummeted. 80%
of women experience street harassment; nearly half avoid going out alone after
dark. One in ten women has even changed career paths to avoid unsafe urban
commutes. That’s urban exile.
So, here’s
the contrast: the flâneur of old claimed transcendence by strolling, deriving
the eternal from the fleeting. The flâneuse of today knows a simpler truth: a
city that doesn’t count women doesn’t see women. And being unseen has
consequences —missed opportunities, unsafe streets, lives literally on the line.
The
flâneuse walks anyway. She walks in Edinburgh, where planners are finally
rolling out feminist urban policy. She walks in Chennai, where gender labs push
for better lighting, toilets, and transport. She walks in Sydney, where 59% of
women feel unsafe after dark, and in Vienna, where Eva Kail proved
stroller-friendly sidewalks aren’t radical, just rational.
The
difference is that her walk is never just a walk. It’s resistance, protest,
art, survival. Baudelaire’s flâneur looked for “the eternal in the transitory.”
The modern flâneuse lives the political in the everyday, refusing to be
invisible any longer.
More on the flâneur / the flâneuse:
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