Jackie Roving’s Reviews > Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity > Status Update

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This idea echoes Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception, which contrasts geometric space (abstract) with anthropological space (existential, tied to lived experience). De Certeau further likens space to language: just as a word gains meaning through speech, space is shaped by human action, context, and time.

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In The Practice of Everyday Life, Michel de Certeau distinguishes between place (a fixed, ordered location) and space (a “frequented place” animated by human movement and interaction). A street, for instance, is a place when mapped by planners—but becomes a space when pedestrians transform it through their presence.

"...by totalling all the air, rail and motorway routes, the mobile cabins called ‘means of transport’ ..., the airports and railway stations, hotel chains, leisure parks, large retail outlets, and finally the complex skein of cable and wireless networks that mobilize extraterrestrial space for the purposes of a communication so peculiar that it often puts the individual in contact only with another image of himself."

"Place and non-place are rather like opposed polarities: the first is never completely erased, the second never totally completed; they are like palimpsests on which the scrambled game of identity and relations is ceaselessly rewritten. But non-places are the real measure of our time; one that could be quantified - with the aid of a few conversions between area, volume and distance..."

"We should add that the same things apply to the non-place as to the place. It never exists in pure form; places reconstitute themselves in it; relations are restored and resumed in it;..."

"The hypothesis advanced here is that supermodernity produces non-places, meaning spaces which are not themselves anthropological places and which, unlike Baudelairean modernity, do not integrate the earlier places: instead these are listed, classified, promoted to the status of ‘places of memory’, and assigned to a circumscribed and specific position."