Home > Author > Alastair Bonnett
1 " 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. "
― Alastair Bonnett , Unruly Places: Lost Spaces, Secret Cities, and Other Inscrutable Geographies
2 " Turning complex, diverse places into shallow, simple ones creates a more culturally vulnerable population, an unrooted mass whose only linking thread lies in the ideology that is fed to them from above. "
3 " Borders are about claims to land, but as soon as you draw one you limit yourself. Every border is also an act of denial, an acknowledgment of another’s rights. By contrast, the claim to want no borders, much prized by corporate executives and anticapitalist activists alike, is a claim to the whole world. Borders have a far more ambivalent and complex relationship to territory; they combine both arrogance and modesty, both demand and denial. "
4 " 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. "
5 " Place is the fabric of our lives, memory and identity are stitched through it. Without having somewhere of one’s own, a place that is home, freedom is an empty word. "
6 " Modern places are made up of layers of incomplete visions of the future, and the result is a permanent state of impermanence. "
7 " The city is a place where nature is excised and then mourned, killed off then raised from the dead, only to be entombed in caged-off spaces of floral tribute. "
8 " As a result, Hobyo is as good an example as any of a “feral city.” It’s a term that is used in military circles to describe regions that have no effective government but sustain an internationally networked criminal economy. Feral cities are the ragged end of spaces of exception: they are not the product of governments or ideologies but show what happens when such structures fall away. "
9 " That morning I’d read that construction workers in London had discovered a young fox living off their leftover sandwiches on the unfinished seventy-second floor of the Shard, the UK’s tallest building. "
10 " In the early 1990s I got involved with one of the more outré forms of this reinvention, known as psychogeography. "
11 " 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. "
12 " The destruction of old Mecca goes hand in hand with the ban on non-Muslims entering the city, as well as the center of Medina. Both are attempts to cleanse the city of historical complexity. The road signs on the freeway into Mecca spell it out: “Muslims Only. "
13 " Centralia, a mining town in Pennsylvania made uninhabitable by an underground fire that began in 1962 and is still burning today (the road into town bears the graffiti legend “Welcome to Hell”); "
14 " 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. "
15 " 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. "
16 " In a fully discovered world exploration does not stop; it just has to be reinvented. "
17 " the replacement of unique and distinct places by generic blandscapes is severing us from something important. "
18 " Most modern intellectuals and scientists have hardly any interest in place, for they consider their theories to be applicable everywhere. "
19 " Centralia, a mining town in Pennsylvania made uninhabitable by an underground fire that began in 1962 and is still burning today (the road into town bears the graffiti legend “Welcome to Hell”); and Gilman in Colorado, a lead-mining town closed because of ground toxicity. "
20 " The Aralqum Desert is too new, too large, and its outline too changeable to be on any maps. It’s a desert that used to be called the Aral Sea. The new name is gaining favor, although it’s not quite as exotic as it sounds. Qum is Uzbek for “sand. "
