ABSTRACT
This chapter begins with a brief history of walking as a practice sufficiently stimulating to both mind and body for production of consequential creative and intellectual work. This is a familiar history in the West, dating at least to Classical antiquity, initially aligned with pastoral pleasures, later incorporating urban pleasures. Familiar also is this history’s marked inflection by relative appraisals of the aesthetic inspiration afforded by the rural ramble as opposed to the urban spin. Today that rural/urban divide is increasingly anachronistic as cutting-edge walking scholarship emerges that reconsiders and redefines flânerie for the 21st century. Published largely within the past five years, this revisionary history identifies fresh walking practices that tread complex blendings of the urban and the rural across ever-expanding global networks. Our chapter documents this research as well as advocates for this contemporized, reinscribed flânerie’s exploration of new spatial aspects of urbanization.
