On Urban Wandering

The Practical Polymath #94

Hi Friends, 

Greetings from the trenches of Newbornland! I am hoping to make it to the end of this paragraph before my little sleep-crusher rises from her slumber. Hold your breath. 

In other news, if reading Homer, Melville or Dostoyevsky sounds like your idea of Friday night fun, I started an Instagram account to report back from my journey climbing the seven summits of classic literature (more on this here).

This week, you’ll get to know another deeply talented 21st-century polymath. Patricia Hurducaș is telling us about the pursuit of happiness through urban wandering. 

Enjoy!

Florian 

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🏹 Archers: Patricia Hurducaș - Flâneuse / Design Researcher / Data Governance Manager

Patricia is a design researcher, writer, data governance manager, and creator of “The Flâneurs Project”, a collection of urban stories delving into the complex relationships people have with cities. Born in Romania, she lived in Germany, Switzerland and is now based in the Netherlands.   

Can you start by giving us your definition of a Flâneuse/Flâneur?

I usually describe a Flâneuse/Flâneur as a person who has an ongoing conversation with the city they explore while walking. They pay close attention to street details, architectural motifs, the ways in which cities unfold, and how people interact—or don’t—with the urban life around them.

What inspired you to create “The Flâneurs Project”? 

When I moved to Berlin in 2015, I spent a lot of my time walking and discovering this fascinating city. Back then, I was a student, and it was my first time living abroad, alone, without friends and family nearby. I didn’t know anyone, apart from my colleagues who were also new to the city.

I walked a lot in the first months living in Berlin and felt very free, very at home. One day, I stumbled upon Walter Benjamin’s The Arcades Project and became acquainted with the concept of the flâneur, learning more about the emergence of the modern city in the 19th century. His work and essay on walking fascinated me. I started to dig deeper, reading more essays on walking, psychogeography, and cognitive architecture. Then, in 2018, I decided to write my Master's thesis on the topic “Defining the Modern and Postmodern Flâneuse in American Literature.” As I read many academic papers and books of fiction on this topic, I found myself craving actual conversations with people: what inspires them to walk and get lost in foreign cities, what brings them wonder.

One evening in 2018, while I was walking on Kurfürstenstraße, I noticed a small art gallery that was open. I entered and introduced myself to the gallery owner, who serendipitously was also Romanian, having also moved abroad from Cluj-Napoca to Berlin. I asked her if I could interview her about her relationship with Berlin. She immediately said yes, and that’s how this project started. This first interview is entitled The Art of Fact Finding.

You’ve met and interviewed people from across the world. What are some universal features of a city that seem to bring people joy?

There are two features in particular that people come back to time and time again: beauty and stories. Beauty in the form of nearby nature—especially seas, oceans, and rivers—and in the form of inviting architecture. Stories in the form of history, culture, and serendipitous encounters with people.

You keep a list of places you want to visit in the next five years. What draws you to a particular city? 

I’m attracted to cities that I feel have the potential to change me and alter my perspective on the world. I am drawn to people and their stories. For example, New York and San Francisco are cities that I know will forever change me, even if I visit them only for a couple of weeks every now and then.

You and I have both lived in different cities across many countries. How has this influenced your sense of belonging?

I feel like the whole world is my oyster, and I know that wherever I live next (after The Hague), I have the capacity to make a home of that place once again. However, in order to feel at home in a city, I need to sense that there’s an ongoing, infinite conversation happening between that place and myself. It’s like a really good relationship—if it’s a “page-turner,” then there’s something special there. The same goes for cities; they need to be a “page-turner” for me to stay.

Our emotional and mental landscape—how we feel and how we think—influences how we live and perceive a city. So, it’s not only the city's responsibility to “make us stay,” but also our own responsibility to know what we want in order to thrive there.

What’s a book you can’t stop talking about on the topic of urban wandering?

Infinite Cities: A Trilogy of Atlases—San Francisco, New Orleans, New York. It’s more than urban wandering; it’s about mapping history, feelings, and perspectives in three fascinating U.S. cities that I am eager to explore in the coming months and years.

I also love Rebecca Solnit’s “A Field Guide To Getting Lost”. It’s one of those books that evokes a certain longing for unknown places, hard to find in any other book on (urban) wandering that I have read so far. 

“To lose yourself: a voluptuous surrender, lost in your arms, lost to the world, utterly immersed in what is present so that its surroundings fade away. In Benjamin’s terms, to be lost is to be fully present, and to be fully present is to be capable of being in uncertainty and mystery.”

― Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost

What advice would you give to someone who wants to start exploring their city more intentionally?

Try to map out what you desire in terms of experiences from a city, then put on your shoes and start walking. The city always provides some answers; we just need to pay close attention and allow ourselves to get lost. 

Lateral Thought

The most frequent evasive tactic is for the would-be writer to say, But before I have anything to say, I must get experience.

Well, yes; if you want to be a journalist. But I don’t know anything about journalism, I’m talking about fiction. And of course fiction is made out of experience, your whole life from infancy on, everything you’ve thought and done and seen and read and dreamed. But experience isn’t something you go and get—it’s a gift, and the only prerequisite for receiving it is that you be open to it. A closed soul can have the most immense adventures, go through a civil war or a trip to the moon, and have nothing to show for all that “experience”; whereas the open soul can do wonders with nothing.

Ursula K. Le Guin