Unruly Places: Lost Spaces, Secret Cities, and Other Inscrutable Geographies by Alastair Bonnett Page A

statement of control, a last claim to place. As one resident in the nearby unrecognized village of Wadi al-Ne’am explained to Human Rights Watch, “When they came there were three houses they wanted to demolish. We said, we don’t want you to cause panic in the community so we’ll demolish them ourselves. They were waiting outside the village, and we demolished them ourselves, and then they came back to check. We got tired of the threats, and that’s when we decided to do it ourselves.”
    Even this act of self-destruction goes unrecorded. For these places never existed: the history of their construction and demolition; of families raised and of people working, farming, and migrating; none of this ever happened. The Negev Bedouin themselves fear that they are disappearing. Because without their places, what do they have—what does being Bedouin amount to? Place isn’t a stage, a backdrop against which we act out our lives. It is part of what we are.

Traffic Island
    54° 58′ 52″ N, 1° 36′ 25″ W
     
    I am staring at a triangle of land surrounded on all sides by steel crash barriers and busy roads. Two corners are covered in bushes and saplings but the center and the sharpest end, which is under an overpass, are stony and bare. This unreachable traffic island is on my walk to work, which for about five minutes takes me alongside a section of inner-city motorway. It’s visible through the wire mesh that fences in the motorway, a semi-verdant kingdom that features on no maps. It seems pristine—two wide-screen TVs, ends of carpet, and some odd gunk in a plastic bag have been dumped behind undergrowth along my side of the fencing, but over there, beyond contact, I can see only infant trees and gravel.
    These places are everywhere, part of everybody’s geographical routine. They are easily ignored, but once you start noticing any particular one it can start to exert a queasy fascination. It’s as if you are seeing a landscape that is invisible to everyone else, a secret and intimate kingdom surrounded by unseeing people. This one is in Newcastle in the northeast of England, on a 1.1-mile-long motorway, the A167(M), which opened in 1975. The A167(M) can be a challenging drive, even for those who know the city. Around the triangular island cars nudge from slow on-ramps into dense traffic traveling at up to 70 miles per hour. Some of the merging vehicles then have to cross three lanes of traffic to get to their exit, a mere hundred yards or so farther on. It’s a landscape of clamped teeth and grim intensity. There is no time to see anything other than what you might hit or what might hit you.
    The triangle is a remnant. The roads were thought about, carefully plotted, and justified, but this island simply happened. This isn’t true of all the motorway’s green spaces: the roundabouts are just as inaccessible, but they were planned and are dutifully planted and mowed and sometimes sport bulky items of public art. What marks out places like the triangle is the absence of any discernible will either to shape or to create them. They have a quality of abandonment but also of independence, of autonomy from the motorized anthill that is the modern city.
    My triangle doesn’t feature in
Diversion
, the newspaper produced by the Newcastle City Council in the early 1970s to win over the local population to the idea that their neighborhood was soon to be plowed through with expressways. The editor of
Diversion
appears to have been convinced that the virtues of multilane highways in the inner city spoke for themselves. The harsh line drawings of overpasses that dominate its front page look almost as unappealing in print as they are in reality. The newspaper’s attempts to soften the blow were brazenly tokenistic: “1,000 new trees will be planted,” along with “22,500 shrubs of varying species,” and the dug-out earth will be made into a ski slope. That last promise did come true: for a few years what remains a