The Arcades Project

Walter Benjamin’s “The Arcades Project” describes the arcades, covered passageways, that were popping up everywhere throughout Paris at the beginning of the 1800s. 300 arcades used to be present in Paris, now there are only 30 in existence in the first and second arrondissements. Benjamin worked on “The Arcades Project” for a long span of time, from 1927-1940, and was never actually completed. The arcades were filled with shops, restaurants and such; they symbolized a shift into a society fixated on consuming products. 

Benjamin writes about these arcades, long after most of them were destroyed through the reconstruction of the city. He wrote about them long after their height of popularity and use largely to revisit a time of the past. He uses the image and feelings fixated to one wandering the arcades in the 19th century in order to inspire and motivate the 20th century. A book review in The New York Times titled “Art/Architecture; The Passages of Paris And of Benjamin's Mind” describes this: “For Benjamin, the 20th century is trapped inside the previous century's dream. By interpreting the dream, he hopes to rouse his contemporaries from their collective slumber. The arcade is where the dream was manufactured. Like the factories that produced the wares sold there, the arcade was an industrial machine. It relied on display, advertising, newspapers and the other new technologies of consumer manipulation.” 

The arcades were a safe haven for flâneurs; they were able to wander through the arcades. It was an escape mechanism, one could go to the arcades and use that time to think and dream. The 20th century was filled with WWI, the Great Depression, WWII and other crises. Perhaps Benjamin wanted to revitalize the 20th century by reminding society of a time where dreams were abundant; a way to enlighten the people of his time. 

An excerpt from “The Arcades Project:”

“Thus appear the arcades-first entry in the field of iron construction; thus appear the world exhibitions, whose link to the entertainment industry is significant. Also included in this order of phenomena is the experience of the flâneur, who abandons himself to the phantasmagorias of the marketplace. Corresponding to these phantasmagorias of the market, where people appear only as types, are the phantasmagorias of the interior, which are constituted by man's imperious need to leave the imprint of his private individual existence on the rooms he inhabits. As for the phantasmagoria of civilization itself, it found its champion in Haussmann and its manifest expression in his transformations of Paris.”

We can still use Benjamin’s words that described this dreamlike state of the 19th century to inspire those in the 21 century. Even though the arcades are few today, we can still live like the flâneurs who frequented them. Are there places in Paris in which you felt like a flâneur? Conscious of your surroundings and an observer of society?