Summer flânerie challenge

Learning to read places

Here’s the challenge I’m setting to my Year 11 students for the summer holidays as they move into their A Level course. Feel free to join in!

Explore a small area. It could be local to you or a new place. Walk around with no purpose, destination or route in mind. Aim only to have your eyes, ears and other senses open to the world and to experience the place as a Geographer.

Try to get beyond the obvious GCSE points (‘there is a CBD with shops’ or ‘the river has a high discharge’) and think carefully about the human and physical processes that shaped that place and make it different to others.

You should record your observations through annotated photographs in whatever format you think appropriate. You might like to produce a StoryMap, you can see an example of such a StoryMap here.

If you do have a go, please share your results in the comments.

One write up of a flânerie fieldtrip

(Flâneur is a nineteenth century French term to describe ‘a gentleman stroller of city streets’. Free from the demands of work, flâneurs ambled slowly and aimlessly around the city observing urban life as cities underwent great change. I use the term loosely here to mean someone who slows down to notice the details of places that we often miss as we rush through them on our way somewhere else.)