Non-places and spectacle. Walking towards the non-place
Authors such as Foucault (1980) have described social or inhabited space as the result of a permanent conflict between power and resistance to power, an idea that is also a feature of Michel de Certeau, but who, unlike the former, finds an element of subversion towards power in daily practices. In Walking in the city (Certeau, 2008) we are offered an interpretation of the act of walking as an empirical tool, an act of speech, of the exploration of a space that is not opposed to the notion of “place” described by Marc Augé in his distinction between places and non-places. For Augé “if a place can be defined as relational, historical, and concerned with identity, then a space which cannot be defined as relational, or historical, or concerned with identity will be a non-place” (1993, p.84). While for Certeau, places are not opposed to spaces as places are to non-places: “Space, for him, is a practised place, a junction of moving elements: the street geometrically defined by urban planning is transformed into a space by walkers. This parallel between the place as an assembly of elements coexisting in a certain order and the space as animation of these places by the motion of a moving body is backed by several references that define its terms." (Augé, 1993, p.45).
It is a disruptive event, according to Debord, when post-modern society produces more spectacle than identity and the spectaclization of space occurs (Fig. 4, 5). In the liquid society (Bauman, 2000), where social class identities are replaced by a consumer society, some “non-places” appear to us in which the user maintains a contractual relationship with the powers that govern them. (Augé, 1993, p.104). A reference of this fiction that fights the real itself to subvert and transform it (Augé, 1998) can be found in theme parks[10]. These non-places with no symbolic support seem to extend beyond the limits of the park, a ‘Disney effect’ that constitutes a self-reference for the future and suppresses the imaginary.
Fig. 3 — Atocha Glasshouse[9] is a botanical garden of subtropical and tropical plants located in the old halt of Atocha Station in Madrid (Spain). Covering an area of 4,000 square metres, it houses more than 7,200 plants of 260 species. (Source: author's own compilation).
[9] According to the study “From the non-place to chronotope, through the lobby of the Atocha station by Álvaro Ramoneda and Ramón Sánchez, Atocha station is not conceived as a space that a priori functions as a non-place, rather it is intended as a space where it is possible to have a picnic, kiss, walk, play, drink, etc.
Fig. 5 — Contrasting images of Disneyland Paris (left) and Central Park NY (right). (Source: author's own compilation).
More forcefully, and placing special emphasis on the relationship between space and power, or rather between a polyhedron of space-economy-globalization, Rem Koolhass describes a junkspace in which:
"Junkspace happens spontaneously through natural corporate exuberance -the unfettered play of the market- or is generated through the combined actions of temporary czars with long records of three-dimensional philanthropy, bureaucrats (often former leftists) that optimistically sell off vast tracts of waterfront... [...] An erratic flow of yen, euros, and dollars (¥€$) creates financial envelopes that are as fragile as their contents. [...] Junkspace expands with the economy but its footprint cannot contract-when it is no longer needed, it thins... [...] At the end of junkspace, the Universal? [...] The global progress of Junkspace represents a final Manifest Destiny: the World as public space... [...] Globalization turns language into Junkspace" (Koolhass, 2002, pp. 39-41).