Non-Places

Definition

Non-places is Marc Augé's term (in Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity, 1992) for the transit and consumption spaces of "supermodernity" — airports, motorways, supermarkets, hotel chains, cash machines — that are passed through rather than dwelt in. Against them stands "anthropological place": space thick with identity, relation, and history. In Taylor's 2018 chapter, the concept is sharpened into an account of built control and disconnection: wandering through "the reductively generated self-similar and homogenized 'supermodern' space of supermarkets, train stations, and airports, 'clients' are scrutinized, identified, and directed by sensors, machines, and card readers" — spaces "replicated indiscriminately across the globe" by "corporate capitalism, business economics, or plain 'efficiency diagrams.'" Graham and Marvin's extension defines them as "sites that are wholly constructed and controlled to support the mobility of global commodities" — "intense concentrations of networked infrastructure" constituting "supermodern spaces of flow" that are "often gated and controlled by barriers, ticket machines (as on subways), and directional paths that allow access by means of network cards that identify users."

The concept's psychological signature is solitude amid simulated connection: Taylor retells Augé's prologue — the fictive urban businessman Pierre Dupont navigating ATM, tollbooth, autoroute, Roissy check-in, duty-free, and the Espace 2000 business-class seat, finally adjusting his earphones to be "alone at last" — as spaces that "advertised and encouraged the idea that 'we are perpetually connected… when, in reality, we are profoundly disconnected.'" Bingham's diagnosis: disconnectedness results from "the overabundance of information and current events, as well as the acceleration of human life and history, but even more so in the proliferation of non-places, which are inherently impersonal and impermanent." Fuller supplies the interactional mechanism: the non-place speaks to "a virtual 'average man' subject to a series of silent exchanges and injunctions (turn left, insert card now, Welcome to Sydney), where contractual modes of interaction are sharply defined and textually mediated" — the cash dispenser "told him he could have 1,800 francs… asked him to wait… thank you for your custom," a conversation with no person in it.

Two cautions on scope: Augé's non-place is an anthropological category (space without identity, relation, history), not a synonym for ugly or new space; and in this wiki it is distinct from Heller's Homogenization (the absorption of activity into a homogeneous sphere of objectivation) even though Taylor's phrase "homogenized supermodern space" uses the same word for spatial sameness.

Key Thinkers

• Marc Augé — the originator: Non-Places (1992); supermodernity produces spaces that individuate (identity via card, seat, code) without relating; his prologue's Pierre Dupont is the concept's parabolic figure, "alone at last."
• Stephen Graham & Simon Marvin — Splintering Urbanism (2001): non-places as "wholly constructed and controlled" infrastructure supporting "the mobility of global commodities"; premium networked spaces (not yet paged — see log).
• Gillian Fuller — "Life in Transit" (2003): the textual interface of transit — "do not eat in the train," "find/lose yourself in Paris" — contractual interchange with a virtual "average man" (not yet paged — see log).
• Kirk A. Bingaman — Treating the New Anxiety (2007): the psychological diagnosis — overabundance of information, acceleration of life, and "the proliferation of non-places, which are inherently impersonal and impermanent" (not yet paged — see log).
• Mark Taylor — the interior-theoretical transmission: reads non-places as the condition of the "supermodern interior" whose continuation in current format he doubts, and as the negative that forces the question of "alternate… receptacles for interiority and dwelling."
• Liz Teston — the political transmission: the non-place as "a postmodern, generic space occupied by people for a predetermined reason" — malls and airports related to "in a detached, solitary manner"; "non-places take our collective identity and twist it into a heterotopic, transactional experience"; yet "by analyzing the everyday, we can see the authenticity and the capacity of 'placeness' in the most ordinary of non-places." Her open question: "what is the phenomenology of the non-place?"
• Melvin Webber — the concept's pre-history (not yet paged — see log): his automobile-based "non-place urban realm" (1964) "directly challenged those for whom place (and maybe even central place) was a defining characteristic of the urban" (via Cochrane, Colenutt & Field 2015, p. 568) — a generation before Augé, the non-place as the urban condition itself rather than a space-type within it.

Related Concepts

• Junkspace — the architectural sibling: Koolhaas's airport/mall/terminal condition is the non-place seen from within the discipline (Augé's page and the Junkspace page each flag the other).
• Dwelling — non-place is defined against dwelling and "anthropological place"; Taylor's chapter makes non-place the negative image that forces the search for "receptacles for interiority and dwelling."
• Interiority — the non-place is interiority-abolishing space: "inherently impersonal and impermanent," addressed to a virtual "average man," private only as solitude ("alone at last").
• Everyday Life — Augé's counter-concept: the everyday need to reinvest meaning ("excess") against non-place; the non-place is the everyday stripped of relation.
• Boundaries — the non-place boundary is the gate automated: barriers, ticket machines, and network cards "that identify users" are Ardener's gate-keepers rendered as infrastructure (see boundaries).
• Power and Space — the control register: "scrutinized, identified, and directed by sensors, machines, and card readers"; contractual, textually mediated injunctions.
• Spectacle — the non-place as late-capitalist space: its advertising pages, its "Espace" branding, its promise of perpetual connection.
• Heterotopia — Teston's distortion formula: the non-place "take[s] our collective identity and twist[s] it into a heterotopic, transactional experience."
• Politicizing the Interior — the non-place as the interior theory's supermodern subject: corporate design standards and non-place named as a research trajectory.
• Interdisciplinarity — the appropriation route: the non-place crosses from anthropology (Augé) into interior architectural theory across the disciplinary frontier.
• The Dialectics of Outside and Inside — the non-place as space without the inside/outside tonality: transit space has no "old intimacy" to lose.
• Terrain Vague — the negative-space counterpart: Weinstock's transposition of the terrain vague into the home ("between the infinite extension of data worlds and the decreasing experience of personal space") — vacancy migrating from the urban void to the dwelling.
• Temporality — the non-place's time is "inherently… impermanent" (Bingham); its impermanence is the temporal signature of supermodern space.

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• Shape shifting (Taylor 2018) — the interior-theoretical account: the supermodern space litany, the Pierre Dupont prologue retold (ATM to Espace 2000 business-class seat, "alone at last"), Graham & Marvin's networked-_infrastructure extension, Bingham's disconnectedness diagnosis, and Fuller's textual-injunction analysis; and the provocation that the supermodern interior "will cease to exist in its current format."

• Megaprojects: Beneath the Pavement, Excess (Jones & Moreno-Carranco 2007) — cities become "non-places" (Augé) resembling airports, against inhabitants' struggle to "reinscribe meaning."

• Deleuze and Space (Buchanan & Lambert eds. 2005) — Augé's non-place (airports, train stations, supermarkets) "crushes the creative and indeed anarchic spirit of de Certeau's notion of space."

• Spatial Stories (de Certeau 1984/2006) — the ground beneath the dialectic: de Certeau's place/space pair — place as "an instantaneous configuration of positions" ruled by "the law of the 'proper'," space as "practiced place" (pp 79–80) — from which Augé's opposition of "anthropological place" and non-place descends (Teston names the lineage explicitly: de Certeau's place as "an area of stasis… ordered, identifiable, and codified," space as "an area that is stimulated by people"). Where de Certeau's practiced space is made by walkers, Augé's supermodern space is engineered against practice. See practiced-place.

• Politicizing the interior (Teston 2018) — the non-place in the political-interior register: "a postmodern, generic space occupied by people for a predetermined reason"; "non-places take our collective identity and twist it into a heterotopic, transactional experience"; the counter-claim of "placeness in the most ordinary of non-places"; the open question "what is the phenomenology of the non-place?"; corporate design standards and non-place as a future research trajectory.

• Thick Edge (Borden 1996/2006) — the non-place in the urban-control register: Augé quoted directly — "a version of Augé's 'non-place as a turning back on the self,' checking the contractual relation between the individual and that non-place" — applied to Broadgate's corporate enclave, where the unsealed gate is "not just the space but the lived time of several seconds through which the visitors validate themselves"; and the Augé formula in full: "The passenger through non-places retrieves his identity only at Customs, at the tollbooth, at the check-out counter… The space of non-place creates neither singular identity nor relations; only solitude, and similitude" (p. 54), with visitors becoming "a 'cast member'" as in Disneyland. See thick-edge, privatised-public-space, spectacle.

• Territory and inhabitation (Campos 2018) — the design revaluation of placelessness: where Augé's non-place is "inherently impersonal and impermanent," Campos designs the placeless interior as inhabited — the Lockheed plant "a hidden, placeless island within an intentionally inconsequential landscape," its interior "liberated from place, suggesting a potential for it to exist in any location or no location," and the liberated interior defined as "an inhabited – if placeless – territory." Placelessness appears not as disconnection but as portability: the interior more durable than the places it occupies. See liberated-interior.

• The waiting room (Hedges 2018) — the non-place's thickened interior other: Hedges's railway station is transit architecture exactly in Augé's sense — "a swirling manifold of circuitry, switching points and deterritorialized, non-grounded flows" (quoted in the chapter), its concourse a gated, timetable-governed passage — but her waiting room is the transit interior where the non-place's erasures are undone: time "slows" and thickens ("the time and place become an interstitial period"), narrative stays alive ("the opportunity to construct narratives out of static scenes through repetitive waiting"), and the room keeps its past ("its surfaces emanating the atmosphere of its past"). Where the non-place creates "only solitude, and similitude," the waiting room is transit space with etiquette, memory, and gendered rules intact — the place-interior persisting inside the non-place network, and, after conversion to student accommodation, the very thing the question "What has been lost?" mourns. See waiting-room, temporality.

• Architectural purgatory (Morey & Alkanoglu 2018) — the vehicular complement: the constant interior ("Inside our homes, automobiles, and offices, the world has become a constant interior") — where Augé's non-place is transit without dwelling, Morey & Alkanoglu's constant interior is transit as dwelling; the highway city known "only… by their highway exit numbers" as the non-place's cartographic reduction of the urban. See constant-interior, space-of-flows.

• Public spheres: Hong Kong's interior urbanism (Solomon 2018) — the non-place's political counter-case: Hong Kong's mall-transit-walkway continuum is non-place material ("multilevel walkways connecting shopping malls and transit terminals"; pedestrians routed "through corridors routed through corporate lobbies, above public parks, or under streets") — yet these supermodern passages become the city's political terrain: "Comprising an interior urbanism, they are, however, potential spaces for political action." The Occupations (the HSBC atrium camp, the footbridge spill-outs, the Umbrella Movement's bridge-and-sidewalk sit-in) are the non-place practiced into public: "the city's public sphere persists in small-scale, ad hoc actions, appropriations, and occupations of private, public, and semi-public infrastructure." Where Augé's non-place creates "neither singular identity nor relations; only solitude, and similitude," Solomon's register finds relation and plurality in the very spaces the category forecloses — the non-place as the square the city never built (see public-sphere, interior-urbanism, practiced-place).

• Living on the Edge: Building a Sub/Urban Region (Cochrane, Colenutt & Field 2015) — the concept's pre-history and its suburban application: Webber's "non-place urban realm" (1964) cited as the challenge to place-centred urban theory (p. 568); and the suburbs themselves caricatured as "bland non-places, defined by what they are not as much as by what they are, with the dynamism of urban life somehow bleached out of them" (p. 568) — the "there is no there there" tradition the paper works against. The suburban case extends the concept's scope: the non-place is not only transit infrastructure but the description a metropolitan culture imposes on places it refuses to see.

• source-notes/jacobus-2018-toward-the-immaterial-interior

• source-notes/vanucci-2018-inside-out-outside-in

Open Questions

• Is the non-place a building type (terminal, mall, concourse) or a mode of occupation — can a place be inhabited non-placially (Dupont's "Roissy, just the two of us!") and a non-place reinvested with meaning (Jones & Moreno-Carranco's "excess")?
• How does the non-place relate to junkspace as analytic: Augé individuates (seat number, card, contract) where Koolhaas conglomerates (brand black holes) — are these two diagnoses of the same space or two different spaces?
• Taylor asks whether the supermodern interior "will cease to exist in its current format" — does the non-place's absorption of interactive technology (sensors that respond rather than merely scrutinize) soften or deepen its impersonality?
• Fuller's "virtual 'average man'" is addressed by injunction, Ardener's category-crosser is addressed by gate-keepers, and Dupont is addressed by machines — is the non-place the contemporary form of the rule-governed boundary space (boundaries) in which the gate-keeper has become a sensor?
• If "anthropological place" requires identity, relation, and history, can the responsive, data-collecting environment Taylor describes ever become a place — or does its perpetual present ("real-time scenario") foreclose the historical depth place requires?
• Does the interior architecture discipline have a stake in designing non-places (airports are interiors), or does its alignment with adaptation and interiority make the non-place its constitutive outside?
• Teston suggests the non-place interior may enable "experiences of psychological interiority" — the less subjective the physical experience, the greater the introspection. Does this invert the wiki's interiority cluster (interiority as the interior's deepest value) — the non-place as interiority-generating rather than interiority-abolishing?
• Teston asks for "the phenomenology of the non-place" and finds "the authenticity and the capacity of 'placeness' in the most ordinary of non-places" — can "placeness" be an attribute of the non-place itself, or does it name exactly what the non-place's predetermined reason forecloses?
• Solomon's counter-case finds "the city's public sphere" persisting in non-place infrastructure ("small-scale, ad hoc actions, appropriations, and occupations of private, public, and semi-public infrastructure") — is the non-place therefore not a final condition but a latent public square whose publics assemble contingently? If the mall walkway can host a camp and a movement, does the category "non-place" describe the space or only its default administration (public-sphere, practiced-place)?