Placeless Geography
Welcome to McWorld! |
| Go into a Protestant church in a Swiss village, a mosque
in Damascus, the cathedral at Reims, a Buddhist temple in Bangkok, and though
in every case you are visiting a place of worship with a common aura of piety,
you know from one pious site to the next that you are in a distinctive
culture. The site of a multiplex movie theater -- or a spectator sports arena, or a mall ,or a modern hotel , or fast-food establishment in any city around the world -- and try to figure out where you are. You are nowhere. You are chasing pixels on a Nintendo: the world surrounding you vanishes. You are in front of or in or on MTV: universal images assault the eyes and global dissonances assault the ears in a heart-pounding tumult that tells you everything except which country you are in. Where are you? You are in McWorld. [Source: Benjamin Barber, Jihad vs. McWorld. Random House, 1995. pp. 98-99.] |
divergence -- how cultural landscapes are different from one another. Now, we start to talk about
convergence - how cultural landscapes are similar regardless of where they are found; indeed, new landscapes are often considered better than "authentic" places. In many ways, placeless places are the landscapes that all the diverse people of the USA share in common: the Amish shop at Menard's; Norwegians go to the movies; Black teenagers hang around in Mall of America; etc. From the various diverse and distinctive cultures and places, people come together in the placeless landscapes of the suburbs, malls, highways, and amusement parks.
Although the above quote deals with countries, the quote
is relevant to places within the United States as well.
McWorld is
another
way to say placelessness. When cultural landscapes
begin to look
alike, geographers use
the
terms like
placelessness, flatscapes, thin places,
generica,
or kitsch.
Components of placelessness are
1)
other-directedness in places,
2)
uniformity and standardization in places, and
3)
place destruction.
Can you cite examples of each?
See your notes from
class.
Notes
on Placelessness.
Ada Louise Huxtable's The Unreal America
(New Press, 1998) critiques "invented environments," which
include fancy theme-parks, fake-old new towns, and even
heritage preservation.
Explanations of placelessness
are numerous:
Can you cite examples of each? See your notes from class. Notes on Placelessness.
Responses to placelessness vary, as they do in other situations as well: 1) fantasy, 2) flight, 3) withdrawal, and 4) resistance.
How might these responses to placelessness express themselves in human behavior?
Let's look at various forms of placelessness in North America:
other types of places: urban renewal |
Just for the fun of it you might want to do an exercise on placelessness (machine space), developed by geographers at the University of Texas at Austin.
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Created by Ingolf Vogeler on 1 May 1996; last revised on 23 November 2010.