According to Turkish novelist Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar, Istanbul's springs could perform miracles. As a child, he recalls meeting an old woman living in an unidentified Arabic city, who would recite the names of Istanbul's springs—Çırcır, Karakulak, Şifa, Hünkâr, Taşdelen, Sırmakeş...—whenever she would fall ill. Gradually, "her lustreless eyes came to life, her whole face grew attentive as though she was listening to things inaudible to us and her hollow cheeks filled out with concentration," and then her fever would steadily drop. Only years later was Tanpınar able to process the spellbinding incident that unfolded before his eyes; the sheer memory of Istanbul as a "city of cool, crystal waters of health" was enough to soothe her pain.

The incident seems to have left an impression on Tanpınar. In his novel Huzur, he describes Istanbul as infrastructurally decrepit, yet filled with presumptuous greenery. Known in English as A Mind at Peace, it narrates the protagonist Mümtaz's forays as he converses with friends, has a love affair, and meanders along the corners of a post-Ottoman city, all the while pondering the future of the new republic torn by war and loss of identity. Tanpınar is unsparing in his depiction of a withering city and understandably so. Empty schools, aging residential blocks, weeds thriving in courtyards and mosques with collapsing domes were common even in wealthy boroughs. Yet, next to dilapidated buildings are majestic trees, his gardens are regular spots for quiet contemplation, and the novel's scenes of affection often take place under pomegranate tree branches. Mümtaz's lover, Nuran, is impressed with the maintenance of a dead chinar etched with Ottoman calligraphy celebrating a Sufi saint, giving the "garden of death the profundity of a masterpiece."

In Turkish literature, it was quite common for mundane locales—residential neighborhoods and half-abandoned infrastructure interspersed with nature—to be depicted with subtle care. The tangibility of everyday urbanity rather than the grandeur of a city's highlights shaped individual and collective sentiments. Celebrated author Sait Faik went so far as to focus his corpus—two novellas, forty poems and one hundred and ninety short stories—on how the küçük adam (little man) navigated and negotiated the city's enigmatic space. In one story an itinerant merchant deals a relatively luxurious item on the sacristy-ridden wartime streets of 1940s Istanbul, cotton candy. He had been in business long before the fall of the empire and was somehow making enough money to drink every night. Faik was intrigued, even more so considering the vendor was advertising his goods while mixing in short poem recitations: "I am skin and bone / I pace up and down the neighborhood."

After Faik passed away, a newspaper article revealed he had many friends from that class—laborers, vagabonds and street children— who were unaware of his status and celebrity. An avid walker, he roamed the streets of Istanbul going wherever his nose led him, discovering street animals, strangers, small gardens, desolate shores. Far from idealizing artisans, prostitutes, and fishermen from afar, his writing found tragedy, solace and introspection through the very lives of Istanbulites he encountered.

Self-styled flâneurs with their verbose meditations on travel and well-intentioned recommendations are likely heirs to Tanpınar and Faik. Popularized by 19th century French poet Charles Baudelaire, flâneurs are described by their contemporary counterparts as individuals comfortably wandering a metropolis as passive observers. Writing about Istanbul, one writer exclaims how streets filled with "carts selling simit...the tables of books at the Sahaflar Çarşısı...the crumbling, vertiginous steps between the Bosporus and the cafes of Cihangir…" all communicated "stories of a teeming city as it is and was." Another recommends exploring Paris by visiting cafes frequented by luminaries such as Camus, Beauvoir and Hemingway or marvel at the "avant-garde digs" of Belleville. Consider Owen Wilson's character in Woody Allen's Midnight in Paris (2011), walking in the warm ambiance of the streets while meeting exaggerated depictions of the city's luminaries, never quite arriving at the film's critique of nostalgia.

Modern flâneurs do distinguish themselves from the stereotypical tourist; the Instagram curator aggressively paddling or passively herded toward the next predetermined hotspot. However, while their meanderings may not be as preordained or culturally myopic, they evoke an image not unlike that of a typical traveler; self-enclosed individuals practicing respectful voyeurism. Interaction with locals is financial, strolls take place in mostly "urbane" districts, and the unease or unpredictability of the streets are ironed out if not ignored. When street ruckus is acknowledged, it is to highlight the city's audacity to hinder a flâneur's desire to be an unencumbered contemplative loner. One self-professed curmudgeon complains Baudelaire would be run over in today's New York, as the rise of frantic gig workers has recently prevented him from practicing an introspective, "peaceable, rhythmic perambulation."

However, the 19th century flâneur was never the complacent pedestrian meandering the streets of Paris. The narrow and crooked medieval Parisian avenues were notoriously restless: makeshift barricades heralded threats of revolution, Haussmann's urban renovations expropriated entire neighborhoods, and bands of badauds (gawkers) gossiped over the latest traffic accident or public suicide. Baudelaire portrayed himself as an individual scouring the city's bedlam in search of poetry, "dueling in dark corners for a rhyme / and stumbling over words like cobblestones." The observer may be "a prince enjoying his incognito wherever he goes," as he famously remarked, but with a sense of gratitude for the crowds: "it becomes an immense source of enjoyment to establish his dwelling in the throng, in the ebb and flow, the bustle, the fleeting and the infinite."

Garnette Cadogan, the Jamaican-born essayist, clearly understands Baudelaire’s sensibility. Walking the streets of 1990s New Orleans and 2000s New York as a black male was a fraught experience, where fearful stares and old women clutching their purses were the least of his concerns. Pedestrian and police assaults, both physical and verbal, kept him from letting his guard down, forcing him to set up rules: “No running, especially at night; no sudden movements; no hoodies...no waiting for friends on street corners, lest I be mistaken for a drug dealer...” Being forced into such arbitrary circumstances was infantilizing, yet Cadogan continued to eagerly walk. Unable to join New York’s historic flâneurs—Walt Whitman, Herman Melville, Alfred Kazin, Vivian Gornick—whom he assumed walked without the threat of surveillance, he instead became a cartographer:

Walking as a black man has made me feel simultaneously more removed from the city, in my awareness that I am perceived as suspect, and more closely connected to it, in the full attentiveness demanded by my vigilance. It has made me walk more purposefully in the city, becoming part of its flow, rather than observing, standing apart.

His circumstances forced him to be more attentive to the city's seemingly mundane details. Only through long walks does one understand the side of New York most visitors avoid; drab bodegas, block parties, and young people on dirt bikes exhibiting a "dalliance with legality." He wants to be invisible for the right reasons, to grasp each borough's rules and rites, to witness their respective "energizing possibilities and severe inequalities and deep ironies."

In Due North, he describes his walks from New York's Upper East Side to the Bronx as one of unraveling the boroughs' contrasting rhythms. His northbound trip began from a picturesque and pristine environment held together by a fragile serenity, "like a museum after closing time," where people were polite yet borderline apathetic. However, such sterility was gradually replaced by the warmth and spontaneity emanating from street chatter, Afro-Caribbean music, and the smell of curry, coating though not overshadowing the reality of urban impoverishment. Bronx's residential buildings may be "four sighs away from collapsing," yet institutions such as the Hunts Point Cooperative Market maintained a sense of vigilance, welcoming outsiders such as himself to learn about distribution and hearken to gossip involving union disputes and local prostitution. Contrary to New York elite assumptions, Cadogan’s cartography concluded it was the Upper East Side that was culturally deprived. The city’s elites lacked exposure to perspectives and temperaments emanating from the Bronx, "stories that are a central part of their city's vibrancy and appeal."

The globetrotting photographer Chris Arnade is a kindred spirit, advocating for what he refers to as thick travel. Thin travelers prioritize tourist-facing shops and districts or ostentatious glamors of urbanity that offer a staged version of a culture. In such regions residents are understandably incentivized to "teach or sell you something," where meaning or purpose is often buried beneath the glitz of commercialism. In contrast, thick travelers meander in residential districts, eat at regional 7-Elevens, and visit unassuming shrines, presumably away from a myriad of distractions vying for attention. Locals are "blending out" by being themselves, allowing outsiders to witness and perhaps even interact with domestic norms, habits, and sentiments.

In Taipei, Arnade once observed a young man entering a neighborhood temple with baggy clothes, a bucket hat, and three tattoos on his forearm. The tattoos—US dollars, brass knuckles, Mercedes Benz logo—in particular, set up against a serene place of worship led him to assume something was amiss. Yet, when the man reverently took off his hat and performed the requisite rituals weaving through the altars and statues, Arnade relented. He allowed his biases to lead to cynicism; the man who seemed like someone from an MTV video was still in his own context seeking meaning through his tradition. The incident also forced him to reflect on the thinness of American life; its transactional, aimless cultural atmosphere thrusting communities into loneliness and chaos.

The photojournalist is well-positioned to make claims of an aspiring ethnologist. He began his career as a photographer talking to and befriending the homeless, addicts, and sex workers of South Bronx. His fellow Brooklynites claimed the area was unsafe and uninteresting, yet like Cadogan he frequented the borough out of sheer curiosity. He was "a gate-crasher, an outsider, a white guy, a banker with a camera," so he walked with self-aware trepidation, though talking to whoever wanted to share their hopes and tribulations. In the urban cacophony and soiled streets of Hunts Point, he found a sense of place and community. There was a McDonald's operating as a communal space, empty lots filled with domino tables, barbershops gleaming with gossip, and bike clubs caring for old Schwinns wealthy New Yorkers had abandoned. However unstable, victims of abuse and drugs formed their own communities under bridges and abandoned buildings, struggling like all other residents of Hunts Point to maintain a sense of dignity. Far from seeing the Bronx as a Potemkin village to be observed from afar, for Arnade it was a phantasmagoric space gradually becoming legible and concrete.

Such thick travel cartography does require time and effort. Cadogan roamed the unglamorous streets of New York for nearly a decade before his first major essay, Walking While Black. Arnade's three-year stint in Hunts Point seems to have influenced his decision to reside in a foreign city for weeks before moving on to the next. The late sociologist William B. Helmreich also spent years walking the streets of New York, methodically documenting nearly every block of the city's five boroughs. This journey involved a six thousand mile march and immolation of nine sneakers, resulting in his acclaimed work The New York Nobody Knows. In its introduction, Helmreich dutifully claims you know when you've walked enough in a particular neighborhood when "the buildings, community centers, noises, smells, and, most of all, conversations, start becoming repetitious."

A few years ago, the philosopher Agnes Callard criticized sentimentalized justifications for travel, such as deepening values, expanding horizons, and globalizing aspirations. By default, travelers are too deferential toward what their friends and guides claim one is supposed to see and subsequently feel. I should appreciate the sights and sounds of Istanbul that communicate 'stories of a teeming city as it is and was'; enjoying Belleville's 'avant-garde digs' does make me a sophisticated cosmopolitan. Callard believes such reverence overshadows sincere introspection; a traveler becomes a spectator equipped with emotional protocols. If a tourist shares the experience of their forerunners it is emotional mimicry; if they don't encounter transcendence, then the whole venture is rendered pointless.

Therefore, universal connection is only possible from a distance, as travel amounts to coercing oneself into becoming an onlooker. Curiously, Callard quotes G. K. Chesterton's travel writing, What I Saw in America, to argue only when we imagine others "in the abstract...as those who labour and love their children and die" we are "thinking the fundamental truth about them." She isn't against traveling for personal pleasure, but finds popular justifications for tourism weighted down by its own sentimentality.

The philosopher does identify a real relationship between transcendence-seeking travelers and their enablers, a dynamic that likely has only increased over the years. Since 2012, TikTok alone has seen a 410% increase in travel vlog viewership and recent research suggests that its storytelling element shapes the behavior of would-be tourists. However, even if one accepts the inevitability of Callard's binary— mindless mimicry or transcendence lost—cartographers and thick travelers would respond, "location, location, location." From the Louvre to Vatican City, she mentions places where locals are still trying to teach or sell, including the falcon hospital in Abu Dhabi that encouraged her to take a photo with a bird. In fact, What I Saw in America echoes the sensibilities of cartographers and thick travelers by emphasizing the significance of a particular culture’s mundane features, i.e., vin ordinaire (cheap wine):

He [a typical traveler] does not realise the sublime and starry paradox of the phrase, vin ordinaire...of the tendency to see that the nation fills up its own gap with its own substitute; or corrects its own extravagance with its own precaution.

Furthermore, Callard seems to misunderstand the central contention of Chesterton’s travelogue. He believed "travel ought to combine amusement with instruction," yet many were prone to seek pleasure by scoffing at foreign exoticism. Such thoughtless tourists were better off picturing others in the abstract, rather than seeing them probe unfamiliar manners and customs for their entertainment. Those who were open to guidance, willing to double their "effort of moral humility and imaginative energy to prevent it from narrowing his mind," were still encouraged to travel. As one of his characters Gabriel Gale remarks in The Poet and the Lunatics, "They say travel broadens the mind; but you must have the mind."

For centuries, the Istanbul district of Beyoğlu (or Pera) exhibited a distinct cosmopolitanism. Agatha Christie wrote Murder on the Orient Express at the Pera Palace Hotel, cafes established by religious minorities were frequented by notables like Tanpınar and Faik, while theaters, brothels, and department stores circumvented conventional ideas of custom and modesty. Some called it Frengistan (Land of the Franks), while the famed Ottoman bureaucrat Ahmed Cevdet Pasha (1822-1895) referred to it as an "isthmus between Europe and the Islamic lands." Yet, its admirable multiculturalism came at a cost, isolation. When a 19th century French ambassador confessed his understanding of Istanbul was fairly limited despite residing there for decades, Cevdet replied: "You lived in Beyoğlu...From here you see Istanbul through a telescope, but the telescopes which you used were always warped." It wasn't the ambassador's nationality, ethnicity or class that necessarily held him back from intercultural fluency, but his inclination to roam exclusively in self-imposed parameters.

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Niels Lee graduated from Yale with a Master's degree in Religious History. He currently works as an editor and has published articles in MERIP, Maydan and the Journal of the History of Ideas Blog. You can find his articles on urbanism here and here.

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