#12: Between two places is a non-place
Of non-places and blind spots in urban topography
In Studio Ghibli's Castle in the Sky, said castle in the sky is a hyperreal wasteland, overrun by creepers and climbers, with the only custodians of wildlife being domesticated robots. It's eerily lively yet devoid of any life; a floating piece of nothingness long abandoned by the ones who called it home. It's the future reclaimed by natural space, where steampunk robots become at one with the very forces they're said to be the contrary to. It exists, yet it doesn't; even when we encounter it, we touch only the ghosts of the land.
Highways are like purgatory. They take you from one place to another, sure enough. But as the vaguely threatening signs tell you when you're hurtling past at 80 kilometres an hour, you can't stop along the way, or stretch your legs, or visit civilisation around. They're a mere passageway between two places but not a place on their own. Their importance is determined by what precedes and what lies yonder. They're a pass-through place — a non-place.
In a like attracts like fashion, highways are also dotted with other non-places: a transitory McDonald's, dilapidated buildings facing a festering longevity, a petrol station with flickering lights and one or two attendants staring out, a resthouse that serves its purpose for a minute and then disappears out of sight, and out of mind. Curiously, you might remember one of them in time for the next trip along the highway, but how often do you remember exactly where it was, and what it was named? For me, that's always been elusive — and we often resort to saying "that place after the big left turn", or "I'm sure there was a place near that statue we'll see in a bit". They exist in the mind, but they're hazy recollections, not fully-formed.
I could say the same about the ATM room down the street. It's small, and often lit only by the eerie glow of the screen saying "Welcome, customer" and a prick of light from the CCTV. The motions carried out in an ATM are elicited naturally, as if triggered by a switch inside: checking behind one's shoulders, blocking the keypad from view, praying the card comes out, surreptitiously checking the notes, wiping the screen clear before nodding to the next in line.
The fact that these non-places exist—and only continue to grow in size and spread—is a result of super-modernity, according to Marc Augé, French anthropologist. The result is a shift in awareness, of perception of these non-places in a partial and incoherent manner. And this amoebic pulsation of our awareness will only grow further and further alien to us, because cities will only continue to expand and eat up surrounding spaces. We'll have sprawling cities and densely packed urban areas — but we'll also have a surplus of malls, highways, school corridors, ATM machines, and another non-places.
If we were to imagine the world as an overly long sentence (which sounds apt coming from a writer), our non-places are its parentheses, and we spend more and more time between these brackets. In engaging with these parentheses, we're giving them meaning for a brief period, but take us away and we're left with more non-places. Urban space is for people, but ironically, it's not in practice, and so much empty space fills our cities in the best and worst of times.
Have you dined out on the streets yet? Or in a glass-enclosed bubble, or a pedestrianised road next to a commercialised pedestrian path? It seems radical, yet it came to life during the pandemic, when life spent outdoors was better than life spent indoors. It's more human, this reclamation, but not invincible — and definitely not sustainable, as a peek out the window at the honking and road rage can probably testify.
Non-spaces continue to exist, even take up more space than required, in the form of the shiny throne rooms to Capitalism that we call malls, or the highways that we speed across looking neither left nor right. Are we letting go of 'spaces' more and more?