Walk more in your city. It could open up new horizons.

As downtown DC and commercial centers in other cities seek a new, post-pandemic identity, we needn’t wait for them to magically evolve. The future identity of the District begins with us — the people who spend time here. Urban planner Will Selman encourages us to develop a stronger relationship to place, starting from within and with “flânerie.”

Selman defines the French word as walking about the city, unhurried, just observing and people-watching. Slowing down may seem like a luxury for the busy set, but intentional wandering is essential for nurturing a healthy relationship to place.

So yes, go ahead, and stay on the right side of the metro escalator, unglue your eyes from the cellphone and look around you. Connect to find the story.

For Selman, the city can be a vibrant, living classroom for personal growth. Engaging in flânerie can help layers fresh “maps of meaning” on everyday surroundings — maps that tell stories, filled with personal symbolism.

“Not being a flâneur is like going to the New York Public Library and not noticing that there are books there,” he says. “You miss out.”

“The way that Pierre L’Enfant laid out DC streets was a way to tell a story,” he continues, referring to the French-American military engineer who designed the district’s preliminary layout in 1791.

Our cities, ourselves

That rich and ever-intriguing story became the inspiration for Selman’s first book, Temenos: The Design and Experience of Urbanism as Spiritual Path (Mandorla Books, 2023). which examines symbolic urbanism as well as the interplay between flânerie and psychological healing. An entire chapter is dedicated to DC.

How he came to see DC as a classroom for self-knowledge started nearly 20 years ago when he moved to the area. Since then he has continually investigated symbolic urbanism in the district — literally on foot, of course—but also on bicycle and public transit. He lives car-free.

Selman’s book emerged from a time in his life when major personal losses pushed him toward a spiritual quest. During his healing journey, he started blogging as The UrbanEvolutionary, where he wrote about “nocturnal flaneury” [sic] that featured long-distance bike rides in the middle of the night all over DC and north Virginia.

One particular linden tree, close to a DC boundary stone along the Potomac River, served as a meditation post. Flânerie became a healing modality.

Witnessing a city mindfully was nothing new. In Paris, where he spent part of his childhood, he started falling in love with the imaginative story “told” by cities. As an adult dealing with grief, being a flâneur helped put the relationship of the outer world to his inner, emotional world into perspective.

Encouraged by readers and a publisher he met at an urban sustainability conference, Selman wrote Temenos as a love letter to cities. The end result was an eclectic, hybrid memoir. Here are two of what Selman calls his “unusual ideas,” grounded in the Congress of New Urbanism, but mixed with his views on spirituality and related subjects.

The city as a classroom

One of those unusual ideas is the marriage of Jungian psychology with urbanism.

Working through the industrial age and two world wars, Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung (1875-1961) questioned what place ancient, collective myths and symbols could have in modernity. He thought psychology would eventually replace religion.

In Selman’s Jung-inspired view, modern cities can be overly utilitarian and soulless, yet city-dwellers still deeply need symbolism — something to spark that story of lived experience in urban settings. Borrowing the term “non-secular” from novelist Toni Morrison, Selman envisions a civic commons that reflects shared values instead of stale religious ideas. “Religion filled a need to make meaning, and that need is still very much with us,” he says. “I’m looking at ways a physical setting gives us a renewed way to participate with our psyche.” Looking at DC through a Jungian lens during countless hours of flânerie helped Selman see the potential of cities to inspire new symbols and myths in our more secular, pluralistic culture.

“The city is a classroom where we can experience what it means to be human,” he continues. “Symbolic urbanism looks at environments in a way that supports individual psychic well-being.”

The story is in the streets

Another Selman concept is seeing DC as a living laboratory for symbolic urbanism. The simple act of paying more attention while walking is one way to revitalize our relationship to where we spend time. For Selman, this has always been true — even before the pandemic forced non-essential workers to stay home and radically upend their sense of place.

“DC is an extremely rare place that was designed as one giant metaphor,” Selman says. “You are immersed in a personal and national psychological conversation, which is what I think L’Enfant was intending.” Temenos features a chapter that summarizes the work of prior authors who have explored L’Enfant’s design. Selman also shares his own geometric sketches overlaid on topography that reveal what L’Enfant did (or didn’t) have in mind for the then-fledgling capital. He concludes that L’Enfant had employed a variety of Baroque design traditions in ways never before seen, all of them leading to a “map of meaning.”

Setting aside the obvious historical symbols of the district that capture the popular imagination—monuments and temples, to name a few—Selman believes that DC is the perfect setting for the ever-curious flâneur seeking various layers of story in a city.

“Your inner world is a ‘city,’ too,” he continues. “We are populated by different personalities. When we’re walking and observing the life of a city, that’s the outer expression of what’s going on. It’s an opportunity to get in touch with your own state of being with that of the wider world.”

Becoming a symbolic urbanist

The final chapter of Temenos is chock-full of ideas on becoming a day-to-day symbolic urbanist. Making your own “map of meaning” includes adopting a place, attending planning meetings, learning history, buying local, going car-free, painting, or journaling about experiences with the symbolic urbanist mindset.

Of course, engaging in flânerie is probably the easiest yet most profound way—just go outside and walk mindfully. “Often we feel that we need to run off into nature to have an experience that will impact our lives, but it can happen in the city,” he says.

In fact, for Selman, the city is full of opportunities to have “non-secular” but still deeply meaningful experiences. The Greek word temenos in the title of his book means a plaza in front of or surrounding a temple, but in Selman’s context, the temenos can be any space that inspires modern city dwellers to play with symbolism.

The consummate flâneur can walk on a planned route or engage in random explorations of something new. While wandering city streets, a flâneur can observe built environments and the way people interact with them.

Selman insists that the point is not to “empty the mind as in meditation” but to engage surroundings in a detached manner. “The places we build reflect the values we hold,” says Selman. “That is something that will hopefully pop up in the process for any flâneur. Ask yourself: “What values does this place reflect for me?’”

If you’d like to learn more about this approach to knowing your city, you could try visiting the Institute for Symbolic Urbanism, a central website where Selman is incubating and implementing many of the ideas he explores in the book.

Earlier this year, Selman established a group for Symbolic Urbanists, which he describes as anyone interested in “the role a city can play in creating a life of meaning and purpose, through myth, symbol, and poetry.” The group meets monthly in Penn Quarter with a motley crew of architects, urban planners, marketing consultants, grad students, neurosurgeons, and more. Selman is planning a day-long walking tour of Washington DC in the coming months. To learn more, visit Jungian Psychology and Urbanism Meetup.