Sociotechnical flânerie

An alternative to ethnography, inspired by Walter Benjamin’s The Arcades Project. Advocating for a slowed and sensitised attention to, e.g., technoscientific subjects, and the infrastructures and material reconfigurations of contemporary urban spaces.

Component practices:

• Walking/pedestrian mobility: Physical movement through urban spaces to capture the nuances of sociotechnical interactions.
• Observation: The detailed, attentive observation of urban environments, people, commodities, objects, infrastructures, and technological artifacts.
• Knowledge production: Generating insights and understanding through the act of flânerie
• Textual authorship/writing: Documenting and articulating key observations and insights through the production of written texts.

Quotidian details and public spectacles: Attention to everyday details, traces, and signs, as well as larger urban spectacles, media, and live events.

Emergence and obsolescence: Observing how urban spaces and sociotechnical systems register processes of change.

The figure of the flâneur unites a geo-historical phenomenon (the urban modernity of 19th-century Paris), an analytical concept (the untethered, mobile gaze), and a mode of investigation grounded in the pursuit of ‘small epiphanies’ (Trivundza 2011).

• [⎈] Consider how sociotechnical systems and infrastructures condition what is observable and knowable about the city.
• [&] See also: Perec’s An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris (1975)
• [&] See also: performance writing?

Backlinks

: Psychogeography