A Bit More Detail

• Justin Haynes writes at NOW Toronto about the exceptional difficulty of finding affordable housing in Toronto for people on ODSP.


• CBC Toronto reports on the life of Crystal Papineau, a homeless woman who died in a tragic accident in Bloorcourt.


• Transit Toronto notes that Yonge and Eglinton is going to be disrupted for the next two months by Eglinton Crosstown construction.


• Toronto Life looks at Brooke Lynn Hites, the first Canadian contestant on RuPaul's Drag Race.


• Samantha Edwards writes at NOW Toronto about the concern that our city's boom in condo construction might also lead to loneliness. What is to be done?

• Paul Krugman notes the exceptional fragility of small cities, depending on small industries which can easily go under, over at The New York Times.


• This feature examining how shopping mall space in American cities has been reused for new purposes is interesting, over at The Atlantic.


• How can the poor be helped most effectively in dealing with rising rent costs? Bloomberg considers.


• Atlas Obscura considers the many small design features that can be used to make cities feel a little more inhospitable.


• Shawn Micallef points out how Toronto, like all cities, is really formed of innumerable individual networks, overlapping and sometimes only rarely intersecting, over at the Toronto Star.

Introduced to the concept by a friend, there was a time when I was a most dedicated flaneur. Then I drifted away a little, although I introduced a remarkable number of people to the concept.

I think one of the reasons for my decline in flaneuring is that I started walking for exercise. This may be healthy, but it tends to defeats the point, the discoveries that can come from random idling.

I find that when walking for exercise I have in mind distance and time, two things in direct conflict with the art of flânerie. What's worse, I tend to get very bored and thus stop walking! Even the desire to achieve a minimum number of paces (10,000 per day appears to have become an almost universal target) provides insufficient incentive.

The irony, of course, is that I actually walked more as a flaneur than as an exerciser because I was simply more interested, was inclined to keep moving.

For centuries, the word ‘flâneur’ has burrowed itself into the historical conversation of what it means to intimately know a city, to walk in it, to fully experience it, to be independent within it. The term, meaning a man who saunters around observing society, can be traced back to at least 17th-century France. It was first explained in detail in an 1872 edition of Larousse’s Grand dictionnaire universel du XIXe siècle in which the dictionary’s authors define it taxonomically: “flâneurs of the boulevards, of the parks, of the cafés.” In his 1837 novel César Birotteau, Honoré de Balzac called it “gastronomy of the eye.” Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve said that to flâne is “the very opposite of doing nothing,” insofar as it is an intellectual pursuit. Some trace the word back even further back, to 1587, with the Scandinavian noun ‘flana’, meaning “a person who wanders.” And it was Walter Benjamin, drawing on the poetry of Charles Baudelaire, who first used the term in a scholarly context, writing about it in the 1920s and further honing its definition: a flâneur, for Benjamin, was at once an inherently literary character, a man of leisure, and a symbol of the modern, urban experience.

Flâneur became a historically valuable term. For at least two centuries, the word adopted a variety of meanings and contexts, but eventually it became a catchall byword for a modern, educated person. To be a flâneur was to encapsulate the progress and the civility of the Western world. The best-known flâneurs are also some of modern history’s most important writers, scholars, aristocrats, poets, and thinkers: from Thomas de Quincey to André Breton to Edgar Allen Poe to Charles Baudelaire to Will Self.

Google ‘flâneuse’, the feminine form of the word, and one only finds photographs and descriptions of a type of chaise longue. Women are excluded from the term. While this is a linguistic exclusion, it is also very much a historical one. To be excluded from the word is to be ostracised from the history of intellectualism, modernisation, even civilisation.

And yet it shouldn’t be so. Virginia Woolf was walking and learning and thinking; so too were the writers Jean Rhys and George Sand and the intrepid reporter Martha Gelhorn; likewise contemporary women like writer-artist Sophie Calle, artist Laura Oldfield Ford, and film director Agnès Varda. There have been dozens of important female saunterers, but centuries in the making, the word flâneur has failed to find room for them. Their contributions to the progression of modernity have largely been forgotten or rendered less important than those of their male counterparts.

Lauren Elkin, a critic, novelist, and author of the recent Flâneuse: Women Walk the City in Paris, New York, Tokyo, Venice, and London, believes that the solution to women being omitted from the history of walking is not to try to retroactively integrate them into the definition of flâneur. Instead, she has sought to redefine “flâneuse,” not as a type of chaise longue, but as a female flâneur. In doing so, Elkin has allowed herself—and historians—to reflect on the history of women walking and to properly revise it.

For more than four years, I have walked to and from work. But that’s about to change.

It’s about three kilometres each way, which is more than I used to walk in a week. I grew up in Saint John, N.B., in a car culture so ingrained that I’d drive to the cinemas a block from my parents’ house. In undergrad, I never lived more than two minutes from campus. Walking always seemed like a waste of time.

Now, I’m in Toronto. I hated the pedestrian commute at first, despite the city’s sheer walk-ability. There was little joy in those first few months of sore legs, or on those days spent trudging more than an hour through a blizzard or rain storm. But here’s the thing: It’s still better than standing for 15 minutes in a blizzard or monsoon, waiting for a streetcar that never comes.

I’m a reporter here at The Globe and Mail, trained to dispassionately report the news, and a millennial culturally moulded to express any personal feelings through sarcasm; I am not used to earnestness. But I would be lying if I didn’t acknowledge that walking to work everyday has made me both physically and mentally healthier. It wakes me up in the morning and winds me down at night. And walking has shown me what Toronto is, shown me how Toronto is changing and made Toronto feel like home.

After throwing out the flyers in my mailbox each morning, I start zig-zagging through the West End then cut through Trinity Bellwoods Park. As I pass by Gore Vale Avenue, I glance up at my old apartment, a basement palace on the park, torn from my clutches four years ago. It was here that I first decided to walk to work – an easy 20 minute stroll.

Moving west forced me further away from The Globe, though it only made the walk more interesting. I grew up a music fan far from Toronto and learning who I share my community with has been a pleasant surprise. Sometimes, I’ll see Broken Social Scene’s Kevin Drew holding court outside a coffee shop or the Barenaked Ladies’ Jim Creeggan running with his dog. Or, after cutting through Bellwoods, I might notice Ron Sexsmith, eyes glazed, walking to the store.

There’s something so attractive about wandering aimlessly through the city, taking it all in (especially if we’re wearing Hermès while we do it). We all, deep down, want to detach from our lives. The flâneur, since everyone wants to be one, has a long history of being many different things to different people, to such an extent that the concept has become one of these things we point to without really knowing what we mean—a kind of shorthand for urban, intellectual, curious, cosmopolitan. This is what Hermès is counting on: that we will associate Hermès products with those values and come to believe that buying them will reinforce those aspects of ourselves.

The earliest mention of a flâneur is in the late sixteenth century, possibly borrowed from the Scandinavian flana, “a person who wanders.” It fell largely out of use until the nineteenth century, and then it caught on again. In 1806, an anonymous pamphleteer wrote of the flâneur as “M. Bonhomme,” a man-about-town who comes from sufficient wealth to be able to have the time to wander the city at will, taking in the urban spectacle. He hangs out in cafés and watches the various inhabitants of the city at work and at play. He is interested in gossip and fashion, but not particularly in women. In an 1829 dictionary, a flâneur is someone “who likes to do nothing,” someone who relishes idleness. Balzac’s flâneur took two main forms: the common flâneur, happy to aimlessly wander the streets, and the artist-flâneur, who poured his experiences in the city into his work. (This was the more miserable type of flâneur, who, Balzac noted in his 1837 novel César Birotteau, “is just as frequently a desperate man as an idle one.”) Baudelaire similarly believed that the ultimate flâneur, the true connoisseur of the city, was an artist who “sang of the sorry dog, the poor dog, the homeless dog, the wandering dog [le chien flâneur].” Walter Benjamin’s flâneur, on the other hand, was more feral, a figure who “completely distances himself from the type of the philosophical promenader, and takes on the features of the werewolf restlessly roaming a social wildness,” he wrote in the late 1930s. An “intoxication” comes over him as he walks “long and aimlessly through the streets.”

And so the flâneur shape-shifts according to time, place, and agenda. If he didn’t exist, we would have had to invent him to embody our fantasies about nineteenth-century Paris—or about ourselves, today.

Hermès is similarly ambiguous about who, exactly, the flâneur in their ads is. Is he the man (or woman?) looking at the woman on the balustrade? Or is she the flâneur, too? Is the flâneur the photographer, or the (male?) gaze he represents? Is there a flâneuse, in Hermès’ version? Are we looking at her? Are we—am I, holding the magazine—her?

But I can’t be, because I’m the woman holding the magazine, being asked to buy Hermès products. I click through the pictures of the exhibition Hermès organized on the banks of the Seine, Wanderland, and one of the curiosities on view—joining nineteenth-century canes, an array of ties, an Hermès purse handcuffed to a coatrack—is an image of an androgynous person crossing the road, holding a stack of boxes so high he or she can’t see around them. Is this flânerie, Hermès-style?

• The BBC notes an attack on a vegan restaurant in Tbilisi by meat-eating nationalists.


• Bloomberg notes a slur by a German populist against a non-white soccer player, reports on Sweden's economic boom, Looks at rail investment in India, and notes Southeast Asia is beating out China as a destination for Japanese investment.


• Bloomberg View looks at reform in Tunisia's Islamist movement and notes the lack of private foreign investment in Greece.


• The CBC notes anti-gentrification sentiment in the Montréal neighbourhood of St. Henri, resulting in the looting of a gourmet grocery store.


• MacLean's interviews Sebastian Junger on his theory that PTSD is rooted in the problems of modern individualism.


• The National Post looks at an anthropologist's discovery of ancient hobo graffiti.


• Open Democracy notes the Europeanization of Estonia's Russophones.


• The Toronto Star contrasts the responses of the NDP and the Conservatives to their election defeats, and notes how older Chinese couples are now using fertility treatments to have their second child.

• Bad Astronomy reports on the discovery of a repeating fast radio burst.


• blogTO lists the five most exciting neighbourhoods in Toronto, my Dupont Street rating there.


• Centauri Dreams studies the ecology of space colony agriculture.


• Crooked Timber notes the contrast between progress on climate change internationally and bizarre rhetoric in the United States.


• Discover's Inkfish reports on a study suggesting scenic environments do keep people healthy.


• Language Log notes difficulties with accessing Tibetan-medium education in China.


• Lawyers, Guns and Money notes the authoritarian mindset.


• Marginal Revolution wonders why labour mobility in India is so low.


• Steve Munro looks at the TTC's policy on fares.


• The Power and the Money's Noel Maurer notes yet another issue with the Nicaragua Canal.


• Towleroad notes Hillary Clinton's apology for praising the record of the Reagans on HIV/AIDS.


• The Volokh Conspiracy notes an American custody order preventing a mother from talking about religion or her sexual orientation to her children.


• Arnold Zwicky notes some prominent children's graphic novels.

Walking is a luxury in the West. Very few people, particularly in cities, are obliged to do much of it at all. Cars, bicycles, buses, trams, and trains all beckon.

Instead, walking for any distance is usually a planned leisure activity. Or a health aid. Something to help people lose weight. Or keep their fitness. But there's something else people get from choosing to walk. A place to think.

Wordsworth was a walker. His work is inextricably bound up with tramping in the Lake District. Drinking in the stark beauty. Getting lost in his thoughts.

Charles Dickens was a walker. He could easily rack up 20 miles, often at night. You can almost smell London's atmosphere in his prose. Virginia Woolf walked for inspiration. She walked out from her home at Rodmell in the South Downs. She wandered through London's parks.

Henry David Thoreau, who was both author and naturalist, walked and walked and walked. But even he couldn't match the feat of someone like Constantin Brancusi, the sculptor who walked much of the way between his home village in Romania and Paris. Or indeed Patrick Leigh Fermor, whose walk from the Hook of Holland to Istanbul at the age of 18 inspired several volumes of travel writing. George Orwell, Thomas De Quincey, Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Friedrich Nietzsche, Bruce Chatwin, WG Sebald and Vladimir Nabokov are just some of the others who have written about it.

On a wickedly frigid November morning, Toronto lawyer Albert Koehl laced up his new hiking shoes, zipped his yellow jacket over a carefully layered wardrobe and set out in search of adventure.

Although he had travelled extensively — crossing the Atlantic by freighter, journeying by bus to Guatemala, and crossing Africa by barge, bush taxi and bus — this time he wanted to explore new ground closer to home, and he wanted to do it on foot.

“With driving you don’t get the smells, the sounds. You remember things when you walk. It’s a pace at which you can absorb things,” he explains.

His self-imposed mission was to visit all four corners of Toronto to test his downtowner’s perspectives against the city’s true size and varied landscapes.

He expected it would take three to four days to trace a path around Toronto’s borders, about 120 km. In the end it took five, walking seven to eight hours a day — 175,000 steps, according to the pedometer he carried.