The historical female equivalent of the flâneur, the flâneuse (walker), appeared primarily in the work of Marcel Proust, who portrayed several of his female characters as elusive and passing figures, who tended to ignore the obsessive (and sometimes possessive) vision he had of them. Increasing freedoms and social innovations, such as industrialization, later allowed the flâneuse to become an active participant in the 19th century metropolis, as women's social roles expanded from the domestic and private to the public and urban spheres.

Literary criticism and gender studies of the century proposed flâneuse as the feminine equivalent of flâneur, with some additional feminist re-analyses.[11]​[12]​[13]​[14]​[15]​This proposal derives from the argument that women conceived and experienced public space differently from men in modern cities. Janet Wolff"), in The invisible flâneuseː women and the literature of the modernity (1985), argues that the female figure of the flâneuse is absent in the literature of modernity, because public space was classified by gender in modernity, which in turn led to the exclusion of women from public spaces to domestic spaces and suburbs.[13]​Elizabeth Wilson, for her part, in The Sphinx in the cityː urban life, the control of disorder, and omen (1991), points out the diverse experiences of women in public spaces in modern metropolises such as London, Paris, Vienna and Berlin, discussing how the modern city was conceived as a place of freedom, autonomy and pleasure, and how women experienced these spaces. public space is not experienced as a homogeneous and fixed space, and how women use concrete public spaces such as beaches, cafes and shopping centers to experience this autonomy.[15]​Departing from Wilson's approach, Lauren Elkin") in her work Flâneuseː women walk the city in Paris, New York, Tokyo, Venice and London (2017) traced a series of flâneuse women in history, such as Agnès Varda, Sophie Calle, Virginia Woolf, Marta Gellhorn, focusing on their particular relationships with specific cities.[11]​.

In less academic contexts, such as newspaper book reviews, the grammatical masculine flâneur is also applied to women (including modern women) in essentially the same senses as to the original masculine referents, at least in English loanwords of the term.[16] However, as the aforementioned feminist scholars have argued, the word flâneuse implies women's distinctive modalities of conceiving, interacting, occupying, and experiencing space.

Baudelaire characterized the flâneur as a "gentleman who walks through the streets of the city";[17]​ however, he was able to see the importance of this when it came to understanding, building and interpreting the city. The flâneur thus played a double role in city life, on the one hand mixing with the crowd on the street, and on the other maintaining his condition as an attentive and thorough observer. This position, of being at the same time "part of" something and being "apart from" that something entails sociological, anthropological, literary and historical issues that have to do with the relationship between the individual and the population to which he belongs.[18] After the Revolution of 1848, with the French Empire reestablished under the bourgeois slogans of "order" and "morality", Baudelaire declared that traditional art was useless in the face of dynamic transformers of modernity. The old aesthetics were alien to the new ethics, derived from the social and economic changes that industrialization brought with it. These changes required that the artist merge with the city and become, according to Baudelaire's metaphor, "a botanist of the sidewalks."[17] According to David Harvey, "Baudelaire would oscillate for the rest of his life between the positions of the flâneur and the dandy; on the one hand, a cynical and distanced voyeur, and on the other, the man of the people who enters the lives of his fellow men out of passion for the other” (Paris: capital of modernity, page 14).

For all these reasons, the concept of the flâneur constitutes an important piece in academic discussions about the phenomenon of modernity. Going deeper into the critical path opened by Baudelaire, some theorists such as Georg Simmel tried to analyze the urban experience from psychology and sociology. In his essay The metropolis and mental life,[19] Simmel reflected on the growing complexity of life in cities, which would contribute to the creation of new social ties and new attitudes towards others. The modern city was the scenario that gave birth to a new individual, with a different perception of time and space, of freedom and well-being:.

The figure of the flâneur has also been adopted by architecture and urban planning to describe those who, indirectly and involuntarily, are affected by a particular design that they can only experience while walking. Walter Benjamin used the concept of "urban spectator" to refer to both his analytical skills and an entire lifestyle. From his Marxist perspective, Benjamin conceived the flâneur as a singular product of modern life and the Industrial Revolution, drawing a parallel with the contemporary figure of the tourist, and describing him as a dilettante bourgeois, distanced but enormously sagacious. Benjamin himself became a paradigm of the flâneur, making numerous social and aesthetic observations during his long and pleasant walks through Paris. Even the title of his magnum opus, The Passages") (Das Passagen-Werk), evokes his taste for traveling through corridors and shopping galleries.

The drift of the flâneur was also considered, theoretically and in practice, by the Situationist International (Guy Debord et al). Basically, it consisted of urban drifting in search of situations, simply letting oneself be carried away by pleasure ("vectors of desire") through an "urban psychogeography", that is, a city that is not utilitarian, but lived for leisure and social relations.

In the context of current architecture and urban planning, design for flâneurs is a way of addressing issues related to certain psychological aspects of the building environment. Architect Jon Jerde, for example, kept this approach in mind in the design of his Horton Plaza and Universal CityWalk projects, planned with the idea of ​​offering surprises, distractions and other series of experiences to visitors.

The vocation of the flâneur is objective but aesthetically harmonious observation, which has favored its adoption in the field of photography, especially in street photography. The street photographer thus appears as a modern extension of the urban observer described by Fournel at the end of the century, before the arrival of the portable camera:

The most notable application of flâneur to urban photography probably has its origins in the essay On Photography, by Susan Sontag. It explains that, thanks to the development of compact cameras in the 19th century, the camera has become the flâneur's tool par excellence:.

The word flâneur is not limited to defining someone who performs the physical act of walking in the Baudelairean sense, but can also refer to an entire "philosophical way of living and thinking", a process of learning and discovery, as described by Nassim Nicholas Taleb in his essay Why I Walk,[20]​ in the second edition of The Black Swan (2010).[21]​ Louis Menand, trying to describe the relationship of T. S. Eliot with the English literary society and its role in the formation of modernism, calls Eliot a "flaneur" (The New Yorker, September 19, 2011, pp. 81–89).

In De Profundis "De profundis (epistle)"), Oscar Wilde writes from his cell about the failures of his life, stating: "I let myself be drawn into long spells of senseless, sensual indolence. I had fun being a flaneur, a dandy, a worldly character. I surrounded myself with petty natures and inferior minds.

The historical female equivalent of the flâneur, the flâneuse (walker), appeared primarily in the work of Marcel Proust, who portrayed several of his female characters as elusive and passing figures, who tended to ignore the obsessive (and sometimes possessive) vision he had of them. Increasing freedoms and social innovations, such as industrialization, later allowed the flâneuse to become an active participant in the 19th century metropolis, as women's social roles expanded from the domestic and private to the public and urban spheres.

Literary criticism and gender studies of the century proposed flâneuse as the feminine equivalent of flâneur, with some additional feminist re-analyses.[11]​[12]​[13]​[14]​[15]​This proposal derives from the argument that women conceived and experienced public space differently from men in modern cities. Janet Wolff"), in The invisible flâneuseː women and the literature of the modernity (1985), argues that the female figure of the flâneuse is absent in the literature of modernity, because public space was classified by gender in modernity, which in turn led to the exclusion of women from public spaces to domestic spaces and suburbs.[13]​Elizabeth Wilson, for her part, in The Sphinx in the cityː urban life, the control of disorder, and omen (1991), points out the diverse experiences of women in public spaces in modern metropolises such as London, Paris, Vienna and Berlin, discussing how the modern city was conceived as a place of freedom, autonomy and pleasure, and how women experienced these spaces. public space is not experienced as a homogeneous and fixed space, and how women use concrete public spaces such as beaches, cafes and shopping centers to experience this autonomy.[15]​Departing from Wilson's approach, Lauren Elkin") in her work Flâneuseː women walk the city in Paris, New York, Tokyo, Venice and London (2017) traced a series of flâneuse women in history, such as Agnès Varda, Sophie Calle, Virginia Woolf, Marta Gellhorn, focusing on their particular relationships with specific cities.[11]​.

In less academic contexts, such as newspaper book reviews, the grammatical masculine flâneur is also applied to women (including modern women) in essentially the same senses as to the original masculine referents, at least in English loanwords of the term.[16] However, as the aforementioned feminist scholars have argued, the word flâneuse implies women's distinctive modalities of conceiving, interacting, occupying, and experiencing space.

Baudelaire characterized the flâneur as a "gentleman who walks through the streets of the city";[17]​ however, he was able to see the importance of this when it came to understanding, building and interpreting the city. The flâneur thus played a double role in city life, on the one hand mixing with the crowd on the street, and on the other maintaining his condition as an attentive and thorough observer. This position, of being at the same time "part of" something and being "apart from" that something entails sociological, anthropological, literary and historical issues that have to do with the relationship between the individual and the population to which he belongs.[18] After the Revolution of 1848, with the French Empire reestablished under the bourgeois slogans of "order" and "morality", Baudelaire declared that traditional art was useless in the face of dynamic transformers of modernity. The old aesthetics were alien to the new ethics, derived from the social and economic changes that industrialization brought with it. These changes required that the artist merge with the city and become, according to Baudelaire's metaphor, "a botanist of the sidewalks."[17] According to David Harvey, "Baudelaire would oscillate for the rest of his life between the positions of the flâneur and the dandy; on the one hand, a cynical and distanced voyeur, and on the other, the man of the people who enters the lives of his fellow men out of passion for the other” (Paris: capital of modernity, page 14).

For all these reasons, the concept of the flâneur constitutes an important piece in academic discussions about the phenomenon of modernity. Going deeper into the critical path opened by Baudelaire, some theorists such as Georg Simmel tried to analyze the urban experience from psychology and sociology. In his essay The metropolis and mental life,[19] Simmel reflected on the growing complexity of life in cities, which would contribute to the creation of new social ties and new attitudes towards others. The modern city was the scenario that gave birth to a new individual, with a different perception of time and space, of freedom and well-being:.

The figure of the flâneur has also been adopted by architecture and urban planning to describe those who, indirectly and involuntarily, are affected by a particular design that they can only experience while walking. Walter Benjamin used the concept of "urban spectator" to refer to both his analytical skills and an entire lifestyle. From his Marxist perspective, Benjamin conceived the flâneur as a singular product of modern life and the Industrial Revolution, drawing a parallel with the contemporary figure of the tourist, and describing him as a dilettante bourgeois, distanced but enormously sagacious. Benjamin himself became a paradigm of the flâneur, making numerous social and aesthetic observations during his long and pleasant walks through Paris. Even the title of his magnum opus, The Passages") (Das Passagen-Werk), evokes his taste for traveling through corridors and shopping galleries.

The drift of the flâneur was also considered, theoretically and in practice, by the Situationist International (Guy Debord et al). Basically, it consisted of urban drifting in search of situations, simply letting oneself be carried away by pleasure ("vectors of desire") through an "urban psychogeography", that is, a city that is not utilitarian, but lived for leisure and social relations.

In the context of current architecture and urban planning, design for flâneurs is a way of addressing issues related to certain psychological aspects of the building environment. Architect Jon Jerde, for example, kept this approach in mind in the design of his Horton Plaza and Universal CityWalk projects, planned with the idea of ​​offering surprises, distractions and other series of experiences to visitors.

The vocation of the flâneur is objective but aesthetically harmonious observation, which has favored its adoption in the field of photography, especially in street photography. The street photographer thus appears as a modern extension of the urban observer described by Fournel at the end of the century, before the arrival of the portable camera:

The most notable application of flâneur to urban photography probably has its origins in the essay On Photography, by Susan Sontag. It explains that, thanks to the development of compact cameras in the 19th century, the camera has become the flâneur's tool par excellence:.

The word flâneur is not limited to defining someone who performs the physical act of walking in the Baudelairean sense, but can also refer to an entire "philosophical way of living and thinking", a process of learning and discovery, as described by Nassim Nicholas Taleb in his essay Why I Walk,[20]​ in the second edition of The Black Swan (2010).[21]​ Louis Menand, trying to describe the relationship of T. S. Eliot with the English literary society and its role in the formation of modernism, calls Eliot a "flaneur" (The New Yorker, September 19, 2011, pp. 81–89).

In De Profundis "De profundis (epistle)"), Oscar Wilde writes from his cell about the failures of his life, stating: "I let myself be drawn into long spells of senseless, sensual indolence. I had fun being a flaneur, a dandy, a worldly character. I surrounded myself with petty natures and inferior minds.