What is a Flâneur?

The term flâneur  comes from the French masculine noun flâneur—which has the basic meanings of "stroller", "lounger", "saunterer" or "loafer.”
Charles Baudelaire developed a derived meaning of flâneur—that of "a gentleman stroller of city streets...a person who walks the city in order to experience it".

The flâneur may therefore be characterised as a deliberately aimless pedestrian, unencumbered by any obligation or sense of urgency, who, being frugal, wastes nothing, including his time which he spends with the leisurely discrimination of a gourmet, savouring the multiple flavours of his city.

A defining characteristic of the flâneur is that he doesn’t have any practical goals in mind. He isn’t walking to get something, or to go somewhere, he isn’t even shopping.  The flâneur stands in deliberate opposition to capitalist society, with its two great imperatives: to be in a hurry and to buy things. What the flâneur is doing is looking.

It follows that flâneur is not limited to someone committing the physical act of peripatetic stroll in the Baudelairian sense, but can also include a "complete philosophical way of living and thinking", and a process of navigating erudition.

Because of the term's usage and theorization by Baudelaire and numerous thinkers in economic, cultural, literary and historical fields, the idea of the flâneur has accumulated significant meaning as a referent for understanding urban phenomena and modernity.

Since the development of hand-held cameras in the early 20th century, the camera has become the tool of the flâneur.  The photographer is an armed version of the solitary walker reconnoitering, stalking, cruising the urban inferno, the voyeuristic stroller who discovers the city as a landscape of voluptuous extremes. Adept of the joys of watching, connoisseur of empathy, the flâneur finds the world 'picturesque and displays a fascination with street life while displaying a critical attitude towards the uniformity, speed, and anonymity of modern life in the city.