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

by Alastair Bonnett

  The lot, which is limited to one hundred vehicles, has been formally recognized by the airport authority since 2005. Residents pay $120 a month to park their RVs there, with an additional $30 fee for their cars. It’s cheap if not very cheerful. And the few newly planted rose bushes can’t the hide the fact that this is a place of last resort for an industry that has squeezed wages and working conditions. One resident interviewed for National Public Radio reported that he hadn’t had a pay raise in twenty years: “It’s always ‘you need to take a pay cut,’ ‘you need to take a pay cut,’ ‘you need to take a pay cut.’” A neighbor makes the same point: “It’s been a devastated industry. Things are not what we thought they were going to be.”

  The NPR story annoyed residents because it named the interviewees. Most would prefer to keep their anonymity, since Lot E is not a place they are proud of. One pilot explained to a visiting reporter, “I never thought I would be here, but pay cuts force us to be frugal.” In another interview, a neighbor vents understandable bitterness: “Pretty glamorous, isn’t it? I, for one, never thought I’d end up at a parking lot at LAX.” Many residents cling to the idea that they are not really living at Lot E but merely using it like a glorified locker room. One pilot with a house in Texas says it is just “a place to come and get ready for work.” Yet like so many others, he is geographically trapped, a long way from work and a long way from home. What might at first seem like something temporary and convenient can easily turn into something semi- or completely permanent.

  Considering they are employees who provide a vital service for US airlines, the Lot E villagers are treated pretty shabbily. The airport does not provide electricity, propane, or water. The residents have to be canny in order to acquire basic services. They rely on solar panels, small generators, and showers taken at the local gym. It is a Spartan existence and its challenges are added to by the roar and lights from the planes that are landing almost on top of them. Some airline employees take a stoic delight in all the noise. “I love to see what’s coming in,” one worker told NPR. “It doesn’t worry me—I love it. I get a thrill.” Noting that flights start at exactly 6:30 a.m., his neighbor dryly offered another plus: “You don’t need an alarm clock.” But no amount of chipper dedication can disguise that the noise is almost unendurable. Other residents have taken to covering their windows with foil and paper to muffle the sound, or playing recorded white noise in their RVs, a static rumble that takes the edge off the shriek of the planes.

  Not everyone dislikes the idea of airport living, and some are even willing it on. Professor John Kasarda of the University of North Carolina travels the globe extolling the pleasures as well as the inevitability of the “aerotropolis.” For him LAX is the center of town: Kasarda regards the essence of a modern place as the availability of a flight to somewhere else. There are good reasons to resist this twenty-first-century rekindling of the Corbusian dreamscape of speeding machines swarming through geometric space. The motorized landscapes created in the twentieth century taught us that this vision doesn’t meet human needs, nor does it create real places, which comes to the same thing. We want places that are worth journeying to rather than non-places that are byproducts of a ceaseless need to keep moving. In the face of the flow of modern history, real places—places with diverse and complex human histories, places where people come first—have taken on an oppositional character. They are engaged in, or poised for conflict with, the engorged but ever greedy traffic. It’s a stark choice. The need to tilt the balance of power back away from travel and toward place is plain.

  Yet a sense of inevitability, of submission to the iron will of something bigger than any of us, seems to have been injected into the cultural bloodstream. How else to explain our readiness to believe the endlessly recycled story that “the sector” is in “crisis,” and not just the airline sector but any and all sectors of business. That unless we give way, become more flexible, go to contract work, and move into rental units many miles from home, we soon won’t have any airplanes or cars or jobs. Amid the surrounding din one of the Lot E residents explained on NPR: “It’s an industry in the throes of stagnation and maybe the early throes of death. Maybe in 10 years, the airlines won’t even be here anymore. It’s that bad.” It’s true; things are bad. But it’s also true that we have gotten so used to messages about adapting to “crisis” that the inhuman demand that we live as rootless nomads has become difficult to challenge. The normalization of “crisis” has created the conditions for people to give up on things that matter to them, like real relationships and places worth flying to. The non-places created by this restless movement feed the traffic and keep the wheels turning. Yet they are so subsidiary to mobility that they also resemble parasitic growths, latched onto an indifferent host.

  Nowhere

  41° 41′ 49″ N, 0° 10′ 12″ W

  The Nowhere festival is held every July on a dusty plain in Aragón, in the north of Spain. It’s a temporary utopia; although you need to buy a ticket to get in, once inside, the Nowhere website announces, “you cannot buy or sell anything, except for ice, for just a few hours a day, so you don’t suffer food poisoning or warm beer.” The result is a creative economy of “radical self-expression” and “self-reliance.” It’s organized around a cluster of camps where everything and anything can happen: pageants, Japanese tea ceremonies, erotic life drawing, circuses, as well as lots of music and art. Participants are encouraged to make full use of the site’s Costume Camp: in the words of the site blog, “think of it as a giant dressing up box and release that inner child!”

  The idea of festivals as places apart is laden with libertarian messaging and rooted in 1960s counterculture. Over the past two decades this sensibility has come in from the margins and blossomed into a mass phenomenon, and the result has been to open up a new chapter in the idea of place. To see whole communities suddenly take shape out of nothing, in the middle of nowhere, is fascinating for a place-loving species. The thrill is multiplied when that new place is bound together by a shared attachment to novelty and autonomy.

  Since places like Nowhere, and its older and much bigger Californian cousin Burning Man, were founded, even remoter and odder events have come along, such as the Traena Festival, which takes place on a Norwegian island inside the Arctic Circle. In fact, some musicians and fans find this island too accessible, and so an offshoot event has formed. This clique all head off to Sanna, a bleak rock slapped by the wind, in order to play and listen to music in a sea cave.

  Festivalgoers have developed a taste for geographical extremism, and distant and spectacular spots that are challenging and hard to get to are much sought after. Because of threats by Islamist militants, the event once promoted as the world’s most remote, the Festival au Désert, usually staged near Timbuktu in Mali, went into exile in 2013 and took place in Burkina-Faso instead. But it plans to be back, and an audience will come. Distance is a way of sifting the crowd, making it unlikely you’ll have to share acts of self-expression or a food tent with people who are dissimilar to yourself. But that’s the sort of sly dig you might expect from a self-confessed festival avoider, especially one whose sarcasm is whetted by envy. The creation of Nowhere is actually a charming mixture of the imaginative and the prosaic. A lot of thought and care are clearly given to how to make this small patch of desert into a happy community. Place-making demands attention to the everyday practicalities of living as well as the big picture. Ironically, it is these prosaic details that churn and excite our imagination: by sorting them out we prove that new places are within reach, that we are capable of conjuring up a new world in an empty landscape.

  The first thing that gets built at Nowhere is Werkhaus, an operational base of toilets, kitchen, and shade. Then attention turns to the festival’s hub, the Middle of Nowhere. The need for a central meeting area was understood from the first Nowhere, in 2004. It was built of piping and parachute material and sited at one side of the camp. That last detail may seem insignificant, but it turns out
that it didn’t quite work: places need centers that are located at the heart of things. So in 2009 the Middle of Nowhere was moved to the physical center of the festival. The energy and mayhem of Nowhere thrives on careful decision-making and clear lines of communication and authority. Without the individuals who take on the responsibility of being a “Nowhere Lead,” the place would become disordered, people would drift away, and the fun would fizzle out. Nowhere deconstructs and overturns the conventions of mainstream places yet relies on a strict division of labor and responsibility in order to fashion a workable alternative. Each Lead coordinates a different function, working with other volunteers leading up to, during, and after the festival. These functions are reassuringly mundane: toilets, tickets, power grid, recycling, safety, medical team, and the like. There is also a communications infrastructure, which centers on the site’s post office and the daily newspaper, Nowhere Tribune.

  Much of the pleasure of creating places is in getting such details right. As “Europe’s answer to Burning Man,” Nowhere has a model it follows. Yet the paradox about Nowhere is that, although “radical self-expression” is the end product, what fuels all the hard work and unpaid hours is not just an ambition to be original or express oneself but the innate human love of place. This is why being able to shape a working, living place from scratch, and then see it filled with excited participants, enthuses enough people to make it happen every year. The thrill of creating Nowhere seems to be heightened by the “leave no trace” policy that it took from Burning Man. At first glance this sounds odd, since we are used to the art of place-making being identified with permanent structures. For many generations we have been establishing new places by sinking foundations, grasping for immortality with the weight and endurance of our grand designs. But in postindustrial societies that no longer have faith in either architectural monumentalism or their own future, this is no longer a convincing conceit. And Nowhere seems to turn the edifice complex on its head with little effort. It’s hard not to be impressed by the way the organizers and participants can craft this place then fold it away, as if by magic, leaving a pristine and empty landscape. It seems that places don’t need to be long-lasting impositions in order to be important or substantial. Indeed, the ongoing growth of festivals suggests the opposite: that there is something about a place that can quickly disappear that adds to its aura.

  This eco-generation’s wisdom on the topic is not always appreciated. A lot of the alternative festival scene in contemporary Spain is supported by British expatriates who felt driven out of their own country by antifestival legislation enacted in the 1990s. The so-called New Age Travellers, who used to wander from site to site in the UK, either ended up as squatters or went abroad, with many heading for the warmth and empty spaces of southern Europe. Since then festivals have multiplied, and far from being despised, people who can sort out and kick-start successful events are in great demand. Even militantly anticommercial festivals like Nowhere, with its explicit rejection of the cash economy, have settled down into valued cultural assets. We have come to appreciate these small utopias, not necessarily for the music or the face painting, but because they remind us of something that we never meant to forget, that making places is serious fun.

  Stacey’s Lane

  51° 41′ 48″ N, 0° 06′ 57″ E

  Children create their own places in between and around the adult world. As children, my brother and I made our dens in Stacey’s lane, a blind alley named after the family who lived at the far end. Behind their house was a set of rough fields broken up by patches of beech and birch trees where Paul and I would also build camps. To look at it today, you wouldn’t think the lane would be worth hanging around in, since it is only a hundred meters long and lined with thin, dirty-looking trees and straggly bushes on either side. These side strips are only a meter or two deep, often less, and behind them there is an assortment of tall fences and messes of wire. It’s a gloomy place whatever the weather, always cold and muddy. But when we were little this is where we created places of adventure and escape. We had four or five hidden spots on the go at any one time, made by breaking back the branches and flattening out just enough room to stand in together. Having a number of them was somehow important, presumably because it meant there was always work to be done and always somewhere else to go when we argued. It meant we could separate and come together, bringing information or biscuits from home, which was just around the corner on the main road.

  Given half a chance, children create their own nooks in the leftover places of the adult map. We weren’t interested in the fields beyond because what we wanted were hidden places that would be bypassed by the adult world. Years later I watched my own two children doing exactly the same thing. The rhododendron bushes in my local park provide the most popular sites. If you peer into their tangled gloom, you’d see grubby girls and boys both. There is usually at least one exasperated parent urgently circling them, for the bushes are not just for den-making but for evading adults.

  In The Child in the City Colin Ward argues, “Behind all our purposive activities, our domestic world, is this ideal landscape we acquired in childhood.” He goes on to describe these lost places as allusive yet persistent: “It sifts through our selective and self-censored memory as a myth and idyll of the way things ought to be, the paradise to be regained.” Ward’s argument suggests that children’s den-making isn’t just echoed in later life but that it is constantly being sought after. The secret places may be long gone and rarely recalled, but they offered something so important and so consoling that they remain with us, their simulacra fashioned time and again in our homes or cars, the adult dens that bring us comfort.

  Childhood dens are our first places, or at least the first places we actively shape with our imagination, care for, and understand. The uncomfortable nests that I helped stomp out between branches in Stacey’s lane were where I learned that places can be far more interesting than the set of routines and lines of demarcation I was used to being ushered into. I also have a clear memory that they offered more than just a feeling of security or the fun of hiding. I can recall the whispered conversations between Paul and me, conversations that remade the significance of each den over and over again: this is your base; no, it’s my main base; no, this is an entrance to those two dens, which are bedrooms. The meaning of each place was entirely at our disposal and was constantly being transformed to fit with our changing fantasies.

  Den-making is a particular kind of play, not with dolls or toy guns but with place. It’s a form of play that is particularly private and vulnerable. Any adult or teenage presence can destroy it at once: a looming face would reduce Paul’s and my dens to a dull clutter of sticks. For adults it’s hard to recapture this ephemeral, playful approach to place-making because, as we grow up, we get used again to the idea that the meaning of places is fixed and not ours to command. Many of the other entries in this book—the micro-nations, the remote festivals, the all-male religious communities—strike us as remarkable because they resemble den-making. Yet, when compared to children’s dens, they are static places, always frozen in one imaginative moment.

  But even as Paul and I were hunkering down in the bushes with our biscuits, there were other adults who were getting worried that fewer children were being allowed similar experiences. In 1960 Paul Goodman had already described the “concealed technology, family mobility, loss of the country, loss of neighborhood tradition” that were, he said, “eating up” play space and taking away the “real environment.” Today the idea that children’s play is endangered is widely shared. Writing of urban Australia, the educational researchers Karen Malone and Paul Tranter suggest that “many children have lost access to traditional play environments, including streets and wild spaces.” They lay the blame at a number of doors: “parental fears about traffic danger, bullying and ‘stranger danger,’” as well as “the loss of natural spaces.” All these parental worries mean that the streets seem risky places for children, so too the parks. Th
ese anxieties are not baseless, but their consequence is that play is increasingly viewed as a time-limited “experience” to be managed by experts. Professionally designed playgrounds and “play facilitators,” “play workers,” and “play assistants” are colonizing the territory, which is an impossible and a paradoxical task. On the one hand we want to protect children, but on the other we want them to relive our own imagined childhood adventures. Play professionals are asked to both secure children from risk and introduce them to risk by prying them from the grip of screen-based leisure.

  Ironically, den-making is something done on a computer for many children today. I know that if my two children saw the unkempt structures Paul and I made, they would be deeply unimpressed. There are numerous websites that allow them to create, in comfort, not just their own rooms or houses but whole private landscapes and kingdoms. This is often done for the benefit of an avatar, but at root it’s a form of den-building, imaginative place-making that appears to be hidden from a nosy and bothersome adult world. Yet these virtual warrens lack something: they do not make their users reassess their relationship to real places or grasp their power to shape them. They are, after all, grown-up creations: manicured spaces with very strict rules and a limited number of options. If it is true that we spend adulthood trying to reconstruct the warm, free, and happy fantasy places of childhood, then it will be interesting to find out how a generation brought up on the Sims can nostalgically rework its computer-mediated memories of geographical play.