“Our fascination with remarkable places is as old as geography…” Alastair Bonnett tells us from the beginning of Unruly Places: Lost Spaces, Secret Cities and Other Inscrutable Geographies. “Although our appetite for curious tales from afar has been continuous, today our need for geographical reenchantment is of a different order.”
Bonnett goes on to explain that we have a need for ‘place’ – specific locations with history and meaning attached – rather than the generic and abstract idea of ‘space’. I only have to think of the endless, almost identical strip malls that I see when traveling around the US to understand what he means here.
“Sir Thomas More’s Greek neologism utopia may translate as ‘no place’, but a placeless world is dystopean prospect” Bonnett writes before reminding us that “[p]lace is a protean and fundamental aspect of what it is to be human. We are a place-making a place-loving species.”
Rebecca Solnitt also echoes this need for ‘places’ in Wanderlust: A History of Walking.
“When you give yourself to places, they give you yourself back; the more one comes to know them, the more one seeds them with the invisible crop of memories and associations that will be waiting for you when you come back, while new places offer up new thoughts, new possibilities.”
Alongside the desire for places with meaning, Bonnett identifies our need to escape.
“The rise of placelessness, on top of the sense that the whole planet is now minutely known and surveilled, has given this dissatsifaction 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.”
Not only does the planet seem to be known and surveilled, but also photographed in its entirety and posted on the internet. Our ability to be surprised and to feel a sense of wonder is suppressed by our feeling that we have seen it all before, and usually in brighter color and with better definition than we find reality to be.
“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 amd 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…The need for reenchantment is something we all share.”
Bonnett warns us that “the most fascinating places are often also the most disturbing, entrapping, and appalling.” The fantastic places described in early travelogues were often strange and disturbing too.
“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.”