The Flâneur in Benjamin: Notes on Urban Walking-Writing in Research on the City and Education

Abstract

This article reflects on cartography as an epistemological approach and on cartographic walking method as a methodological procedure applied to research in the field of city and education. By updating the allegory of the Benjaminian flâneur, displaced to the context of Santa Maria/RS and Parque Itaimbé, we explore how dissident urban bodies (wanderers, flâneuses, and homeless people) express invisible forms of urbanity and how the cartographic walking method can apprehend/reveal such expressivities, in order to constitute a kind of “invisible curriculum” of the territory, whose strength lies in the support it offers to educational practices anchored in these local knowledges. Mobilizing interdisciplinary references (philosophy, geography, urban sociology, education, urbanism, and arts), we adopt an open stance that embraces complexity as a condition for understanding urban phenomena. We therefore argue that walking, in the Benjaminian manner, constitutes a political, epistemological, and interdisciplinary gesture, mobilizing urban ruins and fragments into narratives that broaden the capacity to read the city, offering clues for an educational future attentive to difference, otherness, and the silent pedagogies in potency.