Experience of the city: A Transformation of the Nineteenth Century Spectator

Abstract

        This paper investigates the city images during the nineteenth century through a historical survey of the nineteenth century spectator, the flâneur, and optical device, the panorama. The flâneur and panorama are considered two different approaches to the representation of a city. On the one hand the panorama offered a synoptic and totalizing apprehension of the city as a unified entity. On the other hand, the flâneur disclosed a field occupied by an observer within a city that is knowable only as the accumulation of multiple and diverse point of view. While the flâneur experienced the city as an open field of images and fragments, the panorama offered a view of the city as a unified entity yet represented an act of enclosure in its form.

        Through the two approaches, the paper will attempt to review aesthetic conventions representing the images of the cities by inquiring into the role they offered the spectator, how they had influenced the strategies and tactics of architecture and city planning.

         The paper will go through the rise and fall of the nineteenth century spectator of city life, the flâneur, to find the abstract and universal expressions of flânerie as a concept, a perception unique to the period as well as its reflection in the transformation of the city. Through a story of the flâneur and through an investigation of the panorama, the paper will address two different kinds of experience of the city to find a possible meaning in the relationship between the viewer and the viewed as well as the changing experience of the city during the nineteenth century.

        Through a story of the flâneur and through an investigation of the panorama, the paper will address two different kinds of experience of the city during the nineteenth century: first the city as an open field of series and fragments of images through the eyes of the flâneur, and second, the city as a unified entity through an enclosed form of the panorama. The paper will attempt to find a possible meaning in the relationship between the viewer and the viewed as well as the changing experience of the city during the nineteenth century.