Flânerie 1 as an activity of strolling and looking carried out by the flâneur is a persistent motif in literature, sociology and art concerned with urban and specifically metropolitan culture. During the nineteenth century the flâneur was conceptualised as exclusively male, since women were not able to walk around the city with the same freedom as men. Women were firmly entrenched in the domestic sphere and it was only lower and working class women who entered the masculine public sphere on a regular basis (Wolff 1990:35). Therefore, the experience of the city stroller of the modernist era was mainly attributed to the male and the idea of the female flâneur inconceivable.

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Articulations of the city as a gendered construct 1Since the onset of mechanisation and industrialisation from the beginning of the nineteenth century, machine culture has developed into the fibre of the global world. Today the contemporary city's ontology manifests as a condition of transitivity evident in the mobility of communication networks and high-volume traffic on highways. The effect of this decidedly techno-scientific environment on the behaviour and emotions of people is a topic that, since the commencement of such technologisation, has received much attention in socio-cultural theories, literature and the visual arts.

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