Alastair Bonnett > Quotes

“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.”
― Alastair Bonnett, Unruly Places: Lost Spaces, Secret Cities, and Other Inscrutable Geographies

“Modern places are made up of layers of incomplete visions of the future, and the result is a permanent state of impermanence.”
― Alastair Bonnett, Unruly Places: Lost Spaces, Secret Cities, and Other Inscrutable Geographies

“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.”
― Alastair Bonnett, Unruly Places: Lost Spaces, Secret Cities, and Other Inscrutable Geographies

“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.”
― Alastair Bonnett, Unruly Places: Lost Spaces, Secret Cities, and Other Inscrutable Geographies

“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.”
― Alastair Bonnett, Unruly Places: Lost Spaces, Secret Cities, and Other Inscrutable Geographies

“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.”
― Alastair Bonnett, Unruly Places: Lost Spaces, Secret Cities, and Other Inscrutable Geographies

“In the early 1990s I got involved with one of the more outré forms of this reinvention, known as psychogeography.”
― Alastair Bonnett, Unruly Places: Lost Spaces, Secret Cities, and Other Inscrutable Geographies

“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.”
― Alastair Bonnett, Unruly Places: Lost Spaces, Secret Cities, and Other Inscrutable Geographies

“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.”
― Alastair Bonnett, Unruly Places: Lost Spaces, Secret Cities, and Other Inscrutable Geographies

“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.”
― Alastair Bonnett, Unruly Places: Lost Spaces, Secret Cities, and Other Inscrutable Geographies

“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.”
― Alastair Bonnett, Unruly Places: Lost Spaces, Secret Cities, and Other Inscrutable Geographies

“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.”
― Alastair Bonnett, Unruly Places: Lost Spaces, Secret Cities, and Other Inscrutable Geographies

“The total disappearance in 1946 of “East Prussia” into East Poland and the Soviet exclave of Kaliningrad was also an act of revenge and ethnic cleansing.”
― Alastair Bonnett, Unruly Places: Lost Spaces, Secret Cities, and Other Inscrutable Geographies

“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.”
― Alastair Bonnett, Unruly Places: Lost Spaces, Secret Cities, and Other Inscrutable Geographies

“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

“To wander through a day care center in Newcastle while clutching a map of the Berlin subway is genuinely disorienting.”
― Alastair Bonnett, Unruly Places: Lost Spaces, Secret Cities, and Other Inscrutable Geographies

“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.”
― Alastair Bonnett, Unruly Places: Lost Spaces, Secret Cities, and Other Inscrutable Geographies

“And there is but a step from a she-ass to a woman.”
― Alastair Bonnett, Unruly Places: Lost Spaces, Secret Cities, and Other Inscrutable Geographies

“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.”
― Alastair Bonnett, Unruly Places: Lost Spaces, Secret Cities, and Other Inscrutable Geographies

“In a fully discovered world exploration does not stop; it just has to be reinvented.”
― Alastair Bonnett, Unruly Places: Lost Spaces, Secret Cities, and Other Inscrutable Geographies

“the replacement of unique and distinct places by generic blandscapes is severing us from something important.”
― Alastair Bonnett, Unruly Places: Lost Spaces, Secret Cities, and Other Inscrutable Geographies

“Most modern intellectuals and scientists have hardly any interest in place, for they consider their theories to be applicable everywhere.”
― Alastair Bonnett, Unruly Places: Lost Spaces, Secret Cities, and Other Inscrutable Geographies

“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”);”
― Alastair Bonnett, Unruly Places: Lost Spaces, Secret Cities, and Other Inscrutable Geographies

“A place is a storied landscape, somewhere that has human meaning. But another thing we have started to learn, or relearn, is that places aren’t just about people; that they reflect our attempt to grasp and make sense of the non-human; the land and its many inhabitants that are forever around and beyond us. It can be an unnerving exchange, especially when what we hope to see is something purely natural, and what we find instead is our own reflection. Shorelines are waxing and waning with increasing speed, and old kingdoms, like Doggerland, as well as new ones in the once-inaccessible Arctic, are being revealed, demanding that we look at the landscape, and at the map, in new ways; as something in motion, unmoored by tradition.”
― Alastair Bonnett, Beyond the Map

“It seems natural to define the world around what is sought after, but geopolitics can also be considered in terms of what is not wanted.”
― Alastair Bonnett, Unruly Places: Lost Spaces, Secret Cities, and Other Inscrutable Geographies