Walking Tours with the Fighting Flaneur

Friday, 08. 13. 2010  –  Featured, The Good Life

Matt Chambers

Sitting outside of the Vancouver Convention Centre, it’s impossible to ignore the throngs of tourists speaking foreign languages and clutching guidebooks. They pose for obligatory pictures in front of the cold Olympic torch, wander over to Douglas Coupland’s 8-bit Orca, and then lean on the railings to watch the sea planes arrive and depart. Finally, feeling that they’ve exhausted the opportunities of the space, they settle on one of the long, reclining benches and consult their book.

As they do, red buses rumble by on the street behind them, the tinny sound of their guide escaping through a half-present canopy. The passing buses reveal visor-clad troupes across the street, all wearing the same shirt, and following a man who holds a white paddle above his head.

I wonder how these people would fare on a Sean Orr walking tour?

Not a guide by trade, Orr is a notorious writer, photographer, musician and artist, known both affectionately and hatefully as The Fighting Flâneur - a result of his highly-public challenge of a local blogger to a bare knuckle street fight.

Flâneur, taken by itself, is a French word, meaning “stroller” or “loafer”, adopted to describe a person who walks a city in order to experience it. Orr, camera in hand, is the quintessential flâneur - a very different beast from the vulgar walking tourist. The flâneur strolls in a state of deliberate aimlessness, savoring whatever civic scenes pass them by.

Knowing none of these things, two friends and I arrived at JD’s Barbershop in Gastown - the site of Orr’s May art exhibition and the start of the tour. He appeared as we were locking up our bicycles, drinking a beer from a brown paper bag. Despite the fact that the tours started “officially” at noon and ran every half hour, we were his first group. It was 4pm.

“So, where do you want to go?” he asked.

Our trio exchanged a series of confused glances.

“Wherever you like?” I suggested.

He shrugged, and we headed north, walking in silence, and wondering what the hell we’d gotten ourselves into.

Our first stop was Trounce Alley, where Orr educated us on which scenes from The NeverEnding Story were filmed there. Out the other side, we found ourselves a block or so away from The Flâneur’s home. Here, he referenced a drawing from his recent art exhibition - a tangle of roads and alleys thrusting eastwards from his front door, and dotted with landmarks like beggars and cheap restaurants. He explained it as a psychogeographic map.

We nodded politely.

What we didn’t know at the time is that psychogeography is an actual word - a scientific-sounding term for the rather unscientific study of how human behaviour is affected by place. The word was invented by French writer Guy Debord, who famously bound his first book in sandpaper, so as to destroy any others placed next to it.

Debord, a raging alcoholic, theorized that the economic and architectural modernization of Europe after World War II was responsible for a crushing of both the public and private spirit. As a political tool for combating this perceived alienation, Debord developed his Theory of the Dérive.

In 1958 he wrote, “In a dérive one or more persons during a certain period drop their relations, their work and leisure activities, and all their other usual motives for movement and action, and let themselves be drawn by the attractions of the terrain and the encounters they find there.”

Debord believed that there are fissures, currents and undertows in a city as a result of the feelings that spaces give us. Microclimates, neighbourhoods, histories and orientations - Debord claimed that “from a dérive point of view cities have psychogeographical contours, with constant currents, fixed points and vortexes that strongly discourage entry into or exit from certain zones.”

Although Debord’s original vision of the dérive as a political tool has fallen by the wayside, the concept is still very much alive. The dérive is used by urban planners to experience and connect with a space; Will Self at The Independent writes a popular column on the subject; and Iain Sinclair features psychogeography heavily in his last several novels.

But because we had never heard the term, and because the Fighting Flâneur saw no need to introduce it to us, we were about to embark on our first ever dérive, completely unaware. First, however, as Debord would have likely suggested, we needed booze.

As we walked to Steamworks Brew Pub, Orr explained the significance of his map: through drawing it, he said, he realized that his entire life radiated eastward from his front door. “For whatever reason I always step out and turn left; never right.”

It was his segue to the grand theme of the tour. Beers in hand, we wandered aimlessly through the crumbling alleys of the Downtown Eastside, Orr pointing out historic landmarks, literally as we tripped over them, and explaining their significance in the growth of the city in two directions: east, with big sugar and asian labour; and west, with the CPR and wealthy landowners.

Senses assaulted by the stench and poverty of the back alleys, Orr provided the historical context for the polarization of the city visible right before our eyes.

The Flâneur, whose mom is a historian, is a knowledgeable if somewhat scatterbrained guide, and our allotted twenty minutes expired quickly. With the unlikeliness of anyone else showing up for a tour, and no other commitments on a lazy Saturday, we opted to purchase more beer and extend the dérive.

Our next stop was the overpass in Andy Livingstone Park, where we lingered and learned that the swarms of tiny flies we kept running into were balls of mating insects. At the soccer field below we sat in the shade provided by one of the enormous lightposts and observed how hot the turf was compared to the real grass. Soon, we found ourselves traversing the Adanac Bike Trail, trespassing at the Jimi Hendrix Shrine, and walking the lanes of Strathcona. Finally, we entered the cool of the Cottonwood Community Garden, where we had a nap.

I hadn’t realized it, but by this time we’d been walking for nearly three hours and had covered almost ten kilometers, occupying ourselves with nothing but chatter on the scenery, neighbourhoods and architecture we had been passing. As we realized this, Orr explained that the goal of his walking tour was to reconnect people with their physical environment.

Laying down in the bark mulch, everyone agreed: it was the best walking tour they’d never been on.

And while it may never achieve the popularity of a half-covered bus tour, it’s still tempting to imagine a future rife with psychogeographic tours, where men like Orr lead packs of visor-clad Japanese tourists, yanking them along bike-trails and through eastside alleys, asking:

“So, where do you want to go?”

Every Saturday, noon until four. Sign-up here.

Tags: derive, Guy Debord, psychogeography, Sean Orr