Chronique “Interzone”
Article reserved for subscribers. The Olympic Games are urban and real estate projects that transform the city into a spectacle and public space into merchandise. A stroll through the capital, so dear to the German philosopher, is now a dystopian adventure.
I wonder what Walter Benjamin would think of Paris’s current Olympic project if he were to arrive in the city he loved so much today. He would likely meet the same fate as the main character in Eduardo Mendoza’s novel “Sin noticias de Gurb”, in which an extraterrestrial lands in Barcelona in 1991, a year before the Olympic Games. Just as the unfortunate Gurb fell into one of the many ditches opened by various companies carrying out city reform works.
The new “passages” are inside his smartphone. A timid attempt at a stroll would be enough for Benjamin to realize that in the immediately Olympic Paris, the flâneur is dead. Not only because they risk falling into a ditch, but because if they manage to survive, they are condemned to walk forever in a miniaturized city, a “fifteen-minute city” where the law of telework and teleconsumption prevails, and where each neighbor is required not to leave their own district. The flâneur ol
