ACADEMIA Letters

The flânerie and psychogeography as rooting practices in

the contemporary urban
Davi R. Bote, Universidade de São Paulo

Abstract
In face with the transformations that characterize the contemporary urban, the sensory body
is increasingly prevented from fully appropriating the city in which he lives, mainly due to
the marketing feature that is imposed to global metropolises and cities. Several authors, since
the beginning of the 20th century,point to the impacts at the intrapsychic level of these trans-
formations. In this way, we intend to present in this work some clues and reflections that
may suggest ways of occupying and appropriating the city, in this case, from the psychogeo-
graphic flânerie. Such idea will be of capital to us, as it enables the city dweller to potentially
experience rooting, i.e., this linking and active participation in the city. These experiences,
when mapped on psychogeographic maps, reveal the imaginary dimension of the urban from
the perspective of the individual or groupments, with which we will seek dialogue in this work.

Keywords: Urban; Psychogeography; Flânerie; Imaginary.

Henri Lefebvre, philosopher and important name of the French intellectuality of mid-
twentieth century, quite interested in the urban phenomenon that was all along Europe with the
advent of new forms of mass production and consumption, once said that, in short, “objects,
bricks or houses are no longer sold, but cities” (CARLOS, 1999, p. 175). The urbanized city
was no longer the locus or means of capitalist production: was the productive end itself. This

Academia Letters, February 2022 ©2022 by the author — Open Access — Distributed under CC BY 4.0

Corresponding Author: Davi R. Bote, davi.bote@usp.br

Citation: R. Bote, D. (2022). The flânerie and psychogeography as rooting practices in the contemporary urban.
Academia Letters, Article 4877. https://doi.org/10.20935/AL4877.

1
shift was due to the gradual transformation of the use value of space into its exchange value:
the city, then, became worth of what it could potentially offer, not as a space endowed with the
ability to be appropriated by human groups, serving as a substrate for cultural maintenance
and the arrangements that confer dignity and decency to individuals, but as a commodity-
space, of entrepreneurs, enterprises, the widening of avenues and the narrowing of sidewalks.
Also, according to Marc Augé, it is the moment of the emergence of non-places, i.e., empty
spatialities in historicity, in identity and in relation, that is, spaces of non-binding, of non-
symbolic heritage, such as shopping centers, airports and highways; in his words:

”if a place can be defined as identity, relational and historical, a space that can-
not be defined either as an identity or as a relational, nor as historical, will be
defined as a non-place. The hypothesis here defended is that supermodernity is
a producer of non places” (AUGE, 2012, p. 73).

In face of this scenario, it is necessary to point out a characteristic of the urban to add
not only an ethnocultural multiplicity, an effect of globalization that is circumscribed, but
also of being one of the sine qua non causes of socioeconomic inequality in large cities. The
space is fragmented and sold in lots, and the appropriation of public spaces - increasingly
pressured and cornered by the value of exchange - is threatened by the market logic imposed
on the urban areas. The inalienable unity endowed with resistance is still the body, which,
despite producing the city with its workforce, does not appropriate it with its concreteness (at
least not the majority of the population). Georg Simmel (2005, p. 581) notes that the blasé,
or indifference, is unfolded to the subject in the face of this situation: how to overcome this
contradiction that is, at the same time, to produce and not consume in the/the city?
The metropolitan city is restrictive and has never been able to hide this quality: spaces are
private, walled, sold or rented, they determine movements, are subordinate to tourism. The
spaces of coexistence and recreation, of bios politikos (ARENDT, 2007; AGAMBEN, 1995),
when not subjugated to such logic, they are increasingly residual as they are subversive to this
order. More than the experience of the blasé to those who are spatially segregated in the same
place where they live(d) and established their lives, they quite often experience a feeling even
more profound that is the non-belonging, non-binding and non-identification with the space
and the relationships that occur there. This feeling of detachment from the nourishing soil,
source of the imaginary and subjectivity, is also called uprooting.
We understand uprooting as one of the dimensions of subjectivity (COSTA, 2019), as a
withdrawal from oneself, a loss of bond in a given ethos, in a given way of life. It is es-
trangement (COSTA, 2019; ARRUDA, 2000) before the arrangements and mechanisms of
self-recognition and recognition of the the other, of alterity. To experience uprooting is to

Academia Letters, February 2022 ©2022 by the author — Open Access — Distributed under CC BY 4.0

Corresponding Author: Davi R. Bote, davi.bote@usp.br

Citation: R. Bote, D. (2022). The flânerie and psychogeography as rooting practices in the contemporary urban.
Academia Letters, Article 4877. https://doi.org/10.20935/AL4877.

2
be in a superfluous condition and of deep dullness, of no longer belonging to the world that
inhabits (ARENDT, 1989). Simone Weil, the first to think systematically about this idea, as-
sociated uprooting to a disease (WEIL, 2001, p. 44), moral or spiritual, which affects life per
se, like a neurasthenia that disables the subject to experience pleasure in daily tasks.
But if the individual is this singular and inalienable unity, which is nevertheless liable to
be affected by uprooting in the urban environment due to its lack of participation and appropri-
ation of spaces, how to avoid this becoming of psychic suffering in face of the city he inhabits?
How to think and re-signify the ways of relating in/with the city in order to circumvent this
market logic? Finally, how to discuss imaginaries that rescue this invite of appreciation and
experimentation of the city before the obstacles brought? We will only propose here a few
clues that suggest the (re)rooting starting from the sensory experiences of the psychogeo-
graphic wandering that, besides presenting itself as a geopoetic possibility of appropriation of
the city - since it primarily requires the mobile unity that is the human body - when mapped,
it can serve as a supplementary tool to the thematic/systematic official and institutional maps,
as they are subjective, cathartic and artistic.
The body that circulates in the metropolis is nothing but a commodity-body, which adjusts
itself to the hustle and bustle of times and spaces of capitalist production; times and spaces
represented, in metropolises, by traffic lights, by the sounds of subway doors, the exclusive
lanes, the escalators and the correct form to use them (in São Paulo’s train and subway sta-
tions, the left side of escalators and stair has to be left free to hurried or late people). However,
the metropolis is thought in this work not only as the locus of this circular body, which moves
by the topos of the city, in many cases, like a pendulum (home-work-home), but as space of
the flâneur body - a term coined by Baudelaire and Benjamin (COVERLEY, 2018, p. 23) -,
dériveur, according to Debord and the situationists, fugueur, according to Iain Sinclair, any-
way, this body that errs, wanders and experiences the city under another dimension: through
the distant streets and forgotten in time, the urban roughness, the affective paths and routes.
At long last, the flânerie, urban strolling or any of these terms, keeps this revealing power
of supersensible places, of subjective spatialities according to the flâneur, of what only he sees
and which allows him to rejoice, to remembrance, to creatively imagine; here, we assume
this as a way of granting the flâneur the possibility of re-signification of places of his life.
Similarly, these terms evoke the need to rethink our relationship with the environment, as
well as what kind of urban we want to inhabit. The psychogeographic maps, as they are
cartographic records of the flânerie, can either reveal unique and subjective aspects at the
individual level, as, comparatively, converge to shared ways of thinking about the city and
transformations, pointing to common symbolic and imaginary aspects about a given place or
time; finally, the psychogeographic wandering, which explores the bowels of the urban in a

Academia Letters, February 2022 ©2022 by the author — Open Access — Distributed under CC BY 4.0

Corresponding Author: Davi R. Bote, davi.bote@usp.br

Citation: R. Bote, D. (2022). The flânerie and psychogeography as rooting practices in the contemporary urban.
Academia Letters, Article 4877. https://doi.org/10.20935/AL4877.

3
spontaneous, playful and subversive gesture, would be one of the possible dimensions of the
rooting of the subject(s) with places.

Academia Letters, February 2022 ©2022 by the author — Open Access — Distributed under CC BY 4.0

Corresponding Author: Davi R. Bote, davi.bote@usp.br

Citation: R. Bote, D. (2022). The flânerie and psychogeography as rooting practices in the contemporary urban.
Academia Letters, Article 4877. https://doi.org/10.20935/AL4877.

4
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Academia Letters, February 2022 ©2022 by the author — Open Access — Distributed under CC BY 4.0

Corresponding Author: Davi R. Bote, davi.bote@usp.br

Citation: R. Bote, D. (2022). The flânerie and psychogeography as rooting practices in the contemporary urban.
Academia Letters, Article 4877. https://doi.org/10.20935/AL4877.