Unruly Places: Lost Spaces, Secret Cities, and Other Inscrutable Geographies (14 page)

51° 24′ 20″ N, 30° 03′ 25″ E

The flip side of urbanization is the fantasy that one day nature will return and the hostile concrete of the city will be carpeted with flowers. But as our capacity to poison the earth has grown, so this dreamscape has turned sick. While it’s true that nature has returned to reclaim the Ukrainian city of Pripyat, this is mostly explained by the fact that radiation levels there are so high that all the humans have had to be evacuated.

Less than three kilometers away from Pripyat is the Chernobyl nuclear power plant. Late one day in April 1986 the residents of Pripyat heard the following announcement from their local radio station: “An accident has occurred at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant. One of the atomic reactors has been damaged. Aid will be given to those affected and a committee of government inquiry has been set up.” Later the same day the entire population of forty-five thousand was bundled into over a thousand buses, without any time to pack. Clothes were left in wardrobes, toys remained in empty prams, pets were abandoned. People were told they would be away for just three days, but they never came back. Even the local army unit’s tanks and helicopters were left where they stood. As we now know, they should have, and could have, gotten out sooner. Reactor No. 4 had exploded three days earlier but the accident was kept secret, leaving the city subject to lethal levels of radioactivity that would have devastating consequences for many of those who lived there, as well as for subsequent generations.

After 1992 and the collapse of the Soviet Union, on-site security lapsed and Pripyat became prey to looters, who even stripped out all the wiring and linoleum. But while human life abandoned the city, over the coming years nature surged back. Today the roads and buildings have been cracked open by the roots of young trees. Mosses and grasses cover the asphalt and decaying concrete, and as the city’s drainage system clogged, after each spring thaw paved areas become shallow lakes. An amusement park, complete with Ferris wheel, due to open on May 1, 1986, stills stands, turning to rust amid the weeds.

An old dream has come back to mock us. In 1890 William Morris wrote
News from Nowhere
, in which he delighted in a vision of the city drawn back into nature. He prophesied Londoners turning against the ugly streets and creating “a very jolly place, now that the trees have had time to grow again since the great clearing of houses in 1955.” It was a powerful idea and tapped into a growing sense of urban malaise. As the world has been covered in increasingly large urban conglomerations, the desire to see nature take its revenge has become ever more thrilling and dangerous. But Morris, the anti-industrial prophet, could not have imagined that nature’s revenge would look like this. It is estimated that Pripyat will be safe again for human habitation in about nine hundred years. Radiation levels are so high that even the briefest of visits is ill advised, and the exclusion zone around the site, officially known as the Zone of Alienation, covers 2,600 kilometers, which is bigger than Luxembourg. The most dangerous places are inside the buildings, where contaminated dust and debris have settled. Jill Dougherty, an American journalist based in Moscow, recalls a drive around Pripyat: “It is completely quiet—it is the most eerie experience I have encountered.” She goes on to describe pavements that “have been taken over by moss and brushwood” and “houses literally rotting . . . I could hear the sound of dripping water coming through the ceilings.”

When it was first built, Pripyat was a model Soviet town. Building began on February 4, 1970, and “shock construction” rapidly created a home for numerous Soviet nationalities. The street names—Enthusiasts, Friendship of the Peoples—reflected Pripyat’s diversity. It was a bright city of wide streets and modern apartment blocks, many decorated with ceramic tiles. The average age of the residents was only twenty-six, and more than one thousand babies were born every year. One former local recalls with pride, “Only in this city could you see a parade of children’s strollers, when in the evening, mothers and fathers walked the streets with their babies.”

For a while it looked as if nothing would survive the world’s worst nuclear accident. In the immediate aftermath of the blast everything was affected, often in odd and gruesome ways. Animal embryos dissolved, and the thyroid glands of horses literally fell apart. One large area of pine woods in the path of the fallout became known as the Red Forest as the trees changed color and died. Today, though, the forest is green again. Many plants adapted rapidly to the new environment. A comparative study of two plantings of soybeans, one sowed five kilometers from the reactor and one sowed one hundred kilometers away, has found that the former were highly contaminated and weighed half as much as they should but also that they were undergoing molecular adaptation. For example, they had three times as much of an enzyme (called cysteine synthase) that protects plants against environmental stress as normal plants.

Meanwhile, the city and its surrounding exclusion zone have been colonized by a variety of animals. Radioecologist Sergey Gaschak has observed that “a lot of birds are nesting inside the sarcophagus,” the concrete shell that was built over the blown reactor in 1986. At the epicenter of the disaster he has spotted “starlings, pigeons, swallows, redstart—I saw nests, and I found eggs.” A head and species count of fauna in the exclusion zone in the mid-2000s found 280 species of birds as well as 66 species of mammals, with a total of 7,000 wild boar, 600 wolves, 3,000 deer, 1,500 beavers, 1,200 foxes, 15 lynx, and thousands of elk. Bear footprints have also been spotted. This is something of a revelation in this part of Ukraine, since bears have been unknown here for many years.

Mary Mycio, whose
Wormwood Forest
is a widely read natural history of the site, argues, “On the surface radiation is very good for wildlife.” The reason is simple: “it forces people to leave the contaminated area.” Referring to the wider exclusion zone, she claims, “It is a radioactive wilderness and it is thriving.”

Yet it would be odd if Pripyat and its environs were harmful only to human beings. Another way of looking at the area is as a zone of mutant nature. The flora and fauna may look like they are “thriving,” but that’s only by means of a crude head count in comparison with normal cities. Timothy Mousseau, a professor of biology at the University of South Carolina who has studied the area in depth, conceded to
National Geographic News
, “One of the great ironies of this particular tragedy is that many animals are doing considerably better than when the humans were there.” But he also warned that “it would be a mistake” to conclude that this means they aren’t suffering. In fact, Mousseau’s research shows that reproductive rates among local birds are much lower than average, and evidence from other studies reveals hormone damage in trees, many of which have been growing in strange and twisted ways. The mutation of the trees’ growth receptors means that, as a colleague of Mousseau, James Morris, explains, they “are having a terrible time knowing which way is up.” Other work has shown even odder reactions, such as freshwater lake worms switching from asexual to sexual reproduction.

It is hard to know if these changes are signs of damage or adaptations or both, but they tell us that this is no Garden of Eden. When he visited the area in 2005 the Ukrainian president, Viktor Yushchenko, floated the idea that it could become a nature reserve. Since then the local authorities have been scoping the idea of a Chernobyl National Nature Park. Paradoxically, at the same time the president proposed that the site could be used to store foreign nuclear waste. This idea was soon thrown out, but it drops a heavy clue that Ukraine is trying to find an economic use for the exclusion zone. All the “good news” about abundant flora and fauna is being used to suggest that the area is bouncing back and that lethal radiation and biodiversity are happy bedfellows.

The dream of the city returned to nature is a persistent one. The more we urbanize and rid ourselves of nature, the more it haunts us and the more likely we are to take a strange delight in seeing sidewalks and buildings broken apart by tree roots. This is what is happening at Pripyat, but the dream wasn’t meant to be like this. William Morris’s hope was for a balanced relationship between people and nature. In 1890 that could still have happened, and one day, perhaps, it might yet be possible. In the meantime, the overgrown streets of Pripyat symbolize the abandonment of that hope. We were supposed to be part of this story: regaining something, rejoining something we’d lost. Pripyat points to an alternative future.

37° 43′ 37″ N, 15° 11′ 02″ E

Modern places are made up of layers of incomplete visions of the future, and the result is a permanent state of impermanence. Giarre, a small Sicilian seaside town that lies in the shadow of Mount Etna, offers one of the world’s most startling concentrations of half-finished grand building projects. This town within a town was dubbed the Archaeological Park of Sicilian Incompletion by Italian artists, and the name has stuck. Here you will find twenty-five incomplete structures built between the mid-1950s and the 2000s, many of considerable size, such as a vast Athletics and Polo Stadium, an unfinished near-Olympic-size Regional Swimming Pool, and a tumbling concrete palace known as the Multifunctional Hall. Their concrete shells are slowly being taken over by meadow grass and cacti, but they still dominate the landscape.

In a town of only twenty-seven thousand people these edifices stand out starkly, as unmissable clues to local politicians’ habit of making impressive but ill-advised claims about what public works they could see to completion in order to secure funds from the regional government. Starting large-scale construction work has been a vote winner and a way of creating jobs. It was also claimed to combat the recruiting power of the Mafia.

The landscape that has resulted from all these promises is surreal and has a melancholic appeal for those attracted to the idea that decay and inertia will always overtake the hubris of modernity. A collective of artists based in Milan, New York, and Berlin, called Alterazioni Video, devised the idea of the Archaeological Park of Sicilian Incompletion in Giarre, delighting in what, in a photo essay on Giarre, they call its “sheer scale, territorial extent and architectural oddness.” They define incompletion as the “partial execution of a project followed by continual modifications that generate new spurts of activity,” a process that produces “purposeless sites” that “dominate the landscape like triumphal arches.” Alterazioni Video collaborator and local community activist Claudia D’Aita, who once staged a mock polo match at the Athletics and Polo Stadium, explained to a BBC journalist that all of Giarre’s unfinished edifices should be seen as “a kind of open-air museum.” It’s a refrain picked up by Alterazioni Video, which announced in its photo essay that these “glaring blemishes on the civic horizon” should be “transformed into a tourist destination, giving new value and meaning to the monuments of a perpetual present.”

Alterazioni Video produced a map and guidebook to help visitors find their way around the various key sites of incompletion. I’d not heard of anyone using the guide in earnest, so I went to Giarre in July 2013 to see what it would be like to be a tourist of unfinished Sicily. It was, unsurprisingly, an odd experience, and I occasionally found it difficult to tell the complete and incomplete town apart. Just across the road from Chico Mendes Park, a half-built and fenced-off “children’s city” that is a central stopping point on Alterazioni Video’s self-guided tour, is another abandoned area, an elaborate 1980s roundabout that is now a wasteland of grasses, graffiti, and wild fig trees as well as a huge stash of brown glass bottles. It is adorned with a broken central fountain, a rusting orb shaped like
Sputnik
, a ring of dried-up smaller water features, and a weed-infested sculpture of the nineteenth-century cleric Don Bosco instructing street children. As I stood next to Chico Mendes Park, this large traffic island felt unfinished, but it is more likely to have simply not been maintained. Neglect and incompletion merge in Giarre, creating an extensive and continuous landscape of abandonment.

In its “Sicilian Incompletion Manifesto” Alterazioni Video argues that Giarre is the “epicenter” of a phenomenon that has “radiated out from Sicily to the rest of the peninsula, creating an Unfinished Italy.” Yet the way the incomplete parts of town mesh with the ordinary landscape reminded me that I didn’t need to come to Italy to find the remnants of once heroic architectural visions. Standing in the shadow of the high concrete terraces and walkways of the Athletics and Polo Stadium, on a playing field covered in the ash and cinder thrown up by Mount Etna, I was reminded of my hometown of Newcastle, which has its own network of unfinished concrete walkways and a stub end of a motorway, both discards from 1960s plans to bulldoze the city and rebuild it as the “Brasilia of the North.”

Giarre offers the extreme form of a condition found in most cities, making it a parable of urban planning. It is the epicenter not of merely an Italian but a global phenomenon of accreted unfinished visions. It is also a good place to think about how we live with the layering and churning of the city. Being surrounded by the sawed-off ends of the utopian plans of once powerful people can be liberating, as it subverts the professional’s claim on the city; the architects, politicians, and planners all stand defeated, incapable of molding place to their will. Yet if this is a victory, it is a hollow one, for we are all left picking our way through the pieces. A more profound consequence is that we disconnect ourselves from place: provisional and incomplete hometowns inspire provisional and incomplete loyalty. In tumbling together half-realized projects at an ever greater speed, the city of incompletion disrupts the possibility of people building up a relationship of care, knowledge, and trust with the place they live in.

The artists who guided me around the Archaeological Park of Sicilian Incompletion are attempting to find a new and challenging way to reconnect people with place by embracing this sense of disconnect and tumult. It is a paradoxical project, both subversive and conservative, mocking the failure of effective governance in Sicily while suggesting that vaguely futuristic ruins can be the basis for a novel type of geographical allegiance. “The sum of these relics of never-attained futures,” they write, “is so vast that it can be considered as a true architectural and visual style, representing Italy and the age in which they were produced.” Incompletion comes to represent “the speculative munificence of Sicilians and all other Italians” and, even more grandly, the invention of authentically modern “places for spiritual habitation and contemplation” that are also “places of existential awareness, embodiments of the human soul.”