When talking about a 'non-place', I have in mind here the conception outlined by Marc Auge in his work Non-places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity. In the chapter "From Places to Non-Places", he establishes the difference between an anthropological place and the peculiarly supermodern non-place.

He writes,
"If a place can be defined as relational, historical, and concerned with identity, then a space which cannot be defined as relational, or historical, or concerned with identity will be a non-place. The hypothesis advanced here is that supermodernity produces non-places, meaning spaces which are not themselves anthropological places and which, unlike Baudelairean modernity, do not integrate the earlier places: instead these are listed, classified, promoted to the status of 'places of memory', and assigned to a circumscribed and specific position.

A world where people are born in the clinic and die in the hospital, where transit points and temporary abodes are proliferating under luxurious or inhuman conditions (hotel chains and squats, holiday clubs and refugee camps, shantytowns threatened with demolition or doomed to festering longevity); where a dense network of means of transport which are also inhabited spaces is developing; where the habitue of supermarkets, slot machines and credit cards communicates wordlessly, through gestures, with an abstract, unmediated commerce; a world thus surrendered to solitary individuality, to the fleeting, the temporary and ephemeral, offers the anthropologist (and others [like the explorer]) a new object. (...)

We should add that the same things apply to the non-place as to the place. It never exists in pure form; places reconstitute themselves in it; relations are restored and resumed in it; the 'millennial ruses' of 'the invention of the everyday' and 'the arts of doing', so subtly analyzed by Michel de Certeau, can clear a path there and deploy their strategies" (pages 77 - 79, italics added).

It is exactly this relationship between place and non-place that I have set out to explore in my subway adventure, particularly in terms of individualized approaches, tactics and strategies.
 
 

For Marc Auge links, please click here.