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| WEDNESDAY 6 June | |
| THURSDAY 7 June | |
| FRIDAY 8 June | |
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| Paper Session 5B 'Representation' | |
| Friday, 8 June, 14:30 - 16.00 | |
ODDRUN SAETER |
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From Benjamin’s Flaneur to Photourbanism |
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In my paper I develop an ideal type description of two opposing perspectives on urban landscapes, places, artefacts and human bodies, which can represent aspects of density, at least metaphorically. I use the flaneur and the planner as the two contrasting figures, and in the end I see them together, with consequences for urban planning. The flaneur is beautifully shown in Walter Benjamin’s literary montage in the “Passagen Arbeit” from Paris (Benjamin 1992). We learn to know the street perspective, represented by a certain kind of pedestrian; the visually oriented, but all the time socially confronted one, even the deviant, searching shelter. The smells, the sounds, the confrontations with other bodies, the feet meeting the paving stones, the glance on graffiti and advertisements – it all shows how the flaneur, as a type, is representing a bodily and sensual experience of the city, and at the same time being an allegory of the collective uproar, but also the artist, the wanderer, the male gaze... This figure can at the same time be a seduced one, and a critical one. “The Man of the Crowd”… To show the planners view I use texts of the French planner and architect Le Corbusier, linked to the notion of photourbanism, the view from the air (Vidler 2000). The planner wanders with the eyes, distanced, uncritically fascinated. The labyrinths in the old urban quartiers must be removed, replaced by the urban machinery, and by light, lines and order. The planner will be freed from the dirt, the smells, the noise, the paving stones, the human bodies, fear and anxiety... In my paper I go from Le Corbusieur to the architects’ digital drawing programmes of today, where the imaginations of urban landscapes can be worked out in a new kind of technological fascination; without resistance, in terms of order and pureness, abstraction and immaterialisation (Lefebvre 2000, Rauterberg 2002).
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