Unruly Places: Lost Spaces, Secret Cities, and Other Inscrutable Geographies by Alastair Bonnett (review)

Geographers have long decried the spread of “placeless,” globalized landscapes, warning of inauthenticity, topotedium, rampant hegemony, and other evils that proliferate in a world of geographical sameness. With Unruly Places, effectively a mini-encyclopedia of forty-seven unusual places explored in brief, thoughtful essays, social geographer Alastair Bonnett draws attention to such evils while encouraging “geographical reenchantment” with a world that, clearly, still manages to produce template-shattering places (xi). Some places described in the book—such as Mecca, whose redevelopment over the past twenty years has eradicated ancient sites and whose Vegasy skyline glitters above the Grand Mosque—are unruly by virtue of their globalization-induced familiarity. (Bonnett frames the chapter around “Old Mecca,” but it’s the new one that disconcerts.) It is typical of the places in the book to have bizarre and perverse qualities. Such places—cemeteries-turned-neighborhoods, secret CIA detention centers, spray-ice Arctic islands, as well as five-star hotel districts sprouting up in the birthplaces of ancient, monotheistic religions—have the “power to provoke and disorient,” writes Bonnett (xvi). Encountering them can make “the world seem a stranger place where discovery and adventure are still possible, both nearby and far away” (ibid).

What the book hence offers is a somewhat morbid, shock-therapy approach to “reenchantment.” Among the more macabre examples of places covered are Pripyat, the radiation-poisoned town near Ukraine’s Chernobyl reactor, and Kijong-dong, the North Korean propaganda village inside the two-kilometer-wide “demilitarized zone” that separates North and South Korea. Both affirm the adage that truth is stranger than fiction. Told, as they were being hurriedly bussed out of town, that they would be returning in three days, Pripyat’s 45,000 residents left their clothes, toys, and other personal items where they were. Until looters sifted these items years later, there they would remain. Radiation poisoning has made the town uninhabitable until the next millennium. Hence Pripyat has the fascination of a town frozen in time, its Soviet architecture and iconography haplessly still intact. Even more strange, however—and the focus of Bonnett’s chapter—is the plant and animal life of Pripyat. Following the reactor’s meltdown, animal embryos dissolved, horse thyroid glands fell apart, and a pine wood died, changed color and was dubbed (in irony, one hopes) “Red Forest.” Today, however, nature has returned to Pripyat and the 2,600-square-kilometer exclusion zone around it. A wildlife survey documented the presence of 7,000 wild boar, 600 wolves, 3,000 deer, 1,500 beavers, 1,200 oxen, 15 lynx, thousands of elk, and even found evidence of bear, which had not been seen locally for “many years” prior to the meltdown (117). In the words of a radioecologist quoted by Bonnett, the exclusion zone is “a radioactive wilderness and it is thriving” (117). But given the wildlife’s low productive rates and damaged hormones, notes Bonnett, it thrives in mutant and unsettling form.

Kijong-dong, by contrast, might be described as a mutant city. North Korea built the town in the 1950s, in the demilitarized zone and within view of South Korea, to serve as bait to potential South Korean defectors. Hence Kijong-dong is “fake”; it is mise-en-scene for a 1950s-era vision of North Korea as utopia (104). The lights go off and on in the town’s buildings, but there is no glass in the windows. North Korean propaganda continues to depict the community as thriving and successful, but Bonnett frames Kijong-dong as one of the “hollow architectural spectacles” that are characteristic of communist regimes (107). He compares it to Bucharest’s Palace of Parliament, Bulgaria’s Buzludzha Monument, or to any of North Korea’s other bizarre, oversized tributes to itself—such as its world-record-sized Arc of Triumph, composed of 25,550 bricks (one for each day of dictator Kim Il Sung’s life), and the world-record-height, 525-foot flagpole in...