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

by Alastair Bonnett

  Anyone who has watched nervously as their next-door neighbor put up a fence knows just how important a few inches of land can be; after all, not many of us would lean out the window and politely call, “No, really, don’t worry, just put it anywhere.” For all the disconcerting beauty of “Fake Estates,” Matta-Clark thought he was providing a reductio ad absurdum critique of our obsession with private property. In her study of his work, Object to Be Destroyed, Pamela Lee explains his motives by reference to Karl Marx’s claim that “private property has made us so stupid and narrow-minded that an object is only ours when we have it, when it exists as capital for us.” Matta-Clark’s useless lots are supposed to destabilize our sense of the rationality of land ownership—and they do, in a way. But they also work in the opposite direction, because they remind us how powerful the idea of owning land really is. It is because this desire is so commonplace that “Fake Estates” is so oddly touching. Matta-Clark’s gutterspaces speak to a widespread yearning for a piece of the earth—no matter how small—that we can call our own.

  Matta-Clark’s collection of pieces of land also taps into an aesthetic of ordering and labeling that we are all familiar with. In fact, at about the same time as Matta-Clark’s conceptual activities, another New Yorker, a hardware store owner named Jack Gasnick—already a minor celebrity for his “cellar fishing” (he claimed to have caught a three-pound carp in a stream running through his basement) and for having the world’s third-oldest working lightbulb, at the back of his store (it was first turned on 1912)—was doing something very similar and without a whisper of political intent. For Gasnick, buying up gutterspaces was a hobby. Interviewed in 1994 by Constance Hays of the New York Times, he explained, “It’s like collecting stamps,” adding that “once you’ve got the fever, you’ve got the fever . . . I wanted the unwanted.”

  Gasnick’s set of gutterspaces eventually came to twenty-eight, bought for between $50 and $250, and his prize item was some land behind Louis Armstrong’s house in Corona, Queens. But Jack had many strips and squares, including part of an African-American cemetery and one with an apple tree on it. While Gasnick’s relationship to these bits of land was that of a collector, he also thought of them in aspirational terms. “This jump of mine from flowerpot to apple tree,” he said, “bears witness to the fact that it doesn’t cost much for an apartment-living guy to get a share of the good environment.” The care he took of his apple tree, not to mention the oak in another plot, reflects Gasnick’s real affection for his micro-plots. “Once he acquired a plot of land,” Constance Hays wrote, “Mr. Gasnick spent weekends driving out to visit it and clean it up.” Hays describes how Gasnick “kept visiting his properties even as the neighborhoods around them changed dramatically, keeping his land clear of litter, whether empty coffee cups or abandoned cars.” In the late 1970s Gasnick began to feel overwhelmed by the upkeep, and he either mislaid lots (“some I just forgot”) or sold them off, often for little more than he paid for them. Other lots were given to community gardening organizations. Now in his nineties, he has hung on to one last lot, a beloved picnic spot that offers a harbor view from Staten Island.

  Snippets of land still come up for sale. Claudio Manicone, who works for Broward County, Florida, has been trying to sell a sidewalk, an alleyway, and a river. He sees it as tidying up: “Like in anything you do, you’ve got leftover pieces. Just like when you build something out of wood, you’ve got wood left over.” The companies that sell these parcels occasionally encounter buyers with ulterior motives, such as the man in Palm Beach who bought a tiny section of municipal canal thinking that this would give him control of the water supply (he soon found out that it didn’t). But mostly people are interested in these places for far less rational reasons.

  Gordon Matta-Clark brought his remnants out of obscurity and onto the map. It was always an ironic achievement, since they remained “fake estates,” real but worthless. But even so, it is easy to see why people would want them, especially in cities where most of us feel lucky if we have a yard large enough to sit down in. And I think I understand why Jack Gasnick felt good about his collection. Since the rich take such delight in their spreading acres, is it so peculiar that ordinary people might get some pleasure from owning a few feet of grass? And if people looked bemused, you could always explain that your miniature estate is a critique of capitalism. They would surely understand.

  Bountiful

  54° 20′ 00″ N, 81° 47′ 15″ E

  The relationship between place and well-being seems to be hard-wired into the human brain. Making a better life for oneself suggests going to a better place, and it comes as no surprise that creating a new kind of place is central to the efforts of those who want to flee industrial civilization and fashion a perfect society. Once associated with hippie communes in the 1960s, this utopian impulse has spread and diversified, and today there are a huge variety of “intentional communities,” with the fastest expansion among eco-friendly and off-grid settlements. There are thousands throughout the English-speaking world, but my example comes from the banks of the Ob River, 1,750 miles east of Moscow and 65 miles southwest of Novosibirsk, Siberia’s largest city.

  The desire to escape urban life and build utopia is not new in Russia, but over the past few decades, in the wake of the collapse of the USSR and the social disintegration that has taken hold in many towns and cities, a new generation is packing its bags and heading into the forest, like the sixteen families who now live two miles down a dirt road in the village of Bountiful.

  The fact that we take the bond between place and utopia for granted is a paradox. Utopia is Thomas More’s Greek neologism for “no-place,” a term meant to contrast with real places, which are frustratingly but inevitably full of different histories, ideas, and people. Utopia is an idea that implies that a utopian place could never work. Yet the intention to start such places is not uncommon; many ordinary towns and suburbs started life as ideal communities. There is a creative friction between such intentions and the realities of place-making that undermines utopian purism but also sparks new utopian projects.

  Bountiful is part of the new phenomenon being labeled Russia’s Green Exodus. Hundreds of eco-villages have been founded in the forests, often by professional, educated people who are turning their backs on what they see as the corrupt and corrupting nature of modern Russia. Many hark back to the anarcho-Christian and Tolstoyan communities that were formed in the first decades of the last century, only to be dismantled by Soviet collectivization, and to the small agricultural cooperatives championed by another victim of the USSR, Alexander Chayanov. Although the Green Exodus is too diverse for easy generalizations, it is often marked by a semi-mystical yearning for a purer, kinder, and more authentic Russia.

  Bountiful is part of an eco-spiritual sect called the Anastasia Movement, based around a series of nine books written by Vladimir Megre, in which he claims he met a beautiful young woman called Anastasia on the banks of the river Ob in 1994. He recounts that her parents had died shortly after she was born and that she “has ever since fended for herself, watched over only by her grandfather, great-grandfather and a variety of ‘wild’ animals.” Anastasia revealed to Megre a philosophy of “eco-culture where every person is fulfilling their role as a Divine Co-Creator” and instructed him that “every person has the right to a small parcel of land to grow their own food, build their own house, and raise their family, without taxes.”

  It turned out to be a timely message, because the Russian government was keen to privatize and diversify land ownership. Growing your own food and tending your own patch of ground is extremely popular in Russia—it was estimated in 1999 that 71 percent of the country’s population already owned a plot and were cultivating it. In 2003, the same year that saw the founding of Bountiful, the Private Garden Plot Act allowed Russian citizens to claim free land of between one and three hectares. The Anastasians make much of the Russian prime minister Dmitry Medvedev’s claim that because of “the scale of a countr
y like ours, with such huge areas, there is no point everyone concentrating in cities,” and that it would be “more useful for our health, and for the country, to disperse.”

  The Anastasian message also chimes with the rise of cultural conservatism in Russia. The movement’s emphasis on traditional family values, and reverence for Russian crafts and home cooking, suit the temper of the times. Each homestead in Bountiful, of no less than one hectare, can only be inherited and never sold. Unlike some of the more hippie-ish villages spawned by the Green Exodus, this is one place that is consciously and nostalgically finding its utopia in the past.

  Yet part of this nostalgia is to reclaim a history of collectivism and mutual care. Households help each other as well as new arrivals. The family of former physicist Valery Popov shows newcomers how to build their log cabin. Another family, the Nadezhdins, former dentistry professionals, are the village bakers. A music teacher named Klavdiya Ivanova turns out traditional Russian clothes. These local skills are highlighted on Bountiful’s well-developed website, alongside cheerful stories and tips about how to return to a more wholesome and Russian way of life. One of the leading residents of Bountiful, Dmitry Ivanov, a former navy officer who helps install the cabins’ stoves, explains, “The motherland is what teaches us to live in harmony.” For all the New Age rhetoric, this is a place that flows with a patriotic desire for reattachment to the real Russia.

  Imparting traditional Russian values within a spiritual, environmentalist context has proved an attractive formula. The Anastasia Movement now claims more than 100,000 registered activists and 85 villages, some much larger than Bountiful, spread across Russia (there are 4 Anastasian villages in the Novosibirsk region alone). But the fact that place and utopia are never an easy mix is also being continually proved. For one thing, the Anastasian philosophy is far from universally revered. Indeed, according to Ivanov “it is not so important” and Bountiful is doing its own thing: “It is more important that we are choosing the path that we are going, whether or not it is Megre’s.”

  A bit of classic geography can help us understand how utopian places maintain their cohesion. Geographers like to identify the “push and pull” factors when working out why any settlement gets going. Bountiful has strong attractors: leaders and an ideology that are drawing people in. But the powerful forces that are driving people away from conventional places seem to be just as important. Listening to interviews with village members, one repeatedly hears the same story about what has propelled them so far away from the city and “the system.” Talking to a visiting freelance reporter, Ivanov explains, “All my life, I’ve been a part of the system. At school, as a university student, then as a faithful officer.” But the system failed him: “the system fell apart before my eyes, destroyed by traders, by stealers, by outrageously corrupt managers.” Bountiful is dedicated, says one young mother, “to our future children so they can be more ‘real’ than we are.” Olga Kumani, a resident of a nearby eco-commune at Askat, describes how she left her job as a crime reporter in Novosibirsk in 2002: “I could not breathe in the city; the state system choked me.” But it didn’t work out. “The commune leaders just wanted to control our money and exploit us for work.” So the push factors kept pushing, driving Olga to move to an even remoter part of this vast region.

  What holds utopia in place is not just a vision of a perfect place but the experience of living in a bad one. Ironically, the bad places were often former ideal places, their failure provoking people to seek out better alternatives. However, Bountiful also shows that the pursuit of utopia can quickly become a workable project: as ideological purism cedes ground to ordinary needs, it can offer both tangible benefits to individuals and concrete examples of social change. Today the “no-place” of utopia has thousands of outposts. Some are remnants of past hopes while others are newly founded, but all illustrate humanity’s powerful and paradoxical hunger for escape and homecoming.

  Mount Athos

  40° 09′ 32″ N, 24° 19′ 42″ E

  The Holy Mountain, Mount Athos, is a fifty-kilometer-long peninsula that kicks out into the Aegean Sea. Along its coast are twenty Greek Orthodox monasteries, steeply walled and turreted. Most of them were founded over a thousand years ago, their thick defenses and lofty towers bolstered over the centuries as protection from pirates. Athos also contains the medieval town of Kayres, the village of Daphne, and many chapels and ancient ruins. It is a wild and rugged landscape, accessible only by boat, spined with mountains that rise to two thousand meters or more at the southern end.

  It’s not off the map for me, but it might be for you. Athos is an extreme example of a place defined by exclusion. Women are banned; even curious female sightseers are supposed to stay at least five hundred meters offshore. If they reach land, they are subject to a period of imprisonment ranging from two months to a year. Not only are women banned but so too are all female animals. One of the few exceptions is female cats, which, according to the monks, were “provided” to them by the divine providence of the Virgin in order to control vermin. But cats aside, permission to visit is restricted to adult men and “young males accompanied by their fathers.”

  The desire for men-only religious places may appear anachronistic, yet the story of Athos shows that it is remarkably resilient. According to legend, Athos was given by God as a holy garden to the Virgin Mary. On her way to visit Lazarus in Cyprus, storms swept Mary and her companion, John the Evangelist, onto the peninsula’s east coast. They landed at a spot near a pagan temple dedicated to Apollo. Today it is the site of the monastery of Iviron. It is said the “pagan idols” cried out to the local people to come down and greet Mary, which they did, abandoning their old ways and converting to the new faith. Struck by the beauty of the area, Mary prayed to God to have it given to her. God spoke to her: “Let this place be your lot, your garden and your paradise, as well as a salvation, a haven for those who seek salvation.”

  Mount Athos is dedicated to the Virgin, and the bulk of its many icons are images of her, but it remains a male sanctum. When the legality of the ban on women is questioned, it is argued that its 335 square kilometers must be understood as one big monastery. “If one views each of the 20 monasteries of Mount Athos as a single entity,” explained one of the Holy Mountain’s secular champions, Austrian politician Walter Schwimmer, at a recent international conference dedicated to Mount Athos, “the ban of women from a male monastery is nothing extraordinary but a rule that is commonly accepted.” Schwimmer’s argument relies on and thereby highlights the fact that spatial exclusion remains a widely accepted facet of religious life. Occasionally its biggest impact is on nonbelievers. Two of the most visited places in the world, Mecca and the center of Medina, are also two of the most inaccessible: non-Muslims are forbidden. Mormon and many Hindu temples are also off-limits to nonbelievers, but such attention to faith is the exception rather than the rule. Usually it’s not faith that matters when getting into religious places but gender. With the exception of some reformed Christian and Jewish denominations, the world’s religions exhibit a deep sense of anxiety about the presence of women. Until recently women were forbidden to enter the sanctuary in a Catholic church, and the Muslim and Hindu tradition of purdah keeps millions of women trapped in their houses or peeping out at the world from behind the “protection” of a veil. In some of the remoter Hindu villages of Nepal the practice of chaupadi survives. This tradition dictates that women must not enter their own homes for up to seven nights during menstruation. Instead, they must live and sleep outside, in huts, in caves, or in the open.

  From a traditional religious perspective men and women living side by side in towns and villages is a source of endless problems. These can be solved only by choreographing rituals of separation. Mount Athos is free from such headaches. It is a utopian space in which the celibate holy man’s wish—to live without distraction and temptation—is finally realized. It’s the best that earth has to offer until the day of resurrection, when men can finally shed
their mortal bodies.

  From its famed “six thousand beards” the number of monks on Athos has dwindled to about two thousand. They constitute a self-governing community whose political autonomy is enshrined in Greek law: the Greek constitution recognizes Athos as “a self-governed part of the Greek State, whose sovereignty thereon shall remain intact.” The only bishop with authority over Athos is the “Ecumenical Patriarch in Constantinople–New Rome” (which the rest of the world calls Istanbul), where in 1046 Emperor Constantine Monomachos sanctified the exclusion of women from Athos.

  This prohibition of women has its own legal name, the Avaton. As a piece of legislation it must be judged, on its own terms, a success. Despite its long history and vaunted beauty, the number of women who are known to have entered Athos is very small. There was Helena of Bulgaria, who came here to escape the plague in the fourteenth century. But she may not count, as her feet never touched the ground. In deference to local mores she was lofted around in a hand-held carriage during her entire stay. Athos met a firmer pair of feet when Maryse Choisy, a French psychoanalyst and onetime patient of Freud, decided to pay a visit. She put on a large false mustache and dressed as a male servant. She also claimed to have undergone a bilateral radical mastectomy, what she called her “Amazonian.” Her commitment paid off and she spent a month on Athos. In her book Un Mois Chez les Hommes (1929), Choisy records the following interesting clarification from a monk at Vatopedi monastery on the prohibition of hens, which are banned as part of the general prohibition of female animals: “We must draw the line somewhere,” he explained. “The day we possessed a hen, some brothers would argue that we should also accept a she-cat, a ewe (a useful animal) or even a she-ass. And there is but a step from a she-ass to a woman.” The monk’s list of banned animals suggests that the admission of female cats to Athos is a relatively recent concession. Enraged by the misogyny she encountered, Choisy delighted in exposing the Holy Mountain, depicting the monks as lazy, slow-witted, and racked by homoerotic desire. Her account is mocking and salacious, and its sexual content has been dismissed by some as vindictive fakery. Single-sex communities are ready fodder for titillation. But it’s a leering curiosity that points to a real paradox: sex may be repudiated in such places, but it is also their organizing principle and, hence, their obsession.