Fascinating. A flanuer/poet friend of mine says the same thing about getting to know a city.

definitely! I couldn't agree more. when my friend and I were staying in Rome, it was August and the busses never came, so we just walked and walked the whole time and it was wonderful. You find out so many more things than you would flying by.

Unlike other places, cities are hard to familiarize. Especially in highly urbanized cities, the tendency to get lost is so high. Familiarizing an entire city takes months and even years. As a start, stolling around would help.

Some years ago, I took to boarding a random subway in New York and riding some distance, then to find my way back to my Midtown apartment over the next pleasant hour or so on foot. New Yorkers live in a fragmented city. We go to the Met, or to the Theater District, or to the East Village, and these are separate islands within our island, separate universes so wildly different from each other that they seem to have no connection.

Walking miles and miles through the city is like sewing a patchwork quilt. Each of the pieces is so familiar, but they form a new pattern when you thread them together.

Please do come to New York and sew it together for yourself. Then drop by for tea and we'll compare notes.

Is there an American Iain Sinclair? Or is the literary tradition built around the road rather than the sidewalk/pavement?

There is also kayaking around a city, as Eric Rodenbeck was supposed to have done in 1993, when you could still moor on the Brooklyn Bridge pylons. Beware the changing tides!