Paris

Though convoluted and filled with objects for sale, the arcades offered the common man or woman a brief subterranean escape from a city designed to keep all bodies visible and industrious. In this way, the arcades function more like Deleuze-Guattari's model for smooth space, the space in which "the points are subordinated to the trajectory" (ATP 478). Their structural composition lends way to a space which is conducive to nomadism, in which "dwelling is subordinated to the journey" (ATP 478), and thus these passages become the space of flânerie--of distraction--one of Benjamin's primary obsessions in The Arcades Project.

arcades