Walkers, Voyeurs, and the Politics of Urban Space

Walking, seeing, and being seen in the city—as voyeur or as the subject of surveillance—have a long and contested history. City planning in the last half century has been increasingly fraught with contradictory desires to promote commerce as well as ostensibly progressive initiatives like greening, the re-pedestrianization of cities, and the rehabilitation of historic neighborhoods as sites to make the past more palatable and profitable¬. This special issue historicizes and reconsiders the flaneur—the city stroller—as the iconic bystander to the spectacle of urban life and change, drawing perspectives from urban and public history, museum studies, geography, and sociology.

One article analyzes Australian frontier towns, where notions of indigeneity are commodified for white consumers while Aborigines themselves are unwelcome. Another examines the “funereal flanerie” of protestors in Guatemala who stage scenes of public mourning to engage the radical power of dead bodies in public spaces. Flanerie and drifting are explored as pedagogical tools to draw students out of the controlled settings of college campuses. Contributors to this issue examine the physical experience of city walking—determined by architecture, street signs, traffic lights, and each walker’s differently abled body—alongside the subtler class, racial, and historical markers that define who in city spaces is imagined to be respectable and who is dangerous.

Robin Autry is assistant professor of sociology at Wesleyan University. Daniel J. Walkowitz holds a joint appointment as professor of history and metropolitan studies in the Department of Social and Cultural Analysis and Department of History at New York University. He is a coeditor of Contested Histories in Public Space: Memory, Race, and Nation and Memory and the Impact of Political Transformation in Public Space, both published by Duke University Press.

Contributors: Robyn Autry, Gabrielle Bendiner-Viani, Bruce Doran, Eva Giloi, Catherine Holmes, Ralph Kingston, Tess Lea, Francis Markham, Hillary Miller, Don Mitchell, Natalia Onyshchenko, Elihu Rubin, Anastasiya Ryabchuk, Barbara Schmucki, David Serlin, Jennifer Tucker, Heather Vrana, Daniel J. Walkowitz, Martin Young