Going from place to place doesn’t necessarily mean wasting time on a dull, insipid activity we are forced to do. Journeys may often lack explicit goals, but they can lead to accidental discoveries and become spontaneous sources of knowledge.

The concept of the flâneur, as seen in Walter Benjamin’s book The Arcades Project (Das Passagen-Werk, 1940), has much in common with the Catalan notion of ‘passejant’, given that it goes beyond an individual’s particular relationship with the city and includes all citizens, with all their diversity and history. Meeting local residents is what being a flâneursor ‘passejant’ is all about: in short, feeling at home anywhere and being the centre of a shared emotion. Benjamin’s Arcades Project states that flâneurs do not confine themselves to considering the objects they see with their own eyes but re-live their meanings, as if they were something already experienced, and incorporate them into their knowledge. Which is why, just as literature and films have changed our old perceptions of our city, it is our aim that the anthropological routes will be used for creating new images of public spaces and fitting them into a narrative where they are explained in a reasoned way.