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©2024 entheogen designPlacelessness
Theoretical Grounding
Before critiquing built environments, we must first describe and understand our perception and experience of place, and conversely, placelessness. Only through developing deep understandings of place may we articulate social and environmental injustices driving escalating placelessness, or the gradual erosion of once-unique places which become homogenized through infrastructural and architectural development and through humanity’s increasing withdrawal from the material world altogether. Placelessness is intertwined with the phenomena of displacement – which entails the forcible removal of people and communities from their places by gentrification and redevelopment alongside institutional policies such as eminent domain and redlining. Whereas placelessness entails a description of a perceptual phenomenon, much in the vein of an individual’s depersonalization or dissociation from reality, or a society’s growing normlessness and division, displacement describes the phenomena of how people experience removal from their places due to social or political violence or outright genocide.
Place, here, is approached at a ‘systems’ level rather than at a ‘site-specific’ scale. This definitional scale of place seeks to identify and describe broader social and cultural patterns that manifest in specific sites. Case studies include an examination of physical transportation infrastructure, but also increasingly digital information infrastructure that in tandem shift broader consumption patterns. By considering solely specific individual sites, we lose out on these broader shifts in the social milieu and flows of political capital that are the ‘true, underlying’ causes behind development. In this view, the very notion that a site can be understood by examining only that within its boundaries is reductive and dishonest. For example, in seeking to understand Liriodendron tulipifera (the tulip poplar), we should study not solely individual specimens, but rather the entire surrounding forest; the ways in which Liriodendron tulipifera fulfills and creates ecological niches within environmental constraints, relationally entangling with other species, participating in flows of energy and resources that unfold over countless generations, not solely the lifespan of solitary organisms.
The theoretical lenses utilized in the analysis range from post-structuralist thinkers such as Foucault to new materialist thought which consider flows of matter and energy, and even towards phenomenological approaches more concerned with subjective experience, identity, sensation, and perception. Key to theoretical understandings of place, Seamon & Sowers unpack Relph’s seminal work, Place and Placelessness, arguing that phenomenological approaches are necessary in approaching something as subjective as place: “to uncover the obvious, we must step back from any taken-for-granted attitudes and assumptions, whether in the realm of everyday experience or in the realm of conceptual perspectives and explanations, including the scientific” (Seamon & Sowers 43). This ‘relinquishing’ of our deeply ingrained ways of perceiving and understanding is central to the philosophical work of phenomenological inquiry. Normative understandings of place prevent us from seeing clearly – and thus generate and perpetuate numerous social and environmental issues.
Foucault’s philosophy is relevant to discussions of place in that he considers the ways in which subjects and their objects are divided spatially and informationally so that they may become more efficiently disciplined as both sources of labor to be extracted as well as potential consumers of goods, services, information, places, and transportation. Western knowledge, in the form of scientific categorization, inherently involves the drawing of boundaries between entities, a system of classification reliant upon division, dualism, and efficiency, is highly productive on some scales – such as individual sites – but ceases to retain relevance when working at broader social scales where delineations become messy and arbitrary, requiring relational ways of knowing that recognize the inherent nonduality of complex assemblages and entanglements. Though scientific understandings offer promise as a powerful way of producing knowledge and knowing the world, it is worth noting science’s historic entanglement with extractive and uneven systems of colonization and capitalism that have produced many of the issues we seek to address today.
Rejecting Newtonian/Cartesian notions of mathematicalized space, Relph argues that “space is not a void or an isometric plane or a kind of container that holds places […] space too must be explored in terms of how people experience it” (Seamon & Sowers 44). Phenomenology offers a perspective ‘outside’ the traditional scientific mode of inquiry, offering a glimpse into those facets of experience which science struggles to describe, such as the nature of sensation as humanity’s medium of subjective making meaning, such as building a sense of place. Phenomenology investigates how we derive or attach meaning to place-experience through our attempts to understand ourselves and the world around us. For Relph, “the unique quality of place is its power to order and to focus human intentions, experiences, and actions spatially” (Seamon & Sowers 44). Relph is concerned with programming: the ways in which nonhuman environmental processes and human design intersect to create places that emphasize and enable some activities and bodily actions, but not others. The way a place is designed influences how humans use it and the experiences they have within it; furthermore, each place connects to adjacent places and participates in larger systems of production, consumption, and waste, whether facilitating or disrupting the fluidity of these systems. Place is the battleground of ideology: capitalist economies create and inhabit different spatial manifestations from non-capitalist or indigenous communities – in this way, the built environment is a mirror, reflecting the values we hold and the systems we participate in. In this view, development is a major tool of colonization: physically reprogramming space to suit colonial needs.
Relph argues that a place’s identity is that “persistent sameness and unity which allows that [place] to be differentiated from others” (Relph 1976, quoted in Seamon & Sowers, 45). Thus, place is the product of human attachments and understandings, not solely that place’s geographic location or material arrangement. Humans experience place through ‘belonging,’ and ‘insideness,’ or conversely, ‘unbelonging,’ and ‘outsideness,’ sensations derived from identity formation within communities of discourse. Relph argues that if “a person feels inside a place, he or she is here rather than there, safe rather than threatened, enclosed rather than exposed, at ease rather than stressed […] the more profoundly inside a place a person feels, the stronger will be his or her identity with that place” (Seamon & Sowers 45). Development is the material affirmation of belonging, whether legitimate or illegitimate. Development is ‘self-legitimizing’ in that once people have settled in and worked to make a place their own, it becomes more difficult to see that place as ever having been anything but theirs – consider the disorientation one experiences when returning to one’s hometown many years later and finding the fields they played in growing up have been turned into subdivisions.
Seamon & Sowers argue that Relph’s “crucial phenomenological point is that outsideness and insideness constitute a fundamental dialectic in human life and that […] different places take on different identities for different individuals and groups [across different times]” (Seamon & Sowers 45). Development is a literal division of inside/outside - the physical space occupied by a tree one used to rope swing on is now contained by someone's living room, access to which is no longer available. Even ostensibly public places reflect the identities of those who had control over their design: invariably, we find symbols of oppressive systems embedded within built environments. Something as simple as a statue of a confederate general, or Christopher Columbus creates entirely different outcomes for how people of European and non-European descent experience and inhabit that space. Narratives of power, dominance, and subjugation play out in place, reifying distinctions between ‘inside-ness’ and ‘outside-ness,’ described by sociologists as the process of ‘othering.’
Relph’s analysis of place and placelessness urges us to confront the reality of those forced to leave the place and community of their origin. The displaced tend to experience “existential outsideness—a sense of strangeness and alienation, such as that often felt by newcomers to a place or by people who, having been away from their birthplace, return to feel strangers because the place is no longer what it was when they knew it earlier” (Seamon & Sowers 45). Relph’s inquiry compels us to consider how we may design places that foster feelings of belonging – and belonging for whom? Does universal belonging exist, or is one group’s belonging inherently exclusive of other groups? Is ‘design for all’ design for no one in particular, or are there inherently universal human places and experiences? How can we design places such that they do not contribute to displacement and segregation? Relph’s primary contribution to the study of place-sensation is this conversation of “how and why the same place can be experienced differently by different individuals […] or how, over time, the same person can experience the same place differently at different times” (Seamon & Sowers 50). Though a place may remain the ‘same’ (physically, materially), shifting social mores drastically change the nature and experience of that place – indicating that reductionist/materialist understandings of one place in one time are incomplete without an examination of intersubjectivity and the nature of human experience.
Relph argues that the placelessness is problematic because “regardless of the historical time or the geographical, technological, and social situation, […] having and identifying with place are integral to what and who we are as human beings” (Seamon & Sowers 52). Even nomadic cultures possess certain places that are returned to ritually with the passing of the seasons, identifiable through unique geological or topographical features. In prehistory, before humans began creating places for themselves, caves, watering holes, or fertile food-bearing ecosystems attracted their attention and habitation over other places – ancient sites reveal that place-finding, and place-making are inherent and central aspects of the human experience. Placelessness is problematic because the more homogenous places become, the more disconnected we become from place-identities – the more places are homogenous, the less we care about the health of any given place. The erosion of place identities is inseparable from impending environmental catastrophes – the two phenomena are the same.
Following in Relph’s footsteps, Kupfer identifies the ways in which technologies have contributed to us becoming “detached from our physical surroundings,” arguing that “when environments become irrelevant to what we are doing, they lose meaning for us and we cease to inhabit them in any meaningful way,” adding, “anywhere is nowhere” (Kupfer 39). Relph argues that place is inseparable from community and identity – thus, the erosion of place ultimately constitutes the erosion of community and of the very self “with placelessness, we are deprived of the aesthetic experiences particular places provide[...] we lose touch with our bodies and other people” (Kupfer 39). Places are constituted by selves; the erosion of one is necessarily the destruction of the other. Kupfer argues that “the loss of distinctive places [results from] homogeneity in architecture. The sameness of design in restaurants, motels, sport stadiums, homes, and malls yielded a loss of regionality and locality in our built environment” (Kupfer 39). The increasing self-similarity of our built environment can be traced to the hegemonizing and delocalization of planning, design, and construction, led by real estate investors and executed by corporate architecture firms. Large-scale retail or residential developments – where subdivisions in Memphis are indistinguishable from subdivisions outside of Houston, result in a loss of regional character. With this loss of local character, we lose important visual cues that contribute to our sense of spatial orientation – yet more critically, our very sense that allows us to distinguish between places becomes dulled through habituation when all places appear the same and are navigated in similar ways. As the standardization of material place reaches a crescendo, developments in information infrastructure undermine even the necessity of physical proximity, or ever leaving one’s home (Kupfer 42).
Consider a 1989 study that found Americans spend over 90% of their time indoors (Environmental Protection Agency report). Natural environments are inherently complex – visually, aesthetically, texturally, auditorily, haptically – while the experience of being indoors is ‘more self-similar.’ 'Inside’ is an inherent separation of oneself from 'outside’ conditions beyond one’s control: in these boxes we have created for ourselves, we control temperature, humidity, and lighting at optimal levels for human comfort. Perhaps the reason we find ourselves headed towards environmental catastrophe is not solely due to the ‘dirty’ material processes of extraction, refinement, and transportation that create the environments and infrastructure we wrap ourselves within – more insidiously, it is due to the very self-insulating nature of these environments and systems that at their core distance us from the consequences of our actions, buffer us from that which we cannot control, all while simplifying and dulling our perception of reality.
To understand how our bodies respond to shifts in technology and the built environment, Kupfer uses the concept of ‘body ritual’ later expanded upon by Rothbauer; tracing the habitual pathways our bodies follow over cyclical periods of time in the example of visiting a library: “in the course of our movement and rests, the library offers smaller places within it. These add texture to the experience and provide individualized habitats” (Kupfer 42). Kupfer argues that in material reality, the ‘unnecessary’ places we travel through add ‘texture’ or ‘character’ to our experience – inscribing in our bodies the consequence of action and decision, impressing upon us the importance of the journey in addition to the destination. Unexpected (even unwanted) encounters ‘color’ experience, introducing serendipity and chance into body routines. Though isolating ourselves from ‘unnecessary’ experiences we become more efficient in the ways in which we travel, consume, and learn, we risk becoming so comfortable that we perpetuate our preexisting biases by creating near-impenetrable echo-chambers.
Kupfer furthermore argues that “aesthetic experience is not passive […] it involves an active response to what is going on, in our case, in the particular place at hand. With loss of particular places […] we lose the occasions that demand distinctive responses from us. When we no longer inhabit a place, we stop developing the habits that accompany residing in it […] when we interact in and with a place, we develop habits that are distinctive of being there, tied to the activities and rhythms that are inherent to being there and not somewhere else” (Kupfer 43). The standardization and homogenization of place and path is also the standardization and homogenization of body ritual: by revering efficiency, we simplify the ways in which we move our body through space, reducing meaningful human contact, creating comfortable, regular, and uninterrupted rhythms of behavior and action free from disturbance. Once again, our experiences of place are just as contingent upon our own bodies and our own perceptions as they are upon the physical or material nature of that place or pathway itself – in this sense, we cannot in all honesty disentangle ourselves from our places – we are inseparably connected to the natural and built environments we find ourselves within.
The impact of placelessness on our bodies is not solely related to our physical movement through space: it also structures the ways in which our identities navigate conceptual or mimetic space. Increased efficiency and standardization in the ways in which we seek out information have radical implications for our very cognitive structure: Kupfer muses on how research used to be conducted, “we had to develop research skills in response to the card catalog,” whereas "computerized data searches are inherently [pre]structured" and therefore do the looking for us, leading us to lose “the skills and habits needed to negotiate the functions of particular places” (Kupfer 44). We are far less likely to stumble upon perspectives, narratives, and information that we are not actively looking for – we are far less likely to ‘burst our bubble.’ When the places we end up in and the pathways we take between them become increasingly straightforward, standard, and homogenous, so too do our bodies, perceptions, and thought processes become straightforward, standard, and homogenous. This forced assimilation of diverse ways of perceiving, understanding, and being into capitalist, Eurocentric systems of consumption should be recognized as deeply problematic and antithetical to humanity’s long-term survival.
Kupfer connects displacement and disembodiment: “losing touch with our bodies, we are less able to engage with physical environments in ways that make them places […] place is not simply the built or natural environment. Rather, it is the product of our interaction with our physical surroundings. We make spatial surroundings into place by what we do with and in those surroundings” (Kupfer 44). Kupfer’s insight adheres to well-established traditions in philosophy that recognize the recursive agency of subject/object assemblages. Just as we use our bodies to shape places, places in turn shape our bodies by the movements required to interface within or travel through them. While our infrastructure allows us to travel more efficiently and routinely through space, it atrophies our ability to engage in spontaneous choreographies that more diverse place characteristics require of us. Infrastructural changes physically manifest within our bodies – in the loss of muscle and muscle memory that accompanies complex choreographies.
How did things get to this point? This loss of complexity due to placelessness is both the product of and producer of “the privatization of experience” (Kupfer 46). The homogenization of place expedites and is expedited by increasing corporate infiltration into every facet of our lives, from the products we consume to how we receive services and retrieve information. Our bodily rituals and routines have become increasingly simple, predictable, and uninterrupted – optimal conditions for producing excessive consumption habits. Indeed, our very identities, or ‘sense of self’ are influenced by digital placelessness – the downside of hyper-connection is that there is no ‘place’ wherein one can develop critical consciousness as an entity distinct from the systems it finds itself enmeshed within, no place to pause and reflect on one’s existence and one’s actions.
Infrastructural developments restructure not only our consumption habits – but also our ‘productive’ habits: “because we are accessible almost all the time, the boundaries of work are disappearing [… since] work can reach us potentially at any time, we are actually at work all the time” (Kupfer 47). Increasingly, these systems of hyper-connection require participation – to remain a part of the system, one must consent (or non-consensually submit) to the demands of the system – that one is reachable all the time. Hyper-access is a two-way street – to access information at any time or place, one must themselves be reachable at any time and place. Much like infrastructure as discussed by Belanger, infrastructure we perceive as connecting and enabling are often mechanisms of separation and control.
Increasingly, the only reason to leave one’s house is to engage in ‘authentic consumption’ tethered to precise places. These rituals of ‘authentic consumption’ are often classed, gendered, and racialized – serving to reinforce one’s identity as either a unique individual or a product of mass consumption (see Chapman & Brunsma). It is critical to note Kupfer’s implicit gendered bias – ‘the workplace’ is a term that only recognizes “productive labor” (traditionally performed publicly, outside of the home, by men, who are monetarily compensated) and not “reproductive labor” (traditionally performed in the private space of the home, by women, who are not monetarily compensated). One wonders if women would argue that traditionally, for them, the separation between the home and the workplace has never been distinct, forcing them to exist within a liminal space where labor can be expected and extracted at any time, in one’s most intimate retreat (the home), a sensation that men are just now beginning to grapple with.
Transportation Infrastructure
Bélanger investigates the relationship between infrastructure, landscape, and society in his chapter of Is Landscape…?, arguing that “the outstanding feature of the modern cultural landscape is the dominance of pathways over settlements … by channeling the circulation of people, goods, and messages, they have transformed spatial relations by establishing lines of force that are privileged over the places and people left outside those lines” (Bélanger 190 – referencing Rosalind Williams). Placelessness and displacement have become accepted facets of human experience - supply chains have become so niche, complex, intertwined, and interdependent that the arterial networks of these systems themselves have become ‘place-defining’ – new ‘placeless places’ are created around the pathing of arterial networks, rather than pathway-networks traditionally serving as augmenting, or connecting, existing places.
Bélanger’s commentary rings especially true in rapidly and recently developed places like the United States that lack extant ‘old-growth’ (pre-automobile) cities. ‘Old cities’ developed highly geographically embedded senses of place long before modern supply chain networks arose – yet in economies that presuppose unlimited growth, the destruction of extant places (settlements) is justified by maximizing the efficiency of transporting goods, services, ideas, and people (pathways) to and from areas of dense population centered around consumption. Pathways are alternatively routed through or around settlements based on the economic incentives that each development offers – often compounding existing marginalization. Land in urban, nonwhite communities with ‘low property values’ (due primarily to a history of redlining) is easier to appropriate and develop over than established, wealthy, white, politically represented settlements. Another strategy of uneven development is withholding arterial connections from populations that are not deemed worthy of the supply chain’s connecting effort, due to a lack of capital to engage in ‘authentic’ consumption habits of highly refined or specialized goods – in the United States these deprived areas are typically rural, low-income white communities.
The increasing dominance of pathway over place can be attributed to specialization wherein “patterns of remote consumption are further and further removed from the means and processes of production” (Bélanger 191). Consumers are alienated from the sources, materials, and knowledge of production, which often unfolds in remote locations – as that which we consume (such as personal electronics) becomes more complex, sites of production are increasingly distanced from sites of consumption. This removal expedites the destructive nature of distant resource extraction and unfair labor practices, as ‘core consumers’ are unaware of or lack an understanding of how their consumption habits feed exploitative systems in ‘productive peripheries.’ Were production practices unfolding in consumers’ communities, the consequences of their actions would become highly visible, near inescapable, and consumers would object to the very consumption in which they currently engage. Infrastructure serves as channels along which extraction and reallocation occur, mediating all facets of contemporary life.
Critical approaches to infrastructure argue that “infrastructure is instrumental as a ‘tool and technique of power,’ as Michel Foucault references, deployed as ‘lines of control’ and ‘equipment of power’ by institutions across vast territories from the City to the State” (Bélanger 195). The shift towards more sustainable production and consumption practices is entirely contingent upon our ability to deconstruct, understand, and critique current ‘invisible’ assumptions about what infrastructure is and could be. Bélanger furthermore argues that “the assumed neutrality of infrastructure is perhaps its most dangerous weapon” (Bélanger 199). Infrastructure that is ‘standard,’ ‘self-similar,’ and ‘universal’ in its design appears neutral at face value – accessible and accessed by all – however, accessibility itself is our dilemma: hyper-accessibility produces overconsumption and deepens our dependence on external entities for the most basic of necessities, amplifying existing unequitable power/knowledge/class/racial relations. As Colin Yarbrough argues in Paved a Way, infrastructure’s erasure of our attachment to place undermines our sense of community, disproportionately displacing vulnerable communities.
Infrastructure has become so ubiquitous in its mediation of our lives that we have come to take it for granted: “while we may argue on where infrastructure starts and ends, or how it actually works […] its perverse influence has exerted itself most often to the point of near invisibility lending an appearance of irreversibility. As media, infrastructure completely works us over.” (Bélanger 195). Drinking water purification and sewage sanitation plants, stormwater reservoirs, waste removal, storage, and management systems, oil rigs, coal mines, and energy refinement plants, as well as the labor that upholds all these systems, that exist ‘at a distance’ from those which ‘consume’ or use these services. Consumers’ closest contact with these systems is the water that comes out of their faucet, the light that turns on with the flip of a switch, the dump truck that takes away the waste bin left at the curb each Tuesday. It’s impossible to imagine a city today operating without these vast and remote superstructures, indeed, considering the consequences of these systems’ collapse is alarming – water wars, widespread pestilence, the uselessness of all electronic/digital technology, and ever-piling waste in the streets. Our cities are now irreversibly integrated with these systems – our ‘places’ have been designed around ‘pathways.’ We have become so deeply entrained within these systems that we cease to question them or envision alternatives. In Design with Nature, McHarg calls this phenomenon ‘the shifting baseline effect,’ where each generation takes for granted a ‘new normal’ based on the circumstances they are born into.
Our capitalist fixation on efficiency and stability has blinded us to the inherent instability of our present situation: “through the illusion of insurance and Newtonian predictability, mono-functional land uses and standardized infrastructures have reduced flexible alternatives and often expose large populations to mass vulnerabilities and high risks” (Bélanger 200). With the increasing complexity and interdependence of infrastructure comes vulnerability: without millions of miles of interstate highways, fiber optic and telephone cables, and water/electricity lines working in seamless synchronicity, the current status quo would topple rather quickly – infrastructure which ostensibly connect us to resources have in reality both physically and conceptually distanced us from them, resulting in societies which lack clear understandings of how to responsibly manage these resources.
Infrastructure distorts our perceptions of reality, causing us to design mechanical systems that behave predictably and regularly. Despite our penchant for stability, there is a growing awareness in design and planning disciplines that the most sustainable systems are those that evolve over time, adapting fluidly and flexibly to changing situational contexts and circumstances. Yet can organic conceptions of infrastructure coexist with political/economic systems that function entirely on regularity, predictability, and convenience?
Our fixation with efficiency produces the design phenomena of ‘programming’ space - the spatial separation of places of extraction, places of production, places of consumption, and places of disposal. When our daily routines unfold across fragmented places, pathway networks become necessary to weave our experience together. Our ‘body rituals’ are increasingly characterized by moving along pathways rather than dwelling within places. These social trajectories we are caught within - ‘hyper-accessibility’ and ‘convenience-comfort’ - are engines of sprawl, which necessitate ever-more pathways between where we live, where we work, and where we play. While roadways physically bring us closer to places, they functionally distance us from our destinations.
Bélanger argues that“the understanding of the particularity and distinction of local and regional landscapes can provide a point of resistance to the homogenizing effects of globalization” (Bélanger 211 - referencing the work of Kenneth Frampton). We combat placelessness by shifting the medium and means of infrastructure: by denying standardization one-size-fits-all design approaches that emphasize efficiency and profits; and by cherishing the existing unique characteristics of every place, not as a potential for extraction, production, or consumption. We may also shift our definitions of infrastructure: what if we saw home, health, and holistic wellbeing as infrastructure? What if we saw self-actualization as derived from ‘place-bound identities’ as infrastructure? What if we saw strong communities as infrastructure? What if we reconceptualized place-based knowledge itself as cognitive infrastructure?
We must design with time and change, rather than against it as we are now: our current strategy attempts to create short-term ‘artificial stabilities,’ whereas we should ‘play the long game’ by embracing the inevitability of change with flexible infrastructure (human-ecological systems), rather than fighting change with inflexible infrastructure (highways, pipelines). Reimagining infrastructure will require transdisciplinary collaborations contingent upon ontological shifts ‘decentering’ the human from worldview: do we see ourselves as “apart” from nature, or “a part” of nature?
Collin Yarbrough’s work, Paved a Way, expands upon Belanger’s themes in the specific context of Dallas, Texas – the fourth largest metropolitan area in the United States, and the ninth largest city in the United States by population. The city of Dallas, like all American cities, is built upon land stolen from indigenous peoples, specifically the Caddo, Comanche, Kiowa, Kickapoo, and Wichita nations who inhabited (and whose descendants continue to inhabit) the plains of what we now call ‘North Texas.’ The land was taken and developed by white settlers after a prolonged and exhaustive genocide - the Texas government used the term ‘extermination’ in their policies towards first nations in the 1820’s-30’s (Yarbrough 15) during Texas’s struggle for independence from Mexico. It should also be noted that most of Dallas’s Black residents are descendants of enslaved people. This historical awareness sheds light on the history of Dallas’s commercial, residential, and infrastructural landscape: though slavery ended with the Civil War, its oppressive structures remain intact today in the form of highly uneven development in many southern American cities. The Housing Acts of 1937, 1949, and 1954 established the precedent and standards for “urban renewal” (the demolition of African American and Latinx neighborhoods) that we today call ‘gentrification’ (Yarbrough 34-5). ‘Urban Renewal/gentrification,’ was, and remains, economically incentivized by local, state, and federal governments - using eminent domain and tax deductions expedites developers’ (private, for-profit) projects in low-income neighborhoods and post-industrial brownfields. What makes matters worse is that local property taxpayers bear the financial burden of offsetting developers’ costs for these projects - the very taxpayers that these projects displace.
A prime example of the ways in which modern infrastructural projects have disproportionately targeted minority communities is the violation of Freedman’s Cemetery in North Dallas (a historically Black community) - which has been built over and around three times, first by the Houston & Texas Central Railroad, second by the original construction of Central Expressway, and lastly the subsequent widening and reconstruction of Central Expressway. Infrastructure’s unequal impacts on communities are not halted by death – nearly 1,200 bodies of enslaved peoples and their descendants were exhumed and relocated during expressway development (Yarbrough 26). Yarbrough, like Belanger, reveals the core of the matter: the prioritization of path over place – stating that “the value of saving a marginal amount of time on other people’s commutes was enough to justify cutting through the heart of a neighborhood (Yarbrough 37), signifying the rise of 'convenience culture’ and disinvestment in public transportation.
Dallas’s financial history is deeply intertwined with railroad companies: while railroads once brought connection and prosperity; their subsequent replacement with highway infrastructure in the mid to late 1900’s had much fewer positive outcomes for residents, particularly residents of color: “what was once an easy traverse across the Central [railroad] tracks now stood as a literal and figurative wall confining the community [of North Dallas]” (Yarbrough 38) - children now had to cross ten lanes of traffic to walk to school. It should be noted that during TXDOT’s planning and surveying for the widening of Central Expressway in the 80’s-90’s, “no members of Dallas’s Black community were notified or even part of the process for several years” (Yarbrough 40). Due to this lack of stakeholder involvement, the project was approved and eventually, Freedman’s cemetery was 1,200 bodies lighter - so much for resting in peace. Yarbrough states that “our built forms serve as an acknowledgement of past decisions” (Yarbrough 43) – we cannot escape the realities that our built environment represents – our triumphs and mistakes alike are etched into our surroundings.
Deep Ellum was once home to the preeminent Black community in Dallas - with successful Black-owned businesses, vibrant arts and culture, music halls, and theaters, and a bustling nightlife in bars and pubs - often hosting well-known blues musicians (Yarbrough 52-3). The economic success of Deep Ellum occurred despite rigorous and ongoing housing and financial discrimination:
“Andre Perry of the Brookings Institute found significant correlations in the devaluation of neighborhoods as the proportion of Black homeowners increased. Holding all other metrics the same - like housing type, crime rates, schools, and access to businesses - the research found homes in majority Black neighborhoods were valued at 23 percent less than neighborhoods with few or no Black residents. The average loss in 2018 Black home values across the United States was $48,000 per home, or $156 billion total. Just to emphasize, Black homeowners in the United States are losing out on $156 billion in asset wealth”
(Yarbrough 55).
Much like North Dallas, the railroad that once connected Deep Ellum to the heart of Downtown Dallas and to other cities was removed to make way for the Good Latimer Expressway in 1956 - which encircled Deep Ellum, cutting it off from the rest of the city of Dallas. The man for whom the expressway was named - Judge Good - was a confederate judge notorious for allowing those who murdered unionists and freedmen off the hook. The other man for whom it was named, Latimer, was a pro-slavery editor for the Dallas Morning News (Yarbrough 57-8). Yarbrough argues that though road access is critical to the wellbeing of neighborhoods, “automobile infrastructure often serves the desires of motorists outside the neighborhood [in which the automobile infrastructure passes through]” (Yarbrough 57).
Similar processes of community-building in the face of adversity, followed by repeated and targeted placement and expansion of highway infrastructure, also unfolded in Little Mexico, Dallas’s primary Latinx neighborhood, located near downtown in the area where JFK was assassinated (Yarbrough 68-9). Eminent domain was used to evict residents without adequate compensation and create a six-lane heavily trafficked street (the Tollway & connections to Harry Hines Blvd.) which had the result of “altering the living patterns for those living in the community while primarily serving outside interests” (Yarbrough 71). Residents refer to this infrastructure as “the canyon” as it is no longer navigable by foot, restricting access to downtown. One former resident described how his community, especially elders with less command of English, were an easy target for developers: “there was nobody representing them personally, legally, and nobody representing them at City Hall” (Yarbrough 74). Symbolic of the changing demographics of the neighborhood, new traffic and navigation signage was all in English - making it more difficult for elderly and immigrant residents to find their way around their own neighborhood. Signs and symbols, wayfinding, and visual language are all ways of creating ‘place' - yet are also potent methods of displacement.
Pike Park, the primary urban green space serving Little Mexico, has also come under scrutiny by City Council, who seek to free up the space for development. As traces of the former vibrant community continue to fade, the justification for removing this last reminder of ‘what was there before’ becomes stronger, in City Council’s eyes (Yarbrough 80). The narrative of a ‘blank slate’ is critical to establish before development occurs - the truth of the matter, that residents maintain an attachment to place, is an inconvenient barrier in the eyes of developers and local politicians seeking reinvestment.
Another way legitimacy is ascribed to certain communities and places over others is in the creation of ‘historic districts.’ Historic districts are often used to protect areas critical to a community’s heritage and culture that would otherwise be rezoned under economic pressures for redevelopment, and whose structures would be considered ‘nonconforming’ to current code requirements and demolished. Local city codes, written by local politicians, often contain language that makes it difficult for communities of color to gain historic distinction - one such example is requiring historic residential structures to be over 3,000 square feet (about the area of a tennis court) - common in white neighborhoods, much less common in Black or Latinx neighborhoods. Structures under this square footage are eligible for an expedited demolition process (Yarbrough 97). Other, more vague language in city codes, such as “blight” and “public nuisance” allow developers and planners significant room for interpretation in determining which structures should not be preserved. Though Tenth Street (a historically Black neighborhood) was registered as a historic district in 1993, more than one-third of its 260 historic structures have been demolished - compared to only fifteen demolished structures located across Dallas’s eight primarily white historic districts in Dallas (Yarbrough 97). This is a classic example of how the concept of ‘historical value,’ is used to solidify and protect the history of some communities at the expense of others. Which landscapes and architecture are deemed ‘history-worthy,’ and who gets to decide? It’s rarely up to residents.
“Robert Swann describes the nature of Tenth Street as being a lot like the organic and conversational development of American Jazz. Tenth Street wasn’t about star architects [...] it was about ‘houses that spoke to each other, the way jazz musicians speak to each other.’ Robert said, ‘you can no more understand Tenth Street by preserving a single house than you can understand American jazz by preserving a single note.’”
(Yarbrough 98-99).
Yarbrough offers a succinct summary of philosophical approaches to the relationship between users and place: from Locke (a classroom is defined by its layout and objects such as desks and chairs) to Lefebvre (the act of teaching is what makes a classroom) to Foucault (teaching makes a classroom, but who is left out of the classroom, and why?) to hooks (the classroom itself and the teaching within are mechanisms of colonialism and injustice). With each philosophical progression, we ‘complexify’ the original reductionist/materialist viewpoint (Locke), entertaining questions of subjectivity and relationships (Lefebvre), identity and power (Foucault), and then morality and justice (hooks). (Yarbrough 136-7). Furthermore, Yarbrough states that the language we use to describe places is inherently twofold: “the person will always be both describing the place itself and their relationship to that place” (Yarbrough 139). Considering labeling theory, the words that we use to describe places - such as ‘slums,’ ‘the hood,’ ‘ghetto,’ or ‘blighted’ neighborhoods are often 1. Racially charged terms that are as much about the residents of that place as the place itself; and 2. Self-fulfilling prophecies; when places and people are described derogatorily, the ‘fixing’ of these places (and people) by outside forces becomes justified - the label is actualized. Language is a political choice: describing a neighborhood in simplistic terms as a ‘slum’ justifies its demolition and redevelopment; describing a neighborhood in all its complexity as an ‘economically disadvantaged, historically redlined neighborhood with close-knit family groups, intergenerational support structures, vibrant arts and culture, and thriving small businesses,’ is a description that acknowledges the historic disenfranchisement of the community while highlighting its present positive characteristics to inform future solutions. Yarbrough urges us to be suspicious of simplistic place descriptions: rather, seek nuanced and complex descriptions (Yarbrough 142).
Citing A Pattern Language by Alexander, Ishikawa, & Silverstein, Yarbrough investigates how increasing standardization towards a central ‘norm’ or ‘type’ creates homogenous forms (such as industrially manufactured desks and chairs) that work well for some bodies but invariably leave out bodies that are ‘outliers’ or fall outside of the ‘average’ or ‘normal’ type - whose interactions with said chairs and desks result in sensations of discomfort. Particularly in societies that possess a homogenous majority (e.g. white Americans), standardization invariably suits this ‘dominant’ population’s needs and desires while excluding the perspectives of other racial and ethnic groups. "Standard” pattern languages, in the case of Dallas’s city ordinances and infrastructure development, worked out quite well for average white residents - preserving historic buildings and reducing commute times - but had disastrous impacts on minority communities - resulting in the demolition of their historic buildings and the bisecting or severing of their communities from the rest of the city. Policies regarding places and pathways cannot be one-size-fits-all; they must be situational, contextualized, and community-engaged, should we have any hope of securing just design outcomes in the future.
Consumption and Gentrification
Gentrification can be described as the usurping of a place from the community that built it, often for external commercial gain. Roberts investigates Liverpool’s urban redesign, where “the unique landmarks and architectural iconography that had formerly dominated Liverpool’s representational spaces have in large part been supplanted by a superabundance of signs […] foregrounding the act of consumption as the pre-eminent marker of the city’s urban renaissance” (Roberts 164). Gentrification prioritizes ‘outsideness’ at the expense of ‘insideness,’ wherein ‘first communities’ find themselves left out of decision-making processes, displaced from the very place they built. How places are represented speaks volumes to the socioeconomic processes unfolding there: “akin to any other commodity circulating in the global marketplace, Liverpool is packaged and sold on the strength of its attributes as a place and space of consumption,” rather than as a place to live and work (Roberts 168). In this way, Liverpool’s history as harboring a working-class industrial economy is being rewritten – the ‘truth’ of the matter is seen as unappealing to prospective consumers and travelers – thus, alongside the physical fabric of the city, its image is reworked to accommodate consumption, severing those communities who worked to make the city from their city’s future.
However, placemaking and placelessness as material outcomes of power relations are not a one-way street; there is complexity and nuance in the ways hegemonic narratives are constructed and contested, with ordinary people taking it upon themselves to negotiate and resist official narratives through discourse within their communities and their occupation of public spaces. Though we operate within the constraints of material reality, we all work in ways that serve to either reinforce or subvert hegemonic place narratives. Place is the emergent outcome of collective actions and understandings – ‘place’ is not solely something ‘out-there’ – we, ourselves, together, are inseparable from place. Place is as much a product of ourselves as we are a product of place – by being engaged community members, we have agency to deny policy that results in placelessness, displacement, and gentrification.
Roberts posits that Liverpool is not unique in being “caught in the homogenizing web of global consumerism, where the valorization and reification of the act of consumption eclipses all semblance of local urban and cultural specificity” (Roberts 176). In gentrification, “the local is rendered mutable, dis-located and semiotically unstable by the seemingly unstoppable encroachment of corporate globalization” (Roberts 177, referencing Abbas, 1997). “New localism” shares definitional boundaries with placelessness and the displacement of the local. In gentrified cities privileging tourist entertainment and ‘destination/authentic consumption’ industries, ‘everybody is a tourist,’ including those who once called this place home. Residents find themselves beset with rising rent and an influx of expensive restaurants and stores catering to visiting upper-class ‘global consumers.’
Gentrification responds to and creates economic circumstances where it is more profitable to cater to visitors than to ensure quality of life for long-term residents. Gentrification expedites ‘outside’ consumption, resulting in a very real displacement of those who once felt ‘inside.’ Once a place and its people have been extracted of profit, the only remaining profit resides in allowing outsiders to consume the place itself. Cities are archaeological palimpsests, reflecting the accumulation or loss of intergenerational wealth as played out on the stage of our built environment: architecture, infrastructure, and landscapes: “in its affective materiality, the multilayered fabric of the city is as much a repository of urban memory” (Roberts 184). The places we find ourselves within today are direct material records of the entire history of that place and its communities – often bearing the ‘patina’ of social/economic struggles and forced displacement, which lend gentrification economies the visual imagery (aged, ‘rustic’ structures) of authenticity.
Yet pockets of resistance spring up in unprogrammed space such as empty or abandoned lots, forgotten fragments where residents may shape the space as they see fit, in a bottom-up placemaking effort counter to top-down designed categorizations and delineations of space. As Roberts states, these “counter-aesthetics highlight the ambiguous and contradictory nature of industrial wastelands as the material expression of the uneven and cyclical patterns of capitalist expansion” (Roberts 186). ‘The Wasteland’ in public imagination and in lived experience makes visibly evident the shortcomings of capitalism, the ways in which capitalism extracts and exploits, leaving places empty shells of what came before: “industrial ruins stand as material critiques of [gentrification]” (Roberts 187). Though often devastated or fragmented landscapes, Roberts argues that these industrial ruins are heterotopias: “sites of alternate ordering [… that] exist in in-between spaces: liminal, uncertain zones that challenge established perceptions of space as ordered and fixed” (Roberts 187-8). In these spaces, expectations and divisions between places of production, consumption, and disposal are subverted – these liminal spaces shatter the illusion of authentic consumption, allow us to see clearly the growing ‘cracks’ (shortcomings and instabilities) within our current systems, the repercussions of unethical development.
Like Roberts, Chapman & Brunsma identify consumption ritual as one primary engine of gentrification, pointing towards the specific phenomena of craft breweries as both signs and drivers of displacement and upper-middle-class consumption (Chapman & Brunsma 131) resulting in displacement of original residents (often communities of color), precipitating distinct social changes. Though the effects of gentrification are felt on the scale of the family or neighborhood, gentrification itself is a result of neoliberalism’s larger economic and political restructuring in the face of declining profits, on behalf of large developers, often with state support (Chapman & Brunsma 131-2). Gentrification is seen by city governments and urban planners as a strategy to increase revenues and displace ‘undesirable’ low-income communities from urban cores. Chapman & Brunsma argue that gentrification is complete upon “transforming the place to reflect middle-class values and interests—all reminiscent of the settler colonialism that marked the establishment of the US some 400+ years ago” (Chapman & Brunsma 134). Like nationalist narratives resting on myths of manifest destiny and the ‘white man’s burden,’ language used to justify gentrification borders on blatant dog whistle – “proponents of gentrification often refer to the process as ‘revitalization’ or ‘rebuilding’ a community” (Chapman & Brunsma 134). Recall Yarbrough: proclaiming a community ‘broken’ justifies its ‘fixing’ by outside forces.
In gentrified areas, “residents and tourists seek out unique experiences to distinguish their buying habits from patterns of mass consumption” (Chapman & Brunsma 135) – this is where craft beer comes in – a consumption experience that promises unique, high-dollar, local, ‘authentic’ brews – inaccessible to working class consumers. These consumption habits follow the same broader trends of post-industrialization that leave areas in the US vulnerable to gentrification in the first place – factories shut down, leaving locals out of jobs, and are renovated into businesses like craft breweries that those now unemployed locals cannot afford to patron.
Advertising has led us to believe that our identities are derived from what and how we consume, resulting in this search for ‘authentic, local’ consumption in the face of ‘mass-produced’ objects of consumption. Like the relationship between body ritual and the place-based programming that elicits it, consumption is intertwined with identity formation – the drawing of a boundary between the ‘self’ and the ‘other’ (Chapman & Brunsma 137). Authentic consumption has become a class struggle, with authenticity available to those with the means to consume it, further ‘othering’ those who can only afford standard, mass-produced goods, and consumption rituals.
Spaces are defined by their material/environmental conditions – spaces become places only when actors attach meaning to them (Chapman & Brunsma 142) – thus, ‘place’ is a human-meaning patina that comes to ‘stand in, or over’ space, or ‘come between us and space’ – spaces become places upon their continued and intensive entrainment within human-material assemblages. Authenticity (of the self) stems primarily from attachment to place, a ‘narrative of origin’ (Chapman & Brunsma 143) – in placelessness, we are deprived of authentic connection to origin – the erosion of our ‘claim’ to belonging. ‘Urban renewal narratives’ constitute a twofold displacement of ‘authentic’ locals, and a dilemma for those who now illegitimately occupy their space: the absence of true authentic identities derived from legitimate attachment to place, and the seeking out of ‘authentic consumption’ to fill this void and create some semblance of an authentic identity.
Consider European colonial narratives that characterized indigenous peoples of the Americas as ‘uncivilized savages.’ This narrative served to justify genocide and legitimize colonial claims to land and resources. Colonialism was the original gentrification – or rather, colonialism never ended – and continues today under our knowing it as gentrification. These conversations are the beginning of contesting ‘master narratives:’ Gieryn echoes this sentiment: “in spite of its relatively enduring and imposing materiality, the meaning or value of the same place is pliable— flexible in the hands of different people or cultures, malleable over time, and inevitably contested” (Gieryn 465) - experiences of place are open to (re)interpretation – we have agency in the face of structure.
Race and ethnicity play significant roles in perceptions of place – whether it is the language or cultural references used in signage, menu, or other ephemera, or the art that is shown, or the music that is played - places give impressions of who they were designed by and who they are designed for. Atmospherics of overwhelming, hegemonic whiteness often makes people of other races feel uncomfortable (Chapman & Brunsma 147). Furthermore, racial belonging is often contingent upon outward performance – or the presentation of one’s body in behavior, gesture, body or verbal language, and dress. Often, people of color feel as they do not belong in these spaces unless they ‘perform whiteness’ by assimilating into ‘unspoken rules of interaction’ (Chapman & Brunsma 150), hegemonic assumptions around how to look, talk, think, and act. Place-belonging is contingent upon not just who inhabits it, but how they inhabit it – once locals are pushed out, the nature of performatively ‘belonging to’ that place inherently changes, further othering those who once called that place home.
Information Infrastructure
Just as transportation infrastructure constrains and enables the flow of certain goods and bodies between destinations, information infrastructure filters and structures the flow of knowledge and beliefs between minds. Like transportation infrastructures' goal of increasing connectivity and expediting exchange by leveling uneven physical access, the internet seeks to level the unevenness of information access across physical geographies by transcending the limitations of physical media – however, like transportation infrastructure, it also homogenizes and de-regionalizes the traditional tethering of knowledge to place-based communities. While allowing users to transcend regional, uneven knowledge-terrain, digital information infrastructure reproduces uneven-ness in new ways, offering a glimpse into the nature of knowledge itself: the inherent disparity of access, regardless of medium (Schröpfer 178). With algorithmically sorted search results, digital information-communities self-segregate by the identities and interests of their users – though efficient and razor-precise, algorithmic convenience risks reifying the very material conditions it portends to overcome. Though information’s medium changes, human biases and limitations remain - while we may prefer the convenience and confirmation, we must recognize the inherent danger of losing place-based knowledge-communities that expose us to uncomfortable but necessary conversations that happen because we cannot choose or algorithmically filter our neighbors.
Rothbauer argues that our identities are formed by what we experience and what information we consume – it stands to reason that more access to knowledge results in more empowering and open identity formation processes – yet the rerouting of information infrastructure away from physical institutions such as libraries and community centers and towards internet search engines and online communities does not seem to transcend traditional issues with knowledge access. With physical knowledge infrastructure, people have less access to media and are less connected to diverse thought – yet the dislocation of knowledge communities from relevant place-based knowledge, and the creation of online echo chambers exacerbates the outcomes of uneven knowledge access, dividing, disciplining, and molding people into the same patterns of complacent consumption.
This forces us to question whether knowledge itself is inherently uneven, regardless of its infrastructural method of consumption (see Foucault). Information infrastructure, which expedites the ‘mass consumption’ of knowledge, is both a product and a tool of those in power who produce and reproduce knowledge. Rothbauer offers the anthropological concept of ‘body routines’ to better explain how we as individuals interface with and experience vast information infrastructures. A body routine is “a set of integrated gestures, behaviors, and actions that sustain a particular task or aim,” such as going to the library to check out or return books, or logging into one’s computer to access the internet – in other words, body routines are habitual actions that extend through time (Rothbauer 480). With shifts in information infrastructure, shifts occur in the ways we move our bodies between places and along pathways in pursuit of knowledge. To participate in any kind of infrastructure, we follow highly proscribed body rituals, reinforced by sophisticated systems of law and punishment –for transportation infrastructure, traffic light cameras, drivers’ licenses, vehicle registrations - for information infrastructure, IP addresses, cookies and data collection, and domestic surveillance justified by the PATRIOT Act. Violation of an infrastructure’s rules bear the possibility of incarceration – the entire loss of agency in one’s body ritual, the confinement to one place (prison) that itself lacks inherent characteristics of place, with dehumanizing outcomes for one’s identity formation and sense of belonging in communities. To participate in infrastructure, one must play by the rules or suffer the consequences.
While Rothbauer seeks to understand the negative impacts of the erosion of regionally specific information communities, Humphrey’s analysis of the creation of transregional digital information communities sheds light into the ways in which digital information terrain can be used in subversive and socially just ways – though acknowledging the ways in which our biases remain irrespective of information’s medium. Humphrey argues that “the media that we use to communicate are strongly tied to our understanding of place as a political, physical and phenomenological experience” (Humphrey 49). For example, Gutenberg’s moveable type and printing presses mobilized communities and identities around texts and print-based industries – shaping modern conceptions of nation-states and national identities. Print-based communities and identities were shaped by literature and newspapers; physical objects dependent on very material production processes and physical transportation infrastructure; thus, they were inherently regionally bound, within language groups and cultural communities.
Towards the end of the 20th century, text and print-based information infrastructure was replaced by new technologies such as radio and television, profound shifts that were not lost on theorists of media such as Marshall McLuhan, who “suggested that broadcast technologies […] helped to shape a 'global village' where physical boundaries could be largely transcended” (Humphrey 50). These broadcast media technologies were the highly efficient precursors of the internet. Yet at the same time, “theorists of place, such as Edward Relph and Melvin Webber, have argued that our phenomenological sense of place [is] eroded by the industrial emphasis on accessibility and efficiency” (Humphrey 50). While many first believed that the internet and broadcast technologies would unite humanity, what see in practice is the opposite – increased political polarization and the separation of communities by confirmation bias and identity politics – as well as the epidemic of mis- and dis- information that has imparted very real political consequences in elections in the U.S. and around the world.
The parallels here between information and transportation infrastructure become clear: the ‘highways’ directing flows of people, goods, and information may have become hyper-efficient, but in this efficiency, they have created physical and digital environments that are highly self-similar and self-selecting: both in terms of ‘information echo chambers,’ as well as sprawling suburban neighborhoods defined by racial and class homogeneity. By choosing convenience, people and places increasingly fall into ‘archetypical’ or ‘proscribed’ situations, events, expediting uneven flows of capital, labor, and knowledge, widening existing inequalities, despite initial promises of democratic connection. Humphrey argues that “this phenomenological collapse of place is exemplified in the way most social media platforms present an infinite scroll of standardized content drawn from disparate sources. The simultaneous expansion of place in a political sense can be seen in the way visual communication like emoji and memes are able to bypass language barriers that have historically played a crucial role in national identities” (Humphrey 50, drawing from Mahyar Arefi). As a result, 'communities of interest' replace 'communities of place' – yet these communities of interest are often just as tribal and combative as the national, place-based communities they seek to replace – if not more divisive, due to the anonymity and consequence-less actions that digital identities and interactions afford us.
Humphrey, like Relph, is interested in ‘place’ both in terms of “how people create identities of places as unique and particular, and how people identify with those places and see themselves as either outside or inside them” (Humphrey 53). Our identities shape the places we make; likewise, the places we make give a physical form to our identities. Consider how strongly our memories are intertwined with those places we grew up; yet to be memorable, places must be distinct from their surroundings; places that are indistinct, self-similar, or highly archetypal (a parking lot, for example, or a stretch of highway) are ‘slippery’ entities in our minds; lacking distinction or ‘definition’ upon which we may attach a place-memories. Body rituals in these spaces are heavily prescribed: we act in this parking lot identical to how we act in all other parking lots, or all other stretches of highway. These ‘characterless spaces’ are critical auxiliaries for our transportation infrastructure and our entire contemporary social-economic existence; however, it should come as no surprise that the more space, time, and money we dedicate to be the ‘in-between,’ the less importance we allot to any given place. For Relph, “placelessness arises when the distinctive characteristics of places are removed and replaced with standardized features” (Humphrey 53). Standardization is a precursor to efficiency: yet our fixation with efficiency “undermines the abilities of both individuals and cultures to locate their identities in relation to a place” (Humphrey 53). Interestingly, physical transportation infrastructure is expediting our retreat into digital communities, as our ‘grip’ upon material reality becomes increasingly tenuous.
Humphrey investigates the role of Australian Migrant Detention Centers relating to this global system of transportation of people and objects – arguing that the ‘characterless’ nature of these detention centers “amounts to not only the unmaking of places, but also the unmaking of people,” (Humphrey 54); interviews with detainees describe the centers as characterized by 'the deprivation of beauty, the absence of touch and limited sensory experiences', leading to a 'starvation of the soul' (Humphrey 54). Much like the infrastructure located out of sight of the public that Belanger describes, detention centers are often located in remote areas inaccessible to the public; yet they serve to uphold the very social/economic structure upon which this public rests, maintaining the exclusivity of citizenship-identity and gatekeeping the opportunity that participation in Australia’s economy entails. Humphrey argues that these detention centers are designed to “engender a deep affective sense of 'outsideness' in people who have also been denied access to the political 'insideness' of citizenship or refugee status” (Humphrey 55). In imperial social orders, the creation of ‘insideness’ is predicated on the creation and exclusion of the ‘other’ – for some to belong, some must ‘not-belong.’ As they have been designed to “contain” bodies en-route, along these ‘liminal arteries’ between destinations, migration detention centers (as well as prisons) constitute truly “placeless spaces” (Humphrey 55).
Kirby argues that though many believe that the internet constitutes a positive force bringing the world together, it is important to note that like national citizenship, “the Internet is not a universally accessible or occupied space” (Kirby 76); the internet is only accessible in countries that are wealthy and politically stable enough to possess and maintain the internet’s required physical infrastructure, and even within these societies, it is used disproportionately by upper class and educated individuals who have the time and means to engage with digital technologies. While access to the internet itself is uneven, so too is the terrain once one ‘arrives’ in digital-information landscapes: Kirby argues that we should regard cyberspace “as a larger locality overwhelmingly determined by hegemonic (cultural, economic, political, social) power flows from the “real world” (Kirby 78). The “digital world” has not in any way transcended the problems we possess in the “real world” – it simply replicates and repackages our presuppositions and inequalities within a new medium (Eubanks, 2018).
Brick-and-mortar bookstores have struggled with the shift towards digital information infrastructure: they have a limited capacity of titles given inherent restrictions in retail floor space, while digital bookstores such as Amazon have physical locations primarily in commercial districts. This allows Amazon to hold a far wider selection of titles offered at lower prices: “delocalization through digitization affects both purchaser and seller, and the consequence is a generalized placelessness: books can be ordered anywhere an individual possesses an Internet connection; the metropolis’s historic advantage in giving consumers literary access is weakened as the city/country cultural divide is largely dissolved” (Kirby 79). Kirby offers this description of how information infrastructure has detached from place:
“Like a “real” bookstore such as Blackwell’s, Amazon has a head office located in a particular city (Seattle); it abides by the business regulations of a certain locality; it too has an organizational hierarchy and a full-time staff; and it also owns warehouses found on specific geographical sites. As a bookseller, it is, then, indistinguishable from Blackwell’s in everything except its eschewal of site-specific retail, that is, its elimination of the shop as a customer interface point […] accordingly, delocalization is partial and above all experiential for the consumer: the book purchase is lived as location-free because an “actually existing” store has constructed it as such and, perhaps as importantly, sold it as such”
(Kirby 80).
Experiential placelessness is convenient: it is hugely profitable for Amazon, the wealthiest corporation in America; a corporation with questionable ethics regarding the treatment of its workers (New Dark Age, James Bridle) and the impact it has on the environment. Amazon’s ostensibly ‘placeless’ consumer experience hides the litany of inconvenient truths (workplace conditions, extractive industries) between the clicking of a button and the arrival of the desired product. This growing disconnect – between each other, between where we live, work, and recreate, as well as the ways in which we seek information – lies at the root of the increasing political polarization, income inequality, and environmental degradation we see today.
In Closing
Studies of public space, infrastructure, and displacement have revealed several important themes:
1. The body as housing a ‘disciplined,’ ‘ritualized’ self that, tempted by convenience, consents to the terms and conditions of infrastructural access, and by doing so gets tangled up within ethically questionable consumption patterns
2. Whereas we once derived identity from embeddedness within place-based communities, we increasingly derive our identities through authentic consumption rituals and tailored information access.
3. While infrastructure promises to connect us to each other, whether physically (the interstate system) or informationally (the internet), the experienced outcomes of these forms of ‘connection’ are actual disconnection from place and from each other.
4. The loss of regional or local character (placelessness) is both a cause and effect of the diminishing significance of place in the formation of identity and community.
5. Hyper-connection exacerbates existing inequalities and displaces us into digitally segregated communities of interest and materially segregated neighborhoods, workplaces, and sites of consumption.
6. These outcomes are not natural and inevitable, as the ease of access afforded by ostensibly neutral transportation/information systems would have us believe – the lived experiences they entail are uneven, unequal, and destabilize Earth’s ecologies.
7. These outcomes, though not intentionally planned by those in power, have the real effect of solidifying knowledge/power relations in society by dividing us and condition us to become complacent consumers.
8. Public consensus on any issue has vanished as ‘truth’ itself has become an object of consumption, with varying flavors to satisfy consumer taste - in the absence of a politically literate and unified public, corporations have stepped in as policymakers and power brokers.
Another subject of note is the ‘fractal’ nature of infrastructure – both material and digital infrastructure possess similar form: ‘main arteries’ from which branch progressively more delicate and niche pathways / capillaries of increasing particularization. The ‘main arteries’ from which all capillaries must be reached are the most placeless-places, the most ‘worn-in’ and ‘traveled-through.’ While this ‘fractal-arterial’ system has evolved to be hyper-efficient, is efficiency in the pathway towards environmental degradation, towards social and income inequality, towards the destruction of traditional languages, cultures, and ways of knowing a positive characteristic?
The alternative to ‘efficiency’ is the ‘meshwork’ that prioritizes horizontal/heterarchical ‘capillary’ connection over vertical/hierarchical ‘arterial’ channels, embodying ‘dwelling in place’ over ‘movement between places.’ A meshwork society inherently privileges the local over the global, emphasizing identities derived from relationships to place-based community.
Whether commuting to work or accessing the internet, we are all becoming irreparably entangled in hyper-efficient systems of connection - our entrapment within these systems comes at the expense of humanity’s traditional enmeshment within regional and local communities and identities. As information and transportation infrastructure (and consequently, our very selves) become increasingly standardized and self-similar, we approach an evolutionary singularity: like the mitochondria coaxed into the body of the cell over 1.54 billion years ago, humanity is becoming subsumed within a ‘greater self’ that offers us collectively and individually such connection, comfort, and ease that returning to traditional ways of life is now a near-impossibility. For many of us, we are trapped not because we have been forced to participate in these systems, but because we have been conditioned to no longer care. This next stage of (extra)human evolution is no longer up to us – we are as much a product of these connective networks as they are a product of us. We have simply become the engine, the powerhouse of the cell – the cell itself is beyond the capacity of any of us to control. This amalgam-cell will self-regulate and evolve of its own accord –
We are all simply along for the ride.
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