One of the virtues of big cities is that you can walk around and be distracted without anyone knowing you. The feeling of freedom is immense, especially when you come from smaller cities or towns where everyone knows each other. To be able to look, observe, stop in front of shop windows, sit on a street bench and watch people pass by, get lost in thought listening to a street singer, or look up to find that unique rooftop or dome. To walk aimlessly and without worry, just for the pleasure of freedom, anonymity, and security.
I was particularly interested in a chapter of the book Feminist City. A Field Guide (2019, Between the Lines and Edicions Bellaterra), by geographer Leslie Kern about La Flaunese. While as a woman I have experienced the anonymity of walking through the big city and enjoyed it, walking aimlessly, distracting myself and enjoying the beauty or extravagance of having no schedules or destination, I have to confess that I have avoided neighborhoods or districts as a precaution, I have changed sidewalks if on a lonely street I had to cross paths with a man or a group of men, or I have felt discomfort due to being a woman.
Cities have been a great opportunity for women to leave the domestic environment beyond work. But I wonder, like Kern, if it is possible for women today to become invisible in the big cities of the 21st century. To shed, in short, the state of alert and to become absorbed and enchanted looking at the city. Or, to be more exact, to wander the streets, to roam aimlessly and without objective, just for the pleasure it entails. An interesting reflection that we probably don't consider because women, like most people, use the city with a specific purpose: we go to and from work, we go shopping, we go to the doctor, we take and pick up children from school, we go to a concert or the theater...
The figure of the flaneur or stroller is a term known for its characterization in the work of Charles Baudelaire, but the German philosopher Walter Benjamin also delves into the concept, relating it to the modernity of the metropolis as an essential figure of the modern urban spectator.
Virginia Woolf develops this facet in her essays about her travels and, very specifically, in her texts about London. In Street Haunting: A London Adventure, for example, she confesses the pleasure of wandering through the city under a floating attention, as Kern says, allowing a kind of peace and detachment to be glimpsed in the midst of the crowds.
There are other writers who also perform this exercise and describe the experience to us. Now, can we imagine this flaneur experience pushing a stroller, carrying a baby in a backpack, or with a six-month belly? As Kern tells us, do these women go unnoticed? Surely, they will encounter many barriers, architectural to begin with, but also logistical and probably social.
It must be observed that not only women have felt liberated and intimidated by the city. Other groups suffer this contradiction. Immigrants who regroup in the same neighborhoods for their safety or LGTBI people who also suffer, at the same time, that feeling of freedom and anonymity, and of threat. We cannot ignore the homophobic attacks that gay people have recently suffered.
Cities for walking free us from ourselves, which is why they are so attractive; what is needed is for them to also be inclusive and safe.