Unruly Places: Lost Spaces, Secret Cities, and Other Inscrutable Geographies (17 page)

The arguments continue, but in the meantime we can safely assume that high above nations there is plenty of space, between the lower atmosphere and outer space, that is beyond any country’s jurisdiction. Combined with all that airspace over the high seas, it would appear that the bulk of the world’s thin rim of atmosphere is outside of national or private control.

So what shall we do with it, if we treat the air above us as somewhere to go, possibly even to live? The idea of airborne cities has been intriguing architects for some while, and a number have been planned by the profession’s blue-sky thinkers. Some of the first schemes were set out by the countercultural architects Archigram, whose Instant City envisaged an entire city hoisted aloft by balloons and helicopters that would then move it anywhere its citizens felt like going. Such a place could easily escape national airspace. It’s an idea that has been extended by others, most recently by focusing less on transporting cities and more on the business of keeping aloft. Utopian architect Leah Beeferman envisages a kind of scattered republic: “The helicopters themselves could be liberated to form their own city—an airborne utopia, endlessly aloft, wandering through the planetary atmosphere.”

For Beeferman, this “helicopter archipelago, or flying island-chain,” would be “an escape hatch from traditional, nation-state sovereignty.” It would roam across international airspace: the “archipelago would be impossible to map. Atlas-makers and manufacturers of globes will simply include a pack of removable stickers, featuring small clouds of helicopters, to approximate the country’s location.” It is somehow fitting that the idea of free airspace should deposit us on cloud nine. Although a strange and alien environment, the air is also the natural place for far-fetched bids for human happiness.

In the early 1970s the conceptual artist Gordon Matta-Clark began buying up shards of land between buildings in New York City, called gutterspaces. Most are just a few feet wide, though they are often hundreds of feet long. They are the useless remnants of the planning process auctioned off by the city authorities. Matta-Clark bought fifteen (fourteen in Queens and one on Staten Island), and over the next few years he took photos and collected the plot plans, deeds, and all the bureaucratic documentation he could get hold of associated with each of his new properties.

Most of these gutterspaces are alleyways, sunk in shadow; lurking between buildings, they have a furtive, melancholy look. It seems that Matta-Clark was drawn to them precisely because they were advertised as “inaccessible.” In an interview he explained that he liked the paradox of owning spaces that “wouldn’t be seen and certainly not occupied.” But Lot 15, Jamaica Curb, is different: it is a long rim of sidewalk that sits in broad sunlight, an accessible, apparently public space and a flagrant bit of legal and commercial oddness. Matta-Clark’s twenty-four photos of it form an eleven-and-a-half-foot-long collage.

Matta-Clark died in 1978 at the age of thirty-five, leaving his project, which he called “Fake Estates,” unfinished. It was already getting irksome, largely because of all the separate property taxes he had to pay. The lots, which cost him as little as $25, each incurred a tax of $7 or $8 a year. Although after he died the land reverted back to city ownership, Matta-Clark’s untidy piles of papers were assembled and put in order by his widow, Jane Crawford, and, over the past couple of decades, exhibitions, books, and bus tours have been constructed around them. “Fake Estates” has become a touchstone for a new generation of psychogeographical artists.

Anyone who has watched nervously as their next-door neighbor put up a fence knows just how important a few inches of land can be; after all, not many of us would lean out the window and politely call, “No, really, don’t worry, just put it anywhere.” For all the disconcerting beauty of “Fake Estates,” Matta-Clark thought he was providing a
reductio
ad absurdum
critique of our obsession with private property. In her study of his work,
Object to Be Destroyed
, Pamela Lee explains his motives by reference to Karl Marx’s claim that “private property has made us so stupid and narrow-minded that an object is only ours when we have it, when it exists as capital for us.” Matta-Clark’s useless lots are supposed to destabilize our sense of the rationality of land ownership—and they do, in a way. But they also work in the opposite direction, because they remind us how powerful the idea of owning land really is. It is because this desire is so commonplace that “Fake Estates” is so oddly touching. Matta-Clark’s gutterspaces speak to a widespread yearning for a piece of the earth—no matter how small—that we can call our own.

Matta-Clark’s collection of pieces of land also taps into an aesthetic of ordering and labeling that we are all familiar with. In fact, at about the same time as Matta-Clark’s conceptual activities, another New Yorker, a hardware store owner named Jack Gasnick—already a minor celebrity for his “cellar fishing” (he claimed to have caught a three-pound carp in a stream running through his basement) and for having the world’s third-oldest working lightbulb, at the back of his store (it was first turned on 1912)—was doing something very similar and without a whisper of political intent. For Gasnick, buying up gutterspaces was a hobby. Interviewed in 1994 by Constance Hays of the
New York Times
, he explained, “It’s like collecting stamps,” adding that “once you’ve got the fever, you’ve got the fever . . . I wanted the unwanted.”

Gasnick’s set of gutterspaces eventually came to twenty-eight, bought for between $50 and $250, and his prize item was some land behind Louis Armstrong’s house in Corona, Queens. But Jack had many strips and squares, including part of an African-American cemetery and one with an apple tree on it. While Gasnick’s relationship to these bits of land was that of a collector, he also thought of them in aspirational terms. “This jump of mine from flowerpot to apple tree,” he said, “bears witness to the fact that it doesn’t cost much for an apartment-living guy to get a share of the good environment.” The care he took of his apple tree, not to mention the oak in another plot, reflects Gasnick’s real affection for his micro-plots. “Once he acquired a plot of land,” Constance Hays wrote, “Mr. Gasnick spent weekends driving out to visit it and clean it up.” Hays describes how Gasnick “kept visiting his properties even as the neighborhoods around them changed dramatically, keeping his land clear of litter, whether empty coffee cups or abandoned cars.” In the late 1970s Gasnick began to feel overwhelmed by the upkeep, and he either mislaid lots (“some I just forgot”) or sold them off, often for little more than he paid for them. Other lots were given to community gardening organizations. Now in his nineties, he has hung on to one last lot, a beloved picnic spot that offers a harbor view from Staten Island.

Snippets of land still come up for sale. Claudio Manicone, who works for Broward County, Florida, has been trying to sell a sidewalk, an alleyway, and a river. He sees it as tidying up: “Like in anything you do, you’ve got leftover pieces. Just like when you build something out of wood, you’ve got wood left over.” The companies that sell these parcels occasionally encounter buyers with ulterior motives, such as the man in Palm Beach who bought a tiny section of municipal canal thinking that this would give him control of the water supply (he soon found out that it didn’t). But mostly people are interested in these places for far less rational reasons.

Gordon Matta-Clark brought his remnants out of obscurity and onto the map. It was always an ironic achievement, since they remained “fake estates,” real but worthless. But even so, it is easy to see why people would want them, especially in cities where most of us feel lucky if we have a yard large enough to sit down in. And I think I understand why Jack Gasnick felt good about his collection. Since the rich take such delight in their spreading acres, is it so peculiar that ordinary people might get some pleasure from owning a few feet of grass? And if people looked bemused, you could always explain that your miniature estate is a critique of capitalism. They would surely understand.

54° 20′ 00″ N, 81° 47′ 15″ E

The relationship between place and well-being seems to be hard-wired into the human brain. Making a better life for oneself suggests going to a better place, and it comes as no surprise that creating a new kind of place is central to the efforts of those who want to flee industrial civilization and fashion a perfect society. Once associated with hippie communes in the 1960s, this utopian impulse has spread and diversified, and today there are a huge variety of “intentional communities,” with the fastest expansion among eco-friendly and off-grid settlements. There are thousands throughout the English-speaking world, but my example comes from the banks of the Ob River, 1,750 miles east of Moscow and 65 miles southwest of Novosibirsk, Siberia’s largest city.

The desire to escape urban life and build utopia is not new in Russia, but over the past few decades, in the wake of the collapse of the USSR and the social disintegration that has taken hold in many towns and cities, a new generation is packing its bags and heading into the forest, like the sixteen families who now live two miles down a dirt road in the village of Bountiful.

The fact that we take the bond between place and utopia for granted is a paradox. Utopia is Thomas More’s Greek neologism for “no-place,” a term meant to contrast with real places, which are frustratingly but inevitably full of different histories, ideas, and people. Utopia is an idea that implies that a utopian place could never work. Yet the intention to start such places is not uncommon; many ordinary towns and suburbs started life as ideal communities. There is a creative friction between such intentions and the realities of place-making that undermines utopian purism but also sparks new utopian projects.

Bountiful is part of the new phenomenon being labeled Russia’s Green Exodus. Hundreds of eco-villages have been founded in the forests, often by professional, educated people who are turning their backs on what they see as the corrupt and corrupting nature of modern Russia. Many hark back to the anarcho-Christian and Tolstoyan communities that were formed in the first decades of the last century, only to be dismantled by Soviet collectivization, and to the small agricultural cooperatives championed by another victim of the USSR, Alexander Chayanov. Although the Green Exodus is too diverse for easy generalizations, it is often marked by a semi-mystical yearning for a purer, kinder, and more authentic Russia.

Bountiful is part of an eco-spiritual sect called the Anastasia Movement, based around a series of nine books written by Vladimir Megre, in which he claims he met a beautiful young woman called Anastasia on the banks of the river Ob in 1994. He recounts that her parents had died shortly after she was born and that she “has ever since fended for herself, watched over only by her grandfather, great-grandfather and a variety of ‘wild’ animals.” Anastasia revealed to Megre a philosophy of “eco-culture where every person is fulfilling their role as a Divine Co-Creator” and instructed him that “every person has the right to a small parcel of land to grow their own food, build their own house, and raise their family, without taxes.”

It turned out to be a timely message, because the Russian government was keen to privatize and diversify land ownership. Growing your own food and tending your own patch of ground is extremely popular in Russia—it was estimated in 1999 that 71 percent of the country’s population already owned a plot and were cultivating it. In 2003, the same year that saw the founding of Bountiful, the Private Garden Plot Act allowed Russian citizens to claim free land of between one and three hectares. The Anastasians make much of the Russian prime minister Dmitry Medvedev’s claim that because of “the scale of a country like ours, with such huge areas, there is no point everyone concentrating in cities,” and that it would be “more useful for our health, and for the country, to disperse.”

The Anastasian message also chimes with the rise of cultural conservatism in Russia. The movement’s emphasis on traditional family values, and reverence for Russian crafts and home cooking, suit the temper of the times. Each homestead in Bountiful, of no less than one hectare, can only be inherited and never sold. Unlike some of the more hippie-ish villages spawned by the Green Exodus, this is one place that is consciously and nostalgically finding its utopia in the past.

Yet part of this nostalgia is to reclaim a history of collectivism and mutual care. Households help each other as well as new arrivals. The family of former physicist Valery Popov shows newcomers how to build their log cabin. Another family, the Nadezhdins, former dentistry professionals, are the village bakers. A music teacher named Klavdiya Ivanova turns out traditional Russian clothes. These local skills are highlighted on Bountiful’s well-developed website, alongside cheerful stories and tips about how to return to a more wholesome and Russian way of life. One of the leading residents of Bountiful, Dmitry Ivanov, a former navy officer who helps install the cabins’ stoves, explains, “The motherland is what teaches us to live in harmony.” For all the New Age rhetoric, this is a place that flows with a patriotic desire for reattachment to the real Russia.

Imparting traditional Russian values within a spiritual, environmentalist context has proved an attractive formula. The Anastasia Movement now claims more than 100,000 registered activists and 85 villages, some much larger than Bountiful, spread across Russia (there are 4 Anastasian villages in the Novosibirsk region alone). But the fact that place and utopia are never an easy mix is also being continually proved. For one thing, the Anastasian philosophy is far from universally revered. Indeed, according to Ivanov “it is not so important” and Bountiful is doing its own thing: “It is more important that we are choosing the path that we are going, whether or not it is Megre’s.”

A bit of classic geography can help us understand how utopian places maintain their cohesion. Geographers like to identify the “push and pull” factors when working out why any settlement gets going. Bountiful has strong attractors: leaders and an ideology that are drawing people in. But the powerful forces that are driving people away from conventional places seem to be just as important. Listening to interviews with village members, one repeatedly hears the same story about what has propelled them so far away from the city and “the system.” Talking to a visiting freelance reporter, Ivanov explains, “All my life, I’ve been a part of the system. At school, as a university student, then as a faithful officer.” But the system failed him: “the system fell apart before my eyes, destroyed by traders, by stealers, by outrageously corrupt managers.” Bountiful is dedicated, says one young mother, “to our future children so they can be more ‘real’ than we are.” Olga Kumani, a resident of a nearby eco-commune at Askat, describes how she left her job as a crime reporter in Novosibirsk in 2002: “I could not breathe in the city; the state system choked me.” But it didn’t work out. “The commune leaders just wanted to control our money and exploit us for work.” So the push factors kept pushing, driving Olga to move to an even remoter part of this vast region.