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Welcome to The Grey Urbanist
The concept of the “stroller in the city” or flâneur, has rich associations in European literature and philosophy but remains foreign to New Zealand.
New Zealanders don't consider the urban wanderer a connoisseur of street life - one who employs “gastronomy of the eye” (Balzac) to savour “the multiple flavours of his city” (Skinner). Nor do we think of the pedestrian as a skilled “amateur detective and investigator of the city” (Benjamin) or a “passionate spectator” revelling in “the ebb and flow … the fugitive and the infinite” (Baudelaire). Sainte-Beuve insisted that strolling the city “is the very opposite of doing nothing”....
New Zealanders don't consider the urban wanderer a connoisseur of street life - one who employs “gastronomy of the eye” (Balzac) to savour “the multiple flavours of his city” (Skinner). Nor do we think of the pedestrian as a skilled “amateur detective and investigator of the city” (Benjamin) or a “passionate spectator” revelling in “the ebb and flow … the fugitive and the infinite” (Baudelaire). Sainte-Beuve insisted that strolling the city “is the very opposite of doing nothing”....