Unruly Places: Lost Spaces, Secret Cities, and Other Inscrutable Geographies (27 page)

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.

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. These 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.

I have introduced just a fragment of a world of remarkable places, one that reveals the range and power of the geographical imagination. I believe it also tells us something about our own relationship with the places around us. Unruly places have the power to disrupt our expectations and to reenchant geography. They force us to realize how many basic human motivations—such as the need for freedom, escape, and creativity—are bound up with place. From Sandy Island to Stacey’s lane, we have seen how people pour their hopes and fears into place.

The book’s journey, from places that are lost and hidden to places that are designed and crafted, has followed the human instinct to shape and create. Yet none of these encounters has offered reassurance or comfort. We have had to confront some of the oddest but also some of the bleakest and most difficult locations on the planet and learn that their stories matter to us; that what happens to sinking islands and new deserts or towns in the grip of brutal authority concerns every place.

We have also had to confront the fact that our relationship to place is riddled with paradoxes. Ordinary places are also extraordinary places; the exotic can be around the corner or right under our feet. Another striking paradox is the way borders both trap us and give us our sense of liberty. Some of the places in
Unruly Places
, especially those I have labeled as no man’s lands, appear to have escaped the claustrophobic grid of nations and, hence, offer a promise of freedom. Yet in their unpredictability and sometimes cruelty, these places also impress on us why people find borders so necessary. The paradox can be deepened: the reason we keep drawing borders is not a matter of mere utility. Borders can inspire and excite us. Breakaway nations provide the clearest example, but it’s also an emotion that can be found from Baarle-Nassau to Mount Athos. Not only is a world without borders never likely to happen—it also wouldn’t be much fun.

Another paradox that emerges from the forty-seven disorientating places gathered in this book is humanity’s need for both mobility and roots. “Among the great struggles of man,” Salman Rushdie tells us in
The Ground Beneath Her Feet
, “there is also this mighty conflict between the fantasy of Home and the fantasy of Away, the dream of roots and the mirage of the journey.” A few of the places we have encountered try to ride this divide: residential ships like
The World
, which ceaselessly tour the globe, and ephemeral places like the Nowhere festival, which spring up suddenly then disappear without trace. But this is a dilemma that can never be neatly or completely resolved. The lure of escape and wanderlust is just as deeply implanted as its polar opposite, the desire to anchor oneself in a particular place, to know and care for somewhere that isn’t just anywhere.