Bon Flâneur
A pioneering exploration tool.
What is Bon Flâneur?
Bon flaneur is a pioneering tool for exploring Athens and Thessaloniki.
The project started simultaneously for the cities of Athens and Thessaloniki, providing free educational information about landmarks or lesser-known reference points. Beyond multifaceted and documented information, the user has a rare opportunity: autonomy.
It is not required to follow groups, make appointments with professionals or even have a physical presence in the city. All you need is a device (mobile phone, tablet, computer) and internet.You can explore everything from anywhere, anytime.
In addition to many free services, the website bonflaneur.com offers the potential of a travel experience, through inexpensive “highlights” or themed routes, which can even be shared with four other members.
With bonflaneur.com you can also create your own routes, according to your preferences, interests and your available time. It is a unique webpage, fully capable of creating an urban experience suitable for you!
Therefore it is not a simple website with information about the city; it is a major “urban hacking” tool that provides a number of services, which cover all the aspects of urban life, useful for residents, students and visitors.
A simple membership registration opens the door to a variety of benefits, such as saving free personalized routes and purchasing – saving and sharing structured routes.
Who is flâneur?
“Flaneur” is the person who walks around the city in an exploratory way, feels its heartbeat, its aura and its society.
He slips from the clichés of the trapped in routine inhabitant or the superficial tourist and becomes one with the essence of the city. There is no term which could better describe our goal and our effort than “flaneur”. “Bon” clearly refers to the term “bon viveur”, because a good and a pleasant urban experience are very much identified with our personal well being.
With Bon Flâneur we interlace electronic with physical public space and the flâneur with the city hacker, creating the new “e- wanderer”, the new well informed urban man.
How is the city code rewritten?
By getting to know the city intimately—not just by being informed about it, but by understanding it in depth. When you truly know something, you gain the power to change it. You become a kind of urban “hacker”, and by claiming the city, you ultimately occupy it. Hence the Bon Flâneur slogan: “occupy the city”.
Who are we?
A sociologist’s passion for the dynamics of urban space and the culture it produces led to the creation of Bon Flaneur.
You will find our members “flaneuring” in the two largest Greek cities. This effort has started from the need to share the secrets of our cities in the best possible way both with citizens and visitors. To spread the world the flaneur’s optics.
Why these two cities?
Because, as Hugo has said about major cities, “they are the melting-pots, where all the geographical, political, ethical and intellectual currents of a country come together, all the natural inclinations of a people, wells of culture, we would also say sewers, commerce, industry, spirit, population, everything that is a juice, everything that is life, everything that is soul for a nation is filtered and accumulated endlessly, drop by drop, century by century”.
What is our goal?
Our will is to prompt the inhabitant to become an observer and student in their own city, and the tourist to become a traveller.
The entire content of Bon Flaneur is copyrighted with electronic timestamping by the Hellenic Copyright Organization of the Ministry of Culture.