Published irregularly and difficult to find, Flaneur Magazine focuses each time on a small microcosm to tell universal stories with a refined visual and literary approach. The pleasure of street-by-street exploration must be savored slowly.

The First Few Covers of the Magazine – Photo Courtesy: Flaneur Magazine

[…] This city is an accumulation of completely unrelated artifacts. We delve into their beauty and try to reorder them anew. In this land of our time, the logic of the linear is replaced by the logic of fragments, the desire for fragments. The beyond begins here, the absolute deceleration, our own lack of knowledge as the only indicator of existence.

Well, artistic ambitions aside, vivisecting a street every now and then seems like a good idea to keep your adventurous spirit alive in times of noise and frenzy.

We can look at a city as a simple repository of buildings, monuments, streets, restaurants, shops, squares, and green spaces devoid of life but with a glorious past. As tourists though, it’d be nice if a city map could reveal something more, such as places and cultural initiatives creatively shaped by the local community.

Remapping the City: A Map of Madrid and Its Community Initiatives – Illustration by Los Madriles

An alternative mapping project like that of Los Madriles in Madrid, Spain can then become a new way of looking at the urban territory and fully understand its great diversity. All major cities should have one, don’t you agree?

There are so many awards that celebrate European cities that it is difficult to track them all. Bilbao, the capital of Biscay in northern Spain‘s Basque Country, has just been named European City of the Year by the Academy of Urbanism, a network of built environment experts from across Europe.

2018 Urbanism Awards: Bilbao is Europe’s Best City – Photo Courtesy: SnapwireSnaps @ Pixabay

A well-deserved prize, given that the city, famous for the Guggenheim Museum, has in fact much more to offer and, as the chair of the Academy said, “is a great example of the wholesale transformation of a former industrial city – not just physically, but socially, economically and culturally.”

Even more interesting, we think, is all the work they do to honor great towns, neighborhoods, streets, and places across the UK and Ireland. Actually, there is an award for each of them and this year’s winners are Corby, Byker (Newcastle), Humber Street Fruit Market (Hull), and the Brunswick Centre (London).