Paper Short Abstract:

I explore the rise of creative resistance and community projects in a post-industrial Czech city through Walter Benjamin’s concept of the flâneur and argue that the flâneur is a timely tool for anthropologists trying to make sense of a rapidly changing world and its multiple intermeshed crises.

Paper Abstract:

In this paper, I explore the rise of creative resistance and community projects in a post-industrial city in the Czech Republic through Walter Benjamin’s concept of the flâneur. I discuss how I myself adopted flânerie as a method for gathering and analyzing ethnographic data during fieldwork among the city’s urban activists. Finally, I argue that the flâneur is an especially useful tool for (un)doing ethnography in a rapidly changing world and its multiple intermeshed crises.

A former mining town that served as the main motor of socialist Czechoslovakia’s economy during the second half of the 20th century, Ostrava today is still a city in transition, with neglected public spaces, abandoned mine shafts, and disused steel mills. Urban planning and care for public spaces took a backseat to the privatization of city property in the 1990s and early 2000s. However, a nascent community of urban activists is having some success in bringing life to Ostrava’s empty streets and pushing city administration to invest more in the revitalization of public spaces. From guided walks through neglected neighbourhoods to theatrical tours in abandoned industrial sites, I examine how the urban activists rely on movement and embodied experience of the city as a form of critique. Simply the act of noticing and focusing attention on problematic areas becomes a political statement with the potential to transform.