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

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Table of Contents

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Introduction

  LOST SPACES

  Sandy Island

  Leningrad

  Arne

  Old Mecca

  New Moore

  Time Landscape

  The Aralqum Desert

  HIDDEN GEOGRAPHIES

  The Labyrinth

  Zheleznogorsk

  The Underground Cities of Cappadocia

  Fox Den

  North Cemetery, Manila

  North Sentinel Island

  NO MAN’S LANDS

  Between Border Posts (Guinea and Senegal)

  Bir Tawil

  Nahuaterique

  Twayil Abu Jarwal

  Traffic Island

  DEAD CITIES

  Wittenoom

  Kangbashi

  Kijong-dong

  Ağdam

  Pripyat

  The Archaeological Park of Sicilian Incompletion

  SPACES OF EXCEPTION

  Camp Zeist

  Geneva Freeport

  Bright Light, 4 Mures Street, Bucharest

  International Airspace

  Gutterspace

  Bountiful

  Mount Athos

  Ranch of Sprouts: Brotas Quilombo

  FARC-controlled Colombia

  Hobyo

  ENCLAVES AND BREAKAWAY NATIONS

  Baarle-Nassau and Baarle-Hertog

  Chitmahals

  Sealand

  United Kingdom of Lunda Tchokwe

  Gagauzia

  FLOATING ISLANDS

  Pumice and Trash Islands

  Nipterk P-32 Spray Ice Island

  The Floating Maldives

  The World

  EPHEMERAL PLACES

  Hog’s Back Lay-By

  LAX Parking Lot

  Nowhere

  Stacey’s Lane

  Conclusion: Sympathy for a Place-Loving Species

  Bibliography

  Acknowledgments

  Index

  About the Author

  First U.S. edition

  Copyright © 2014 by Alastair Bonnett

  Illustrations copyright © 2014 by Lauren Nassef

  All rights reserved

  For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003.

  www.hmhco.com

  First published in Great Britain in 2014 by Aurum Press

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:

  Bonnett, Alastair, date.

  Unruly places : lost spaces, secret cities, and other inscrutable geographies / Alastair Bonnett.

  pages cm

  ISBN 978-0-544-10157-9 (hardback)

  1. Geography—Miscellanea. I. Title.

  G131.B66 2014

  910—dc23

  2013050983

  eISBN 978-0-544-10160-9

  v1.0714

  For Helen and Paul

  Our fascination with remarkable places is as old as geography. Eratosthenes’s Geographika, written around 200 B.C., offers a tour of numerous “famous” cities and “great” rivers, while the seventeen volumes of Strabo’s Geography, written in the first years of the first century A.D. for Roman imperial administrators, provides an exhaustive compendium of journeys, cities, and destinations. My favorite of Strabo’s places are the gold mines of India, which, he tells us, are dug by ants “no smaller than foxes” that possess pelts “like those of leopards.” Although our appetite for curious tales from afar has been continuous, today our need for geographical reenchantment is of a different order.

  I root my love of place in Epping. It’s one of many commuter towns near London, pleasant enough but generic and placeless. It’s where I was born and grew up. As I used to rattle out to Epping on the Central Line or drive there along London’s orbital motorway, I often felt as if I were traveling from nowhere to nowhere. Moving through landscapes that once meant something, perhaps an awful lot, but have been reduced to spaces of transit where everything is temporary and everyone is just passing through, gave me a sense of unease and a hunger for places that matter.

  You don’t have to walk far into our coagulated roadscape to realize that, over the past one hundred years or so and across the world, we have become much better at destroying places than building them. The titles of a clutch of recent books, such as Paul Kingsnorth’s Real England, Marc Augé’s Non-Places, and James Kunstler’s The Geography of Nowhere, indicate an emergent anxiety. These authors are tapping into a widespread feeling that the replacement of unique and distinct places by generic blandscapes is severing us from something important. One of the world’s most eminent thinkers on place, Edward Casey, a professor of philosophy at Stony Brook University, argues that “the encroachment of an indifferent sameness-of-place on a global scale” is eating away at our sense of self and “makes the human subject long for a diversity of places.” Casey casts a skeptical eye over the intellectual drift away from thinking about place. In ancient and medieval thought place was often center stage, the ground and context for everything else. Aristotle thought place should “take precedence of all other things” because place gives order to the world. Casey tells us that Aristotle claimed that place “gives bountiful aegis—active protective support—to what it locates.” But the universalist pretensions of first, monotheistic religion, and then the Enlightenment, conspired to represent place as parochial, as a prosaic footnote when compared to their grand but abstract visions of global oneness. Most modern intellectuals and scientists have hardly any interest in place, for they consider their theories to be applicable everywhere. Place was demoted and displaced, a process that was helped on its way by the rise of its slightly pompous and suitably abstract geographical rival, the idea of “space.” Space sounds modern in a way place doesn’t: it evokes mobility and the absence of restrictions; it promises empty landscapes filled with promise. When confronted with the filled-in busyness and oddity of place, the reaction of modern societies has been to straighten and rationalize, to prioritize connections and erase obstacles, to overcome place with space.

  In his philosophical history The Fate of Place Casey charts a growing “disdain for the genus loci: indifference to the specialness of place.” We all live with the results. Most of us can see them outside the window. In a hypermobile world, a love of place can easily be cast as passé, even reactionary. When human fulfillment is measured out in air miles and when even geographers subscribe to the idea, as expressed by Professor William J. Mitchell of MIT, that “communities increasingly find their common ground in cyberspace rather than terra firma,” wanting to think about place can seem a little perverse. Yet placelessness is neither intellectually nor emotionally satisfying. Sir Thomas More’s Greek neologism utopia may translate as “no place,” but a placeless world is a dystopian prospect.

  Place is a protean and fundamental aspect of what it is to be human. We are a place-making and place-loving species. The renowned evolutionary biologist Edward O. Wilson talks about the innate and biologically necessary human love of living things as “biophilia.” He suggests that biophilia both connects us together as a species and bonds us to the rest of nature. I would argue that there is an unjustly ignored and equally important geographical equivalent, “topophilia,” or love of place. The word was coined by the Chinese-American geographer Yi-Fu Tuan about
the same time as Wilson introduced biophilia, and its pursuit is at the heart of this book.

  There is another theme that threads its way throughout the places corralled here—the need to escape. This urge is more widespread today than at any point in the past: since fantastic vacation destinations and lifestyles are constantly dangled before us, it’s no surprise so many feel dissatisfied with their daily routine. The rise of placelessness, on top of the sense that the whole planet is now minutely known and surveilled, has given this dissatisfaction a radical edge, creating an appetite to find places that are off the map and that are somehow secret, or at least have the power to surprise us.

  When describing the village of Ishmael’s native ally and friend, Queequeg, in Moby-Dick, Herman Melville wrote, “It is not down in any map; true places never are.” It’s an odd thing to say, but I think it makes immediate, instinctual sense. It touches on a suspicion that lies just beneath the rational surface of civilization. When the world has been fully codified and collated, when ambivalences and ambiguities have been so sponged away that we know exactly and objectively where everything is and what it is called, a sense of loss arises. The claim to completeness causes us to mourn the possibility of exploration and muse endlessly on the hope of novelty and escape. It is within this context that the unnamed and discarded places—both far away and those that we pass by every day—take on a romantic aura. In a fully discovered world exploration does not stop; it just has to be reinvented.

  In the early 1990s I got involved with one of the more outré forms of this reinvention, known as psychogeography. Most of the time this involved either drifting in search of what some of my comrades fondly imagined were occult energies or purposely getting lost by using a map of one place to navigate oneself around another. To wander through a day care center in Newcastle while clutching a map of the Berlin subway is genuinely disorienting. In so doing, we thought we were terribly bold, but in hindsight what strikes me about the yearning to radically rediscover the landscape around us is just how ordinary it is. The need for reenchantment is something we all share.

  So let’s go on a journey—to the ends of the earth and the other side of the street, as far as we need to go to get away from the familiar and the routine. Good or bad, scary or wonderful, we need unruly places that defy expectations. If we can’t find them we’ll create them. Our topophilia can never be extinguished or sated.

  We are headed for uncharted territory, to places found on few maps and sometimes on none. They are both extraordinary and real. This is a book of floating islands, dead cities, and hidden kingdoms. We begin with raw territory, exploring lost places that have been chanced upon or uncovered, before heading in the direction of places that have been more consciously fashioned. It’s not a smooth trajectory, for nearly all of the places we will encounter are paradoxical and hard to define, but it does allow us to encounter a world of startling profusion. As we will quickly discover, this is not the same thing as offering up a rose-tinted planet of happy lands. Authentic topophilia can never be satisfied with a diet of sunny villages. The most fascinating places are often also the most disturbing, entrapping, and appalling. They are also often temporary. In ten years’ time most of the places we will be exploring will look very different; many will not be there at all. But just as biophilia doesn’t lessen because we know that nature is often horrible and that all life is transitory, genuine topophilia knows that our bond with place isn’t about finding the geographical equivalent of kittens and puppies. This is a fierce love. It is a dark enchantment. It goes deep and demands our attention.

  The forty-seven places that make up this book are here because they each, in a different way, forced me to rethink what I knew about place. They have not been chosen for being merely outlandish or spectacular but for possessing the power to provoke and disorient. Although they range from the most exotic and grandest projects to modest corners of my own hometown, they are all equally capable of stimulating and reshaping our geographical imagination. Together they conspire to make the world seem a stranger place where discovery and adventure are still possible, both nearby and far away.

  Note: Where possible, I have added Google Earth coordinates for the approximate center or location of each place. These coordinates are consistent with each other but cannot be claimed to be exact, in part because they may change each time Google Earth is updated. No coordinates have been given for historical places or places that are mobile.

  Sandy Island

  19° 12′ 44″ S, 159° 56′ 21″ E

  The discovery of the nonexistence of places is an intriguing byway in the history of exploration. The most recent example came in 2012 when an Australian survey vessel visited Sandy Island, seven hundred miles east of Queensland, and found that it was not there. This despite the fact that a stretched-out oval fifteen miles long and about three miles wide had been on the map for almost as long as people had been charting these seas.

  Breakers and sandy islets were first sighted here by a whaling ship called the Velocity in 1876. A few years later Sandy Island got a mention in an Australian naval directory. In 1908 its inclusion on a British Admiralty map of the area lent it even more legitimacy. But its dotted outline on this chart shows that it was being identified as a potential hazard and hinted that it needed further exploration. Four years earlier, in 1904, the New York Times had covered the story of an American cruiser, the USS Tacoma, that had been sent to verify “Hundreds of Illusions Charted as Land” within the “American Group,” a chain of islands supposedly located midway between the United States and Hawaii. Their existence was given weight by the claim of Captain John DeGreaves, “science advisor” to King Kamehameha of Hawaii, that he had picnicked on one of them in the company of the famous “Spanish dancer” and mistress of King Ludwig I, Lola Montez.

  Unfortunately both the islands and the picnic turned out to have been wishful thinking on the part of the captain. The New York Times story explained why, aside from tall tales, the oceans were still littered with cartographic blunders. “Long dark patches or bright, yellowish patches, which at a distance give the mariner the impression of shoals,” “a rip tide mistaken for breakers,” and even the back of a floating whale have been enough to start a new myth. In lonely parts of the sea, where information is at a premium and corroboration or refutation rare, the thinnest evidence “will live for a time on a chart with the embarrassing letters ‘E.D.’ opposite the entry, meaning its existence is doubted.”

  Because land is looked and hoped for by sailors, the faintest signs have been seized upon. Far from being doubted, Sandy Island’s credentials became ever more watertight. Having been inked in on an authoritative chart, it acquired the status of a known fact and its myth was transmitted deep into the twentieth century and beyond. It was included in maps produced by the National Geographic Society and The Times of London, and no one complained or even noticed. It was also, apparently, captured by the satellites that many imagine are the sole feeders for Google Earth. Dr. Maria Seton, who led the Australian survey team, explained to journalists that although the island is on Google Earth as well as other maps, navigation charts show the water to be 1,400 meters deep in the same spot: “so we went to check and there was no island. We’re really puzzled. It’s quite bizarre.”

  On November 26, 2012, Google Earth blacked out Sandy Island and later stitched over the spot with generic sea. Today on Google Earth the place where Sandy Island once was is crowded with dozens of photos uploaded by map browsers. Unable to resist the creative possibilities, they have scattered the ex-island with images of clashing dinosaurs, moody urban back streets, and fantastical temples.

  The story of the disappearance of Sandy Island was a minor global sensation. If Sandy Island doesn’t exist, then how can we be certain about other places? The sudden deletion of Sandy Island forces us to realize that our view of the world still occasionally relies on unverified reports from far away. The modern map purports to give us all easy access to an exhaustive and panop
tic God’s-eye view of the world. But it turns out that ventures such as Google Earth are not just using satellite photographs. They rely on a composite of sources, some of which are out-of-date maps.

  Even before 2012 some people already knew that Sandy Island didn’t quite live up to its name. It lies in the terrestrial waters that extend hundreds of miles around the French “special collectivity” of New Caledonia. But some decades ago Île de Sable, the French name for Sandy Island, was quietly dropped from French maps, and it doesn’t feature on a French hydrographical office chart drawn up in 1982. A 1967 map of the area produced in the USSR also doesn’t include it. What is clear is that not everyone is using the same sources. However, this does not imply that the French or Soviets have been consistently better informed than everyone else. The 2010 Michelin map of the world includes Île de Sable, and the news of its nonexistence was as much a surprise to the French public as it was to the rest of the world. Following the Australian nondiscovery of Sandy Island, Le Figaro announced, on December 3, 2012, that “Le mystère de l’île fantôme est résolu.”

  But this isn’t just a technical story about mismatching geographical data. Why should it matter to anyone that a sandy strip thousands of miles away, somewhere hardly anyone had ever heard of before, turns out not to be there?

  It matters because today, although we live with the expectation that the world is fully visible and exhaustively known, we also want and need places that allow our thoughts to roam unimpeded. The hidden and remarkable places are havens for the geographical imagination, redoubts against the increasingly if not exhaustively all-seeing chart that has been built up over the past two hundred years. The 1908 inclusion of Sandy Island on an Admiralty chart was a clumsy error, a mistake not typical of the period. Far from dotting the globe with fabulous islands, the naval powers of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries remorselessly tracked down any and all such rumors and either confirmed or disproved them. As a result, the 1875 revised Admiralty Pacific chart discarded 123 unreal islands. The New York Times story from 1904 led to the confirmed nonexistence of a cluster of islands south of Tasmania called the Royal Company Islands. After vessels were sent to investigate, these islands, like so many before them, were removed from the map. The American ships were doing their bit for modernity: eliminating doubt, attaining panoptic knowledge. Yet modernity also gives us the self-questioning and self-doubting consciousness that permits us to understand that we lose something in its attainment. As the clutter of outrageous, fantastical photographs that today occupy Sandy Island’s place on Google Earth suggests, Sandy Island’s disappearance established it as a rebel base for the imagination, an innocent and an upstart that managed to escape the vast technologies of omni-knowledge.