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

by Alastair Bonnett

  In an era in which the importance of place is often overlooked, we need to turn to desperate places such as Twayil Abu Jarwal, a Bedouin village in Israel’s Negev Desert, to be reminded of the urgent and necessary nature of topophilia. It’s up a dirt track off the smooth tarmac of Highway 40 that runs north of Beersheba. There are no road signs to the village and it doesn’t appear on any maps. But like the forty other “unrecognized” Bedouin villages in the Negev, Twayil Abu Jarwal grips onto this bone-dry landscape with a stubborn energy. It has been demolished by the Israeli authorities so many times that accounts vary widely on the exact number, but conservative estimates suggest that the bulldozers have rolled in and pushed over some part of the village between twenty-five and fifty times. Today there are no permanent structures for its 450 residents, only tents and tin shacks.

  In the aftermath of each demolition a group of villagers gathers to assess the damage. Israeli activist Yeela Raanan recorded one such exchange: “The bulldozer driver took his time,” says one, “he worked slowly and thoroughly, he left nothing standing, nothing.” This time, says another, “they buried alive the doves’ hatchlings.” But as soon as the bulldozers leave, the village reemerges—shelters and pathways are reestablished; it becomes a place again, awaiting the next visit from the Israeli authorities. Talking to an observer from Human Rights Watch, a village woman, Aliya al-Talalqah, describes how it takes “five to six days after the demolition to make these tents.” In the meantime, everyone has to sleep “outside on mats, like wild animals, with the sun in the day and the cold at night, with small children.”

  Interviewed in the Jerusalem Report, Ilan Yeshurun, a local director of the Israel Land Authority, explained the ceaseless round of demolition by simply stating, “This is not a village.” Without irony, he added, “It doesn’t exist on any map or in any legal registration. It’s only a village in the eyes of the Bedouin.” In other words, it is because Twayil Abu Jarwal doesn’t exist that it both can and has to be bulldozed again and again.

  The tents of Twayil Abu Jarwal, flapping bleakly amid the rubble, offer a broken echo of a time when the Negev Bedouin were a nomadic people, moving with their sheep and goats across the desert. The Bedouin were pretty much ignored by the area’s past rulers, the Ottomans and later, briefly, the British. Israel’s was the first government that took an interest in them. From the 1960s the Israeli government pursued a policy of “sedentarization” and concentration, relocating the Bedouin in seven new towns in a triangle of land in the Negev called the Siyag. It was hoped that this ancient people would be reshaped into a modern community. In 1963 Israeli general Moshe Dayan looked forward to a time when the Bedouin would constitute “an urban proletariat” and each man “would become an urban person who comes home in the afternoon and puts his slippers on.” But the Bedouin carried with them a huge sense of loss into the Siyag’s new towns, and they were ill prepared for urban life. The new towns soon became associated with social breakdown, crime, and unemployment. Many drifted back to their ancestral land. No longer nomadic, and with an increasingly fragile connection to traditional Bedouin identity, the al-Talalqah clan chose to build the village of Twayil Abu Jarwal near their old tribal cemetery.

  Settlements like Twayil Abu Jarwal deliver the goal of a sedentary lifestyle but on the Bedouin’s own terms. The Bedouin sense of place, which once extended across the Negev Desert, has become anchored in such locales. But their attempt to make this transition on their own terms has been continually challenged. The urban planner Steve Graham offers the word “urbicide” to describe the Israeli government’s policy toward the Palestinians, referring to the attempt to smash political resistance by breaking up the physical and social infrastructures of urban life. But at least the Palestinians have places to break. The problem for the Bedouin is that their villages are not even acknowledged. Ironically, as a cultural and ethnic group, the Bedouin receive a lot of attention. Their traditional clothes, food, and other items of ethnographic interest get tourist and state attention and even respect, but without the acknowledgment of place, respect for mere artifacts means little.

  Why do we have such a hard time grasping why people care so much about place, even if it is only a few rubbish-strewn meters of scrub? It is a difficulty that is in part rooted in the nongeographic way we approach the task of acknowledging or recognizing others. The German philosopher Hegel argued that people need recognition from others in order to achieve a sense of self. Hegel went on to claim that consciousness is always trying to make itself more pure and less dependent on dumb materiality. Thanks in part to such interventions, our ideas about what human liberation means have become ever more untethered from the earth, drifting off into abstract realms and leaving geography to become nothing more than a tedious list of facts. An obsession with the struggle for free consciousness, filtered through Karl Marx, framed the worldview of the last century’s anticolonial intellectuals. Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Memmi, and Frantz Fanon turned the colonized world into a field hospital of psychosocial trauma. Today the pain and humiliation of subject peoples has been fashioned into a series of sub-Hegelian clichés about respect for “others” and respect for “difference.” But all this attention to the internal life of victims has obscured as much as it has revealed, turning place into an irrelevance or something meaningless and inert.

  Place is the fabric of our lives; memory and identity are stitched through it. Without having somewhere of one’s own, a place that is home, freedom is an empty word. Twayil Abu Jarwal is just one ruined village hoping for recognition, but its story—like the stories of the Negev’s other unrecognized villages—is not only a local one. It reminds us of the necessity of place and the battles that are being fought between those who want to recognize places and those who wish to deny them.

  The grievance of the Bedouin is sharpened by the fact that, while their illegal villages fail to make the map, illegal Jewish farmsteads are being tolerated across the Siyag and the wider region. Fifty such farmsteads have sprung up, many with unapproved buildings. Rather than knocking them down, the state facilitated their growth. One way this has been done was by extending Highway 6 into the Negev. In drawing the route of the new road, the country’s transportation planners simply ignored the existence of the Bedouin’s unrecognized villages. The road’s blueprints show that it plows straight through a number of them. The highway will soon be on the map, but the villages beneath and around will remain invisible. Although recognition has been won for half a dozen Bedouin villages, the Israeli state’s plans for the region involve forced resettlements and demolitions for the remainder. It seems likely that Twayil Abu Jarwal will be destroyed many more times before its inhabitants or the government gives up.

  So what do you do if demolition is inevitable? The Bedouin are in a bind. If they challenge a demolition order, they have to admit that they built illegally and thus confess to a criminal act. With nowhere else to go, their claim on places like Twayil Abu Jarwal takes a perverse route, self-demolition. It is a final statement of control, a last claim to place. As one resident in the nearby unrecognized village of Wadi al-Ne’am explained to Human Rights Watch, “When they came there were three houses they wanted to demolish. We said, we don’t want you to cause panic in the community so we’ll demolish them ourselves. They were waiting outside the village, and we demolished them ourselves, and then they came back to check. We got tired of the threats, and that’s when we decided to do it ourselves.”

  Even this act of self-destruction goes unrecorded. For these places never existed: the history of their construction and demolition; of families raised and of people working, farming, and migrating; none of this ever happened. The Negev Bedouin themselves fear that they are disappearing. Because without their places, what do they have—what does being Bedouin amount to? Place isn’t a stage, a backdrop against which we act out our lives. It is part of what we are.

  Traffic Island

  54° 58′ 52″ N, 1° 36′ 25″ W

 
I am staring at a triangle of land surrounded on all sides by steel crash barriers and busy roads. Two corners are covered in bushes and saplings but the center and the sharpest end, which is under an overpass, are stony and bare. This unreachable traffic island is on my walk to work, which for about five minutes takes me alongside a section of inner-city motorway. It’s visible through the wire mesh that fences in the motorway, a semi-verdant kingdom that features on no maps. It seems pristine—two wide-screen TVs, ends of carpet, and some odd gunk in a plastic bag have been dumped behind undergrowth along my side of the fencing, but over there, beyond contact, I can see only infant trees and gravel.

  These places are everywhere, part of everybody’s geographical routine. They are easily ignored, but once you start noticing any particular one it can start to exert a queasy fascination. It’s as if you are seeing a landscape that is invisible to everyone else, a secret and intimate kingdom surrounded by unseeing people. This one is in Newcastle in the northeast of England, on a 1.1-mile-long motorway, the A167(M), which opened in 1975. The A167(M) can be a challenging drive, even for those who know the city. Around the triangular island cars nudge from slow on-ramps into dense traffic traveling at up to 70 miles per hour. Some of the merging vehicles then have to cross three lanes of traffic to get to their exit, a mere hundred yards or so farther on. It’s a landscape of clamped teeth and grim intensity. There is no time to see anything other than what you might hit or what might hit you.

  The triangle is a remnant. The roads were thought about, carefully plotted, and justified, but this island simply happened. This isn’t true of all the motorway’s green spaces: the roundabouts are just as inaccessible, but they were planned and are dutifully planted and mowed and sometimes sport bulky items of public art. What marks out places like the triangle is the absence of any discernible will either to shape or to create them. They have a quality of abandonment but also of independence, of autonomy from the motorized anthill that is the modern city.

  My triangle doesn’t feature in Diversion, the newspaper produced by the Newcastle City Council in the early 1970s to win over the local population to the idea that their neighborhood was soon to be plowed through with expressways. The editor of Diversion appears to have been convinced that the virtues of multilane highways in the inner city spoke for themselves. The harsh line drawings of overpasses that dominate its front page look almost as unappealing in print as they are in reality. The newspaper’s attempts to soften the blow were brazenly tokenistic: “1,000 new trees will be planted,” along with “22,500 shrubs of varying species,” and the dug-out earth will be made into a ski slope. That last promise did come true: for a few years what remains a large bump in a nearby park was labeled a ski slope on city maps. It was never used for this purpose, however, since Newcastle, then as now, gets little snow.

  Arial photos from the 1960s show that the area that now includes the triangle was once occupied by a school field and long rows of Georgian houses. Both field and houses are still there but bitten off, ending abruptly before the twin-level highway. The violence and suddenness of the transition created a deep sense of loss. The schism between the past and the new world that was built over it has never healed. Almost as soon as the highway was completed, community projects, and now websites, began to be created that gather together pictures, maps, and recollections of the place that was knocked aside.

  The unnameability and arbitrary nature of modern remnants like the triangle seem to mock the old streets, but the meaning of these offcuts is inherently amorphous, forever open to reinterpretation. Today in some cities there is a vogue for the most accessible versions of such places to be named, even micro-farmed and semi-inhabited, although not yet in Newcastle, a city immune to such bohemian habits. The postindustrial creative imagination circles these scraps; they suit the academic fascination for transgressive in-betweenness. It is a fashion that has spawned a slew of neologisms among postmodern geographers: “dead zone,” “nameless space,” “blank space,” “liminal space,” “urban void,” “terrain vague,” “gapscape,” “drosscape.”

  But such places are too legion to be co-opted by academic jargon. The only writing that really stays with me when thinking about my traffic triangle is a novel. J. G. Ballard’s Concrete Island is about a man called Robert Maitland who, after a car crash, finds himself marooned on just such a place: “Maitland saw that he had crashed into a small traffic island, some two hundred yards long and triangular in shape, that lay in the waste ground between three converging motorway routes.”

  Concrete Island is Ballard’s journey into the psychological damage and opportunities of the contemporary landscape. It hardly matters that Maitland’s would-be rescuer, Jane Sheppard, has no trouble clambering away. Maitland is stuck because the island induces in him an ever more desperate desire to create meaning out of placelessness. He has to stay in order to create rituals, naming and declaiming over the separate regions of his new domain like “a priest officiating at the eucharist.” “I am the island,” he declares.

  Elsewhere Ballard writes, “Rather than fearing alienation . . . people should embrace it. It may be the doorway to something more interesting.” Yet I do fear alienation, and with good reasons. One is my daily journey past this traffic island in Newcastle. It offers a trauma deeper even than the utterly personal one that is charted in Ballard’s Concrete Island because it is a place emptied of so many histories. The sliced-off terraces and fields look as if they have been freshly cut. It’s a mutilated landscape, somewhere to look away from, far easier to ignore than acknowledge.

  Could I claim this island, become a thirty-minute Crusoe amid the din? Perhaps it’s the only way I can get this place out of my mind and stop this possibly unhealthy obsession. And there might be something there, a hidden structure, or hatch, something left from the past. It has become a necessary trip, and I’ve chosen a relatively quiet late morning to make my pilgrimage, the only daylight period when it is possible to get across the traffic. The on-ramp isn’t too bad, and the safety barrier before the island is a bit buckled in one spot, allowing knee-height access. But as soon as I’m over it and onto the island I feel acutely self-conscious. There are a variety of young maples and alders and other self-seeded shrubbery. As the traffic swarms about me I attempt to look purposeful, like a council official surveying biodiversity, doing something meaningful. But I quickly realize that while there may be other, more welcoming traffic islands to explore, this one is beyond human recuperation. There will be no “officiating at the eucharist.” In fact, I have a strong desire to lie flat and disappear from view. I’m stopped only by the knowledge that I will then become immediately visible as a dumped body.

  After five minutes I’m safely back on the mainland, bubbling with nervous energy. I have come to the conclusion that this particular island isn’t nameable or knowable and it cannot be imaginatively reclaimed. Not by me anyway. It retains its dignity, but I have somehow lost mine. There are plenty of other “gapscapes” where I might have better luck. The recolonization of the city still seems like a necessary task, but for the moment I’m keen to get away. I stride purposefully back to safety and in a few moments I’m away from the on-ramp and breathing more easily.

  Wittenoom

  22° 14′ 10″ S, 118° 20′ 08″ E

  Places without people are paradoxical. Though they appear functionless, they often have considerable symbolic power. The starkest examples are empty towns constructed for political purposes, but places emptied because of conflict and environmental disaster can be equally potent.

  Thirteen hours by car from Perth in Western Australia, Wittenoom is a cursed place. In 2007 the town officially ceased to exist. Wittenoom was a blue-asbestos mining town. According to the state government, Wittenoom is still contaminated with carcinogenic fibers. It has been taken off the map to join a global list of one-industry towns destroyed by their own industry.

  Although there is a long tradition of viewing calamity in geographical terms, we
have become increasingly nervous about being reminded of failed or “fallen” places. The journey from Sodom and Gomorrah to the disastrous places of the late industrial age is also a shift from the strident, hectoring religious geography of the premodern world to a culture of avoidance and unease. Where once bedeviled cities were constantly invoked reminders of the ceaseless ingenuity of evil, the poisoned places of the secular era are hidden from view. The transition from one kind of moral geography to another deposits us in the deleted town of Wittenoom.

  About twenty thousand people lived at Wittenoom before the mine was shut in 1966. The town was taken off the power grid in 2006 and the state government in Perth issued dire warnings to anyone thinking of going there. The official decree maps out a plan of erasure:

  the town of Wittenoom should be closed as soon as possible;

  all buildings and structures in Wittenoom should be demolished and associated infrastructure removed to remove any easily visible sign of past habitation;

  road access to Wittenoom and Wittenoom Gorge to be reviewed with a view to realignment, or closure and removal.

  Western Australians expected no less. Contact with any form of asbestos can be fatal, even after the briefest of exposures, and blue asbestos is the most deadly variety. Hundreds of Wittenoom workers, residents, and even casual visitors have died of mesothelioma and other asbestos-related illnesses. The subtitle of Blue Murder, investigative journalist Ben Hills’s 1989 book on Wittenoom, is Two Thousand Doomed to Die. Although much of the town had already been demolished, an entrepreneurial cussedness sustained Wittenoom into the 2000s. It hung on for years, with a population of about thirty, as a ghost town curiosity (the bumper sticker available from the town’s souvenir store read, “I’ve Been to Wittenoom and Lived”). Compared to the dead silence of what was once the world’s largest blue-asbestos mine, the totally deserted town of Koegas in South Africa (closed in 1979), Wittenoom was almost lively. In recent years, however, the number of permanent residents has fallen to only five, and the state government is now determined to move everyone out.