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Unruly Places: Lost Spaces, Secret Cities, and Other Inscrutable Geographies

Autor Alastair Bonnett
en Limba Engleză Hardback – 8 iul 2014
A tour of the world’s hidden geographies—from disappearing islands to forbidden deserts—and a stunning testament to how mysterious the world remains today
At a time when Google Maps Street View can take you on a virtual tour of Yosemite’s remotest trails and cell phones double as navigational systems, it’s hard to imagine there’s any uncharted ground left on the planet. InUnruly Places, Alastair Bonnett goes to some of the most unexpected, offbeat places in the world to reinspire our geographical imagination.
Bonnett’s remarkable tour includes moving villages, secret cities, no man’s lands, and floating islands. He explores places as disorienting as Sandy Island, an island included on maps until just two years ago despite the fact that it never existed. Or 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. Or 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.
An intrepid guide down the road much less traveled, Bonnett reveals that the most extraordinary places on earth might be hidden in plain sight, just around the corner from your apartment or underfoot on a wooded path. Perfect for urban explorers, wilderness ramblers, and armchair travelers struck by wanderlust,Unruly Placeswill change the way you see the places you inhabit.
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Specificații

ISBN-13: 9780544101579
ISBN-10: 054410157X
Pagini: 288
Ilustrații: 10 b-w section openers
Dimensiuni: 140 x 210 x 29 mm
Greutate: 0.38 kg
Editura: HMH Books
Colecția Mariner Books
Locul publicării:United States

Recenzii

“It’s not so much the idea of the journey, or even movement that Alastair Bonnett has on its mind...Here, it’s all about location, location, location...He takes the reader to ‘the ends of the earth and the other side of the street,’ illuminating why it is that place matters and demands our attention – lest we lose the very essence of who we are..." --The New York Times Book Review

"Delightfully quirky." —Ron Charles, Washington Post
"Fascinating...A conversational, thoroughly researched, and very engaging armchair tour of what might be seen as a parallel planet to the one we live in every day—one in which nothing is ordinary...Alastair Bonnett is a most excellent traveling companion." —The Atlantic
"Unruly[Places] overflows with amazing examples of the world's hidden places." —Entertainment Weekly
"[Bonnett] takes us to one-of-a-kind, off-the-grid areas—from Cappadocia to Camp Zeist to Chitmahais—in this inspired, instructive travelogue on earth's lost spaces, breakaway nations, no-man's-lands, floating islands, and secret enclaves." —Elle

"Bonnett is an excellent guide and literary companion. He wears his learning and his prejudices lightly, leaving the reader to join the geopolitical dots. He succeeds in making the strange familiar and the familiar strange, fully justifying his conclusion that "ordinary places are also extraordinary places; the exotic can be around the corner or right under our feet." —Los Angeles Times

"A chronicle of the world’s missing and hidden treasures...Bonnett manages to imbue the mundane—a traffic island in Newcastle, England—with the same gravitas given to the politically and historically weighty—an empty decoy city in North Korea meant to lure defectors from its southern neighbor." —The Daily Beast
"Alastair Bonnett shows us that our maps still hold plenty of secrets...The geography of the unknown has never been so comprehensible." —Mother Jones

"[A] delightfully outlandish travelogue. You’ll never look at a map—or your own backyard—the same way again." —O, The Oprah Magazine
"Fascinating...A comforting read, much like dipping into a highly intelligent travel magazine, a book that teases the imagination while remaining firmly rooted in the factual." —Boston Globe
"If you’re someone who can happily while away the hours leafing through old atlases or scrolling through Google Maps, this is the book for you...[A] wonderful book." —Seattle Times
"An ideal travel tome."  —Pauline Frommer, Frommers.com

"Looking at even the most familiar landscapes through his eyes opens up new ways of seeing. " —The Columbus Dispatch
"Thought-provoking...Unruly Placesis a timely call to rethink our relationship to the map." —Men's Journal
"Fizzingly entertaining and enlightening." —The Telegraph
“A fascinating delve into uncharted, forgotten, and lost places. . . . not just a trivia-tastic anthology of remote destinations but a nifty piece of psychogeography, explaining our human need for these cartographical conundrums." —Wanderlust
“Unruly Places works to re-enchant the world by introducing us to unlikely places: places that exist but cannot be found on any map, places on maps that do not exist, islands that disappear or suddenly appear, deserts that form out of lakes, and labyrinths beneath cities. Carefully avoiding nostalgia and rose-tinted topophilia, Bonnett manages to reveal a myriad of ways in which place and geography still matter.” —Tim Cresswell, author ofPlace, An Introductionand professor of history and international affairs, Northeastern University
“Through dozens of punchy tales, Bonnett takes us on an imaginative grand tour of the most exceptional places in the world, reminding us that even in an age of seemingly total surveillance, the world is teeming with geographic mysteries.” —Bradley Garrett, author ofExplore Everything
"An inspiring compendium of unusual destinations that will ignite your wanderlust." —Shelf Awareness
"Bonnett’s charming, pensive prose and light-handed erudition illuminates the stubborn human impulse to find a home in the unlikeliest places." —Publishers Weekly
"A wonderful collection of a few dozen geographical enchantments, places that defy expectations and may disturb and disorient yet rekindle the romanticism of exploration and the meaning of place...A scintillating poke to our geographical imaginations." —Kirkus Reviews(STARRED review)
"This book will satisfy armchair travelers as well as those who appreciate thought-provoking journeys." —Library Journal

Notă biografică

ALASTAIR BONNETT is a professor of social geography at Newcastle University. The author of numerous academic texts, he served as editor of the avant-garde, psycho-geographical magazineTransgressions: A Journal of Urban Exploration.
 

Extras

Introduction

Our fascination with remarkable places is as old as geography. Eratosthenes’sGeographika, written around 200 B.C., offers a tour of numerous “famous” cities and “great” rivers, while the seventeen volumes of Strabo’sGeography, 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’sReal England, Marc Augé’sNon-Places, and James Kunstler’sThe 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 historyThe Fate of PlaceCasey 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 thanterra firma,” wanting to think about place can seem a little perverse. Yet placelessness is neither intellectually nor emotionally satisfying. Sir Thomas More’s Greek neologismutopiamay 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, inMoby-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.

Cuprins

   INTRODUCTION    ix
   Lost 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

Descriere

A beautiful tour of the world’s hidden geographies—from disappearing islands to forbidden deserts—and a stunning testament to how mysterious the world remains today