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

by Alastair Bonnett

  Yet any survival from the past irritates the purists, who want complete control of the city. Apologists for Saudi turbo-iconoclasm claim that it is entirely religiously inspired. The country’s highest religious authority, Sheikh Abdul-Aziz Ibn Baz, issued a fatwa in 1994 decreeing, “It is not permitted to glorify buildings and historical sites . . . Such action would lead to polytheism.” The sheikh was repeating a mantra that has been stamped on this land for a little over two hundred years. The Wahhabis, the Islamic faction to which the Saudi dynasty belongs, took control of Mecca and Medina in 1803. From the first they were intent on tearing down visible associations with other, older, and less puritanical varieties of Islam. The mausoleums and mosques cared for and often elaborately embellished by the Ottomans were a particular target, including the tomb of Muhammad himself. The tussle between the Ottomans and the Wahhabis over whether to revere or destroy the physical heritage of Islam entered another phase when the Ottomans managed to take back Mecca and Medina between 1848 and 1860. But by the century’s end the holiest places in Islam were firmly back in the hands of a sect that regards respect for Mecca’s past as idolatrous.

  The destruction of old Mecca goes hand in hand with the ban on non-Muslims entering the city, as well as the center of Medina. Both are attempts to cleanse the city of historical complexity. The road signs on the freeway into Mecca spell it out: “Muslims Only.” A side road taking cars away from town is marked, “Obligatory for Non-Muslims.” Of course there are plenty of bans on nonadherents entering religious sites around the world, including non-Mormons and non-Hindus entering Mormon and Hindu temples, at least during services and rituals. But the scale of the ban in Mecca, which prohibits five-sixths of the world’s population from entering not just one building but an entire city, makes it unique. The Qur’an has a verse that instructs, “Truly the idolaters are unclean; so let them not, after this year, approach the Sacred Mosque.” It’s not a prohibition on entering Mecca but on entering the Grand Mosque. The citywide ban is another invention of the Wahhabi Saudis. Ironically, before they seized the city, the Wahhabis themselves were deemed heterodox and banned from its holy places by the city’s sharif, or holy steward.

  Yet if the motivations are entirely religious, why have both secular and religious historical buildings been targeted for demolition? It’s worth recalling that communist regimes also claimed to have purely ideological motives for knocking down old buildings, but their actions can today be seen as more to do with securing power and profits. Mecca is a boomtown with a guaranteed and growing flow of cash-rich pilgrims. “All the top brands are flocking here,” says John Sfakianakis, the former chief economist of Banque Saudi Fransi. Starbucks, The Body Shop, Topshop, Tiffany & Co., Claire’s accessories, and Cartier are just a few of the labels that are benefiting. The iconoclasm inflicted on Mecca is providing the perfect environment for the growth of consumerism. Nothing stands in the way of spending: no signs or symbols of the kind of slower, less frenzied, and more heterogeneous way of life that must have existed here before history was erased.

  The destruction of old Mecca and the ban on non-Muslims impose a singular vision of the city’s past and future. They also provoke nostalgia for that lost diversity. Like Leningrad, as old Mecca recedes from reality it emerges as a place of fantasy and critique. In an ancient city like Mecca the glaring absence of the past becomes its own form of presence, something intangible but also something permanent and important that lies inside the city’s story and which can never be entirely extinguished.

  New Moore

  21° 37′ 00″ N, 89° 08′ 30″ E

  Dramatic storms and floods can reshape a landscape overnight. The island of New Moore emerged a few kilometers out to sea in the Bay of Bengal after Cyclone Bhola in 1971, and was built up from the soil, sand, and stones that had been tumbled down the many rivers that make up the vast braided landscape of the Ganges Delta. The island grew quickly, eventually reaching 3.5 kilometers in length and 3 kilometers in width. A handful of Bangladeshi fishermen lived on the island during the dry season but it was otherwise uninhabited. Apart from a cluster of mangrove trees, there was little to keep New Moore in one place. Its size and shape shifted with the seasons and the tides.

  New Moore could hardly have chosen a more delicate spot in which to take residence, since the Hariabhanga River from which it sprang forms the border between India and Bangladesh. As soon as it crested the water, both countries claimed it as their own, each giving it a different name. For the Indians it was New Moore Island, which remains its most commonly used name, but for the Bangladeshis it is South Talpatti. Either way it was a rich prize. India and Bangladesh have overlapping claims on the Bay of Bengal and its oil and gas reserves. Being able to claim a new island so far out to sea would allow one of them to extend its territorial waters over lucrative seabed.

  As a signal of intent, the Indian Border Security Force installed a billboard on the island in 1978, complete with a map of India and a picture of the Indian flag. The Indians raised the temperature again in May 1981 when they temporarily stationed troops on the island and ran a real flag up a real flagpole. For a while the question of which country this sandy speck belonged to looked as if it might lead to a serious conflict. Both sides, however, hoped that the conclusive shots would come from independent boundary experts. Those experts were tasked with determining how the waters of the Hariabhanga flowed around the island. This arcane information could have been decisive if it could have pinpointed the river’s thalweg, a German word used in boundary disputes involving rivers that refers to the line of a river’s lowest, and hence middle, flow. If the thalweg was to the east of the island, then it was India’s; if it was west of the island, it belonged to Bangladesh.

  As it was, the thalweg proved hard to determine, and delays set in. But before the problem was sorted out, New Moore began to disappear, and in March 2010 it was fully submerged. The last photograph of the young island shows the topmost branches of drowned trees clawing the waters.

  Rising sea levels are creating new shorelines at a rate that is outstripping governments’ abilities to respond. Since 2000 the waters of the Bay of Bengal, which were already rising, have been getting higher, quicker. The bay now sees a rise of about five millimeters a year. In a low-lying region, subject to sudden inundations, that’s a significant increase. For some, New Moore looked like a political problem caused by nature and solved by climate change. The Christian Science Monitor ran the story as “Global Warming as Peacemaker.” In fact, separating out what is natural about either the rise or the fall of New Moore isn’t that easy. Only one of the contributing factors falls simply into the category of “natural”: the sinking of a tectonic plate. This subsidence is gradually lowering the land under and around the Bay of Bengal and increasing sea levels in the process.

  And climate change is making the situation worse, not better. It can be blamed not only for accelerating the cycle of creation and destruction but also for the severity of recent floods. The increased rainfall that created the swollen rivers that, in turn, gave birth to New Moore was the direct result of the warmer seas caused by climate change. Road-building upstream also contributed to New Moore’s creation, by triggering landslides that added huge loads of sediment to the river. Unfortunately, deforestation across the region, especially the axing of mangrove trees along the coast, meant that the new sediment did not sink at the shoreline and help defend the coastline but instead was carried far out to sea.

  New Moore is not the only island that has come and gone in the Bay of Bengal. On the Indian side at least four other islands have emerged and then vanished. One of these, Lohachara, had a population of six thousand before it went under in 2006. Recently it has been spotted rising again. It seems that neither the appearance nor disappearance of these islands is a one-off event. They are rising and falling with greater frequency, a phenomenon that has been noted at other estuaries across the world. One of the most famous new islands emerged in France in January 200
9, after Cyclone Klaus hit southwestern France. The Gironde estuary deposited what was soon named L’île Mystérieuse seven miles out to sea. Covering 250 acres at low tide, L’île Mystérieuse was caused by many of the same processes as New Moore. The waters of the Bay of Biscay are not rising as fast as those of the Bay of Bengal, and with luck L’île Mystérieuse may be around for longer than New Moore, since new islands off lowland coasts can be very useful. Their environmental worth doesn’t lie in pushing back territorial claims but in protecting coastal areas from storms and inundation. They could also provide additional land for overpopulated nations. In a world where coastline change is speeding up and becoming more unpredictable, such outcrops should be given a helping hand. New Moore could be raised up and bulked out and held in place with mangrove trees. It would be an inexpensive task, at least when compared with the construction of entirely new islands.

  As has become clear, sea level rise doesn’t augur a dawn of fun holiday islets but a wearisome struggle to protect low-lying land. Projections suggest that much of the Bay of Bengal, from Kolkata in the west to Myanmar in the east, will soon be under water. Initial predictions by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warn that Bangladesh will lose about 17 percent of its landmass by 2050. More recent work by the Dhaka-based Center for Environmental and Geographic Information Services indicates that much of this land will not be lost permanently but seasonally, during monsoon. Either way, it’s a growing problem in a country where every hour an average of eleven people already lose their homes to rising water.

  New Moore represents far more than a dispute over territorial waters. It is a serendipitous and heavy nudge toward a more proactive approach to sustaining coastal islands. Living in a delta-based country, Bangladeshis are used to the idea that islands can come and go, and they have the skills to hang on to them. Another recent arrival shows how it is done. Nijhum Dwip, or Silent Island, emerged in the early 1950s. Although much of the island is regularly flooded, it has now been stabilized and consolidated, largely thanks to the planting of mangrove trees. More than ten thousand people live there, along with deer, monkeys, and a planned tiger sanctuary. In 2001 it was designated a national park.

  Given assistance, new islands like New Moore can become viable places. It’s true that we don’t know if land-building activities can outpace the rise of the sea, and pessimistic forecasts suggest that the only long-term solution for many coastal areas is abandonment. But for the time being there is no reason to run for the hills. Rather, we need to extend our idea of what local conservation consists of. Twenty-first-century conservation will need to include not just protecting species and ecosystems but island-making too. Islands do not need to be left to sink; they can be managed and sustained. With help, New Moore could rise again.

  Time Landscape

  40° 43′ 37″ N, 73° 59′ 58″ W

  At the corner of LaGuardia Place and West Houston Street in New York is a rectangle of land, fenced in and inaccessible to the public, that since 1978 has been given over to lost nature. This quarter-acre plot was planted by the artist Alan Sonfist with species native to the area. Red cedar, black cherry, and witch hazel, along with groundcover of Virginia creeper, pokeweed, and milkweed—the kind of flora that would have been found in the city before the seventeenth century.

  Time Landscape was the first major work to emerge from ideas that Sonfist had been nurturing for some while. In a manifesto published in 1968, “Natural Phenomena as Public Monuments,” he called for environmental equivalents of war memorials. Such places would become monuments to vanished landscapes, places of reflection that record and remind us of “the life and death of natural phenomena such as rivers, springs, and natural outcroppings.”

  Time Landscape is designed to “be a reminder that the city was once a forest.” It is also a more personal reminder. Sonfist admitted in a recent interview with John Grande that much of his work “began in my childhood when I witnessed the destruction of the forest, walking in the Bronx.” Yet in its completed state Time Landscape poses some difficult questions about the defense of nature’s lost places. For Time Landscape is constantly being invaded by alien, post-Colonial weeds like morning glory and sow thistle. Sonfist said he is not bothered, arguing that “this is an open lab, not an enclosed landscape” and that he always meant there to be an interplay between species.

  Yet if that is the case, then Time Landscape is a rather hollow memorial. It is precisely its exacting evocation of the past that makes it different from any other bit of green space in the city. It’s no surprise that New York City’s Department of Parks and Recreation, which now manages the site, is less blasé about alien weeds. All such invasive species are cleared out at intervals. Time Landscape has become a unique if rather low-key asset in the department’s program called Greenstreets, which it says is designed to convert “paved street properties, like triangles and malls, into green lawn.” The department wants to preserve Time Landscape as art. Thus it has become subject to another type of preservation, another attempt to stay the corruption of time.

  Removing the weeds from Time Landscape maintains it as past art. Without all that grubbing up, its temporal direction would get much harder to read: it would be less clear whether it was pointing backward or forward. Critics say Time Landscape has been “museumified,” that it’s now a dead place and of little public benefit. In fact, its layers of preservation have combined to make it ever more complex and disconcerting. Time Landscape has gotten weirder, for it now confronts us with an uncomfortable paradox: as we try to revere nature, it slips through our fingers, leaving us holding something we never expected, something unnatural.

  The city is a place where nature is excised and then mourned, killed off then raised from the dead, only to be entombed in caged-off spaces of floral tribute. The weeds that infest Time Landscape’s sepulchral landscape are pulled up and stuffed into black plastic garbage bags and removed for incineration. They form their own kind of monument, off to the fires, our revenge on the revenge of nature, enacted again and again. The carefully maintained remnants of nature that remain are too anemic to evoke a fertile or meaningful past, even as they secure Time Landscape’s status as a memorial to both past nature and past art.

  Time Landscape’s protocol of purity is echoed across countless parks and gardens but also in the kind of environmental or land art that tends to get commissioned in cities. A lot of land art creates disorientingly human places within large natural landscapes: a straight stone path amid a chaos of boulders, a spiral jetty thrust into a remote lake. But for artists working in cities the temptation to confront paved streets with pure nature seems irresistible. Apart from Time Landscape, the best-known work in this genre seen in New York was Wheatfield—A Confrontation, a two-acre vacant lot in downtown Manhattan that was planted with wheat by Agnes Denes in 1982. It was a more political piece than Time Landscape. The fertile field and the one thousand pounds of wheat yielded were symbolic of the hunger caused by Wall Street’s “misplaced priorities.” But the golden grain and the simple moral message were also designed to contrast with the corrupt and fallen city. This was another place made pure by nature.

  Denes’s Wheatfield was soon reaped, and wasn’t around long enough to get drawn into difficult debates about land use or to start looking outdated. Time Landscape suffers a different fate. The Village Voice reported the atmosphere of one weeding and cleanup day turning slightly sour as the director of a local community alliance declared that “the time has come for something new” and that “Time Landscape is a piece of ’80s art,” all “within earshot of the artist.” It’s true that over the past couple of decades the pursuit of prelapsarian eco-art has gone out of fashion and a fascination with weed-infested urban decay has taken root (see “The Archaeological Park of Sicilian Incompletion,” [>]). An influential essay by John Patrick Leary on the “exuberant connoisseurship of dereliction” labeled the trend “Detroitism,” because for artists and photographers, that city has become “
the Mecca of urban ruins.”

  Time Landscape and Detroitism are very different starting points, but they both converge on a central worry for urban civilization: How can we live without nature? What do we become without it, or what can we pretend to be? Sonfist never claimed to have the answers, and what Time Landscape means has long since escaped his control. Today it is a troubled and paradoxical place but also somewhere that hints at the remorse for lost nature that lies just beneath the surface of even the shiniest and blankest cityscape.

  The Aralqum Desert

  44° 45′ 37″ N, 62° 09′ 27″ E

  The Aralqum Desert is too new, too large, and its outline too changeable to be on any maps. It’s a desert that used to be called the Aral Sea. The new name is gaining favor, although it’s not quite as exotic as it sounds. Qum is Uzbek for “sand.”

  The map captioned “Geography: Physical” is usually seen as an impassive affair when compared to “Geography: Political.” We are used to the latter requiring regular updates but continue to imagine that the physical outlines and natural features of the planet are slow-moving or even rock-solid. The love of “natural places” is, in part, built around the conviction that, unlike our fragile settlements and fickle borders, they are self-reliant and age-old. It’s an outdated perspective, as New Moore (see [>]) demonstrates, and encourages a belief that natural systems can always cope with change; that when one set of flora and fauna die out, a new set will happily move in. The Aralqum is a natural place, an empty desert, but also an unnatural one that shows that organic adaptation can no longer keep pace with human impact.