Unruly Places: Lost Spaces, Secret Cities, and Other Inscrutable Geographies
288Unruly Places: Lost Spaces, Secret Cities, and Other Inscrutable Geographies
288Overview
At a time when Google Maps Street View can take you on a virtual tour of Yosemite’s remotest trails, it’s hard to imagine there’s any uncharted ground left on the planet. But in Unruly Places, Alastair Bonnett rekindles our geographical imaginations with excursions into some of the world’s most peculiar places—such as moving villages, secret cities, no man’s lands, and floating islands.
Bonnett investigates Sandy Island, a place that appeared on maps until just two years ago despite the fact that it never existed; Sealand, an abandoned gun platform off the English coast that a British citizen claimed as his own sovereign nation, issuing passports and crowning his wife as a princess; Baarle, a patchwork of Dutch and Flemish enclaves where walking from the grocery store’s produce section to the meat counter can involve crossing national borders; and many other curious locales. In this “delightfully quirky” guide down the road much less traveled, Bonnett reveals that the most extraordinary places on earth might be hidden in plain sight (Ron Charles, Washington Post).
Product Details
ISBN-13: | 9780544101609 |
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Publisher: | Houghton Mifflin Harcourt |
Publication date: | 06/11/2020 |
Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
Format: | eBook |
Pages: | 288 |
Sales rank: | 753,947 |
File size: | 9 MB |
About the Author
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Introduction
Our fascination with remarkable places is as old as geography. Eratosthenes’s Geographika, written around 200 B.C., offers a tour of numerous “famous” cities and “great” rivers, while the seventeen volumes of Strabo’s Geography, written in the first years of the first century A.D. for Roman imperial administrators, provides an exhaustive compendium of journeys, cities, and destinations. My favorite of Strabo’s places are the gold mines of India, which, he tells us, are dug by ants “no smaller than foxes” that possess pelts “like those of leopards.” Although our appetite for curious tales from afar has been continuous, today our need for geographical reenchantment is of a different order.
I root my love of place in Epping. It’s one of many commuter towns near London, pleasant enough but generic and placeless. It’s where I was born and grew up. As I used to rattle out to Epping on the Central Line or drive there along London’s orbital motorway, I often felt as if I were traveling from nowhere to nowhere. Moving through landscapes that once meant something, perhaps an awful lot, but have been reduced to spaces of transit where everything is temporary and everyone is just passing through, gave me a sense of unease and a hunger for places that matter.
You don’t have to walk far into our coagulated roadscape to realize that, over the past one hundred years or so and across the world, we have become much better at destroying places than building them. The titles of a clutch of recent books, such as Paul Kingsnorth’s Real England, Marc Augé’s Non-Places, and James Kunstler’s The Geography of Nowhere, indicate an emergent anxiety. These authors are tapping into a widespread feeling that the replacement of unique and distinct places by generic blandscapes is severing us from something important. One of the world’s most eminent thinkers on place, Edward Casey, a professor of philosophy at Stony Brook University, argues that “the encroachment of an indifferent sameness-of-place on a global scale” is eating away at our sense of self and “makes the human subject long for a diversity of places.” Casey casts a skeptical eye over the intellectual drift away from thinking about place. In ancient and medieval thought place was often center stage, the ground and context for everything else. Aristotle thought place should “take precedence of all other things” because place gives order to the world. Casey tells us that Aristotle claimed that place “gives bountiful aegis—active protective support—to what it locates.” But the universalist pretensions of first monotheistic religion and then the Enlightenment conspired to represent place as parochial, as a prosaic footnote when compared to their grand but abstract visions of global oneness. Most modern intellectuals and scientists have hardly any interest in place, for they consider their theories to be applicable everywhere. Place was demoted and displaced, a process that was helped on its way by the rise of its slightly pompous and suitably abstract geographical rival, the idea of “space.” Space sounds modern in a way place doesn’t: it evokes mobility and the absence of restrictions; it promises empty landscapes filled with promise. When confronted with the filled-in busyness and oddity of place, the reaction of modern societies has been to straighten and rationalize, to prioritize connections and erase obstacles, to overcome place with space.
In his philosophical history The Fate of Place Casey charts a growing “disdain for the genus loci: indifference to the specialness of place.” We all live with the results. Most of us can see them outside the window. In a hypermobile world, a love of place can easily be cast as passé, even reactionary. When human fulfillment is measured out in air miles and when even geographers subscribe to the idea, as expressed by Professor William J. Mitchell of MIT, that “communities increasingly find their common ground in cyberspace rather than terra firma,” wanting to think about place can seem a little perverse. Yet placelessness is neither intellectually nor emotionally satisfying. Sir Thomas More’s Greek neologism utopia may translate as “no place,” but a placeless world is a dystopian prospect.
Place is a protean and fundamental aspect of what it is to be human. We are a place-making and place-loving species. The renowned evolutionary biologist Edward O. Wilson talks about the innate and biologically necessary human love of living things as “biophilia.” He suggests that biophilia both connects us together as a species and bonds us to the rest of nature. I would argue that there is an unjustly ignored and equally important geographical equivalent, “topophilia,” or love of place. The word was coined by the Chinese-American geographer Yi-Fu Tuan about the same time as Wilson introduced biophilia, and its pursuit is at the heart of this book.
There is another theme that threads its way throughout the places corralled here—the need to escape. This urge is more widespread today than at any point in the past: since fantastic vacation destinations and lifestyles are constantly dangled before us, it’s no surprise so many feel dissatisfied with their daily routine. The rise of placelessness, on top of the sense that the whole planet is now minutely known and surveilled, has given this dissatisfaction a radical edge, creating an appetite to find places that are off the map and that are somehow secret, or at least have the power to surprise us.
When describing the village of Ishmael’s native ally and friend, Queequeg, in Moby-Dick, Herman Melville wrote, “It is not down in any map; true places never are.” It’s an odd thing to say, but I think it makes immediate, instinctual sense. It touches on a suspicion that lies just beneath the rational surface of civilization. When the world has been fully codified and collated, when ambivalences and ambiguities have been so sponged away that we know exactly and objectively where everything is and what it is called, a sense of loss arises. The claim to completeness causes us to mourn the possibility of exploration and muse endlessly on the hope of novelty and escape. It is within this context that the unnamed and discarded places—both far away and those that we pass by every day—take on a romantic aura. In a fully discovered world exploration does not stop; it just has to be reinvented.
In the early 1990s I got involved with one of the more outré forms of this reinvention, known as psychogeography. Most of the time this involved either drifting in search of what some of my comrades fondly imagined were occult energies or purposely getting lost by using a map of one place to navigate oneself around another. To wander through a day care center in Newcastle while clutching a map of the Berlin subway is genuinely disorienting. In so doing, we thought we were terribly bold, but in hindsight what strikes me about the yearning to radically rediscover the landscape around us is just how ordinary it is. The need for reenchantment is something we all share.
So let’s go on a journey—to the ends of the earth and the other side of the street, as far as we need to go to get away from the familiar and the routine. Good or bad, scary or wonderful, we need unruly places that defy expectations. If we can’t find them we’ll create them, for we are a place-making and place-thinking species. Our topophilia can never be extinguished or sated.
We are headed for uncharted territory, to places found on few maps and sometimes on none. They are both extraordinary and real. This is a book of floating islands, dead cities, and hidden kingdoms. We begin with raw territory, exploring lost places that have been chanced upon or uncovered, before heading in the direction of places that have been more consciously fashioned. It’s not a smooth trajectory, for nearly all of the places we will encounter are paradoxical and hard to define, but it does allow us to encounter a world of startling profusion. As we will quickly discover, this is not the same thing as offering up a rose-tinted planet of happy lands. Authentic topophilia can never be satisfied with a diet of sunny villages. The most fascinating places are often also the most disturbing, entrapping, and appalling. They are also often temporary. In ten years’ time most of the places we will be exploring will look very different; many will not be there at all. But just as biophilia doesn’t lessen because we know that nature is often horrible and that all life is transitory, genuine topophilia knows that our bond with place isn’t about finding the geographical equivalent of kittens and puppies. This is a fierce love. It is a dark enchantment. It goes deep and demands our attention.
The forty-seven places that make up this book are here because they each, in a different way, forced me to rethink what I knew about place. They have not been chosen for being merely outlandish or spectacular but for possessing the power to provoke and disorient. Although they range from the most exotic and grandest projects to modest corners of my own hometown, they are all equally capable of stimulating and reshaping our geographical imagination. Together they conspire to make the world seem a stranger place where discovery and adventure are still possible, both nearby and far away.
Note: Where possible, I have added Google Earth coordinates for the approximate center or location of each place. These coordinates are consistent with each other but cannot be claimed to be exact, in part because they may change each time Google Earth is updated. No coordinates have been given for historical places or places that are mobile.
Table of Contents
INTRODUCTION ixLost Spaces 1
Sandy Island 3
Leningrad 8
Arne 12
Old Mecca 15
New Moore 20
Time Landscape 24
The Aralqum Desert 28
Hidden Geographies 35
The Labyrinth 37
Zheleznogorsk 42
The Underground Cities of Cappadocia 46
Fox Den 51
North Cemetery, Manila 55
North Sentinel Island 59
No Man’s Lands 67
Between Border Posts (Guinea and Senegal) 69
Bir Tawil 73
Nahuaterique 77
Twayil Abu Jarwal 82
Traffic Island 87
Dead Cities 93
Wittenoom 95
Kangbashi 100
Kijong-dong 104
Ag˘dam 108
Pripyat 114
The Archaeological Park of Sicilian Incompletion 119
Spaces of Exception 125
Camp Zeist 127
Geneva Freeport 132
Bright Light, 4 Mures Street, Bucharest 136
International Airspace 141
Gutterspace 144
Bountiful 148
Mount Athos 153
Ranch of Sprouts: Brotas Quilombo 158
FARC-controlled Colombia 163
Hobyo 168
Enclaves and Breakaway Nations 175
Baarle-Nassau and Baarle-Hertog 177
Chitmahals 183
Sealand 188
United Kingdom of Lunda Tchokwe 193
Gagauzia 198
Floating Islands 205
Pumice and Trash Islands 207
Nipterk P-32 Spray Ice Island 212
The Floating Maldives 216
The World 221
Ephemeral Places 227
Hog’s Back Lay-By 229
LAX Parking Lot 234
Nowhere 238
Stacey’s Lane 242
CONCLUSION 247
BIBLIOGRAPHY 252
ACKNOWDLEGMENTS 253
INDEX 254