Abstract

Although traditionally, the flaneur has been attached to the specific geo-historical context of
nineteenth-century Paris, flaneurs have evolved throughout the twentieth century and continue to
meander in contemporary cities. Flaneurs not only meander; they also tell stories about their
meanderings, including stories about a city, a neighbourhood, a street, a park, a bench and about the
different people and non-human creatures they encounter. Given the detail-oriented trait of the
flaneur's personality and their capacity to act as a connoisseur and a collector of unnoticed, invisible
and neglected city's components, these stories provide a unique perspective on the city, on its
inhabitants and their behaviours. In this project, I investigate flânerie as a critical tool to reflect upon
the relationships between people, objects, and places through the mapping of these stories. My journey
in the world of flanerie starts with the identification of contemporary flaneurs who have been telling
stories about their flaneries, with a particular focus on Montreal. Among the rich material these
flaneurs collected and shared, I selected seven stories from a printed magazine (i.e. the Flaneur
Magazine) dedicated to flaneries along rue Bernard from Outremont to Mile End. To map these
stories, I developed a graphic language dedicated to representing various spatio-temporal and personal
aspects of these stories. This language was inspired by the concept of Inductive Visualization
(Knowles et al. 2015), which allows for the spatial expression of a story based on its content, in
contrast with conventional euclidean cartographic structure. This approach led me to produce The
Flanerie Atlas of Rue Bernard, which corresponds to the creation part of this research-creation project.
Throughout the production of this original atlas, I was able to develop a methodology to map data
from stories and to propose a new (carto)graphic language dedicated to the representation of stories.
This atlas revealed certain particularities of Rue Bernard as captured by flaneurs' stories. It led me to
reflect on the relevance of mobilizing flaneurs' materials to study a park, a street, a neighborhood.
Flaneurs' materials, in this sense, show their potent to reveal people's affective bonds with places.