The Dictionary of Human Geography

users will move to a local government admin-
istration that optimizes their tax and services
preferences, trading off the costs of paying
for public services through taxation against
sacrifices in their ability to consume private
services. The model has been used to explore
the geographical consequences of distributed
and competitive local government administra-
tive structures (e.g. Davies, 1982). The process
also operates at an international level, and
underlies the creation of offshore financial
centres, tax havens and export processing
zones, all of which attract international capital
investmentpartly through fiscal incentives that
include tax holidays and other inducements.al

fla^neur/fla^nerie The flaˆneur is associated
with aimless urban wandering and observing,
especially in nineteenth-century Paris, where it
took its first steps. Yet the figure has also
walked further afield, as it has been taken
up more widely in social, cultural and urban
studies as ‘an emblematic representative of
modernity and the personification of con-
temporary urbanity’ (Ferguson, 1994, p. 22).
Despite becoming a common motif, the
flaˆneurand activities offlaˆnerieremain elusive
and resist easy definition, although they
usually involve a solitary and anonymous
male, with the emphasis falling variously on
strolling, idling, watching, writing, artistic cre-
ativity and detection. Many commentators
suggest that it is most productively seen as a
mythological figure, a strategy ofrepresenta-
tion, and thus asocial constructionwithin
discourse more than a sociological reality.
First referenced in 1806, the flaˆneur
received its most famous articulation in the
writings of Charles Baudelaire, for whom it
was a ‘modern hero’ and passionate spectator
who derived poetic meaning from an immer-
sion in thecity, in the fleeting movement and
electrical charge of its crowd. Baudelaire’s
account played an important role in Walter
Benjamin’s investigations of Paris as ‘capital
of the nineteenth century’, and in his attempts
to decipher the phantasmagorias of urban
modernity. In these texts, the increasing com-
modification and rationalization of the city
along with the decline of the arcades meant
that theflaˆneurwas already becoming a dis-
placed and bygone figure. Benjamin’s writings
have remained a key source for subsequent
interest in theflaˆneur, with some critics view-
ing Benjamin’s own approach as being akin
toflaˆneriein its mode of reading metropolitan
spaces through attending to urban fragments
and signs. There have also been multiple

reinventions offlaˆnerie in the arts, cultural

practice and urban studies through recent

interest in other forms of urban walking (see

urban exploration).

Feminist critics have emphasized the exclu-

sivity offlaˆnerie, arguing that a female equiva-

lent – theflaˆneuse– was rendered impossible

by the ideologies and sexual divisions of nine-

teenth- and early-twentieth-century cities that

constrained anonymous and unaccompanied

movement by women. The practice offlaˆnerie

itself, so it is argued, was structured around a

male gaze. However, critical elaborations have

since questioned the extent of the exclusion of

women from the public realm, revealing the

intersections between public and private, and

have also argued that theflaˆneurwas a more

insecure and marginal figure than is often sup-

posed (Wilson, 1991). Writers have further

traced out the possibilities for femaleflaˆnerie

through the development of department

stores, through writing and literary texts and

through early cinema, which enabled a mobile

urban gaze from within the safety and respect-

ability of afilmaudience.

Suchstudieshaveled to re-evaluations of

the (in)visibility of theflaˆneuse(D’Souza and

McDonough, 2006). Dissenting voices never-

theless remain, with Janet Wolff arguing that

the problem with theflaˆneurlies less in its

exclusivity than in the centrality it has been

accorded in urban and cultural studies of

modernity, and in the consequent occlusion

of female experiences. She therefore calls

for theflaˆneur’s ‘retirement’ from centre stage

and for attention to turn instead to the ‘micro-

practices of urban living, and the very specific

ways in which women negotiate the modern

city’. In the process, she claims, questions

of femaleflaˆnerielose importance and ‘women

become entirely visible in their own particular

practices and experiences’ (Wolff, 2006,

p. 28). dp

Suggested reading

D’Souza and McDonough (2006); Tester (1994).

flexible accumulation Aregime of accu-

mulationemphasizing diversity and differen-

tiation rather than the standardization

associated with Fordist modes (seefordism)

of accumulation. Flexible accumulation

requires workers, machinery and manufactur-

ing techniques that can quickly and regularly

innovate and adapt to changes in consumer

tastes, thus generating profit throughecon-

omies of scoperather than theeconomies

of scale. As Harvey (1999 [1982]) points

FLAˆNEUR/FLAˆNERIE

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