Streets for Cyborgs: The Electronic Flaneur and the Posthuman City

This paper separates the city and the street in order to examine them as concepts which
order our experience of both cyberspatial worlds and the 'posturban' city. The extraordinary
persistence of the flâneur and his successor, the cyberflâneur , despite both having been
pronounced 'dead' can be attributed to the need to reconcile these concepts in the
continued reproduction of urban subjectivities under the terms of global capitalism.
However, there is a tension between the understanding of embodiment which the practice
of flânerie mandates and new ontological concepts emerging from the way that the
biological sciences now write the body. I will argue that new practices of spatial production
which subvert the conceptual cartography of contemporary urban space can emerge from
an understanding of the street as responsive to a posthuman performance of embodiment.