Unruly Places: Lost Spaces, Secret Cities, and Other Inscrutable Geographies (25 page)

The people of the Maldives seem to prefer solid ground to floating islands. The floating villages on Lake Titicaca in South America and those found across East Asia may be tourist attractions today, but traditionally they have been home to people with few other options. This was certainly the case for the Yau Ma Tei shelter in Hong Kong, a floating boat community of refugees. Bigger examples include Sandu’ao in China, which has its own floating postal service, convenience store, police station, and restaurants, and Kampong Phluk, a collection of attached stilt villages in Cambodia. Both places might be taken to resemble Olthuis’s “app city,” since their constituent parts are often added to or separated. Yet even in the relatively shielded environment of lakes, floating structures are vulnerable: houses flood, materials decay or wash away, and there is a constant struggle to keep food dry as well as to obtain clean, fresh water.

One of the places where these dilemmas are being seriously confronted is in Singapore. Singapore is a small city-state with a burgeoning population where leading voices are today proposing floating platforms as a cheap way of creating more landmass (cheap, that is, when compared to land reclamation, a laborious process that, since 1959, has increased the size of Singapore by 23 percent). However, there is little dreamy utopianism about these plans, for, as the leading authority on the new platforms, Professor Wang Chien Ming, argues, no one platform could last more than a century. “You may think that a good structure must last 100 years,” he says, adding, “Nobody would want to live there after 100 years.” It’s a sobering thought for those who imagine that rising seas and floating technology are the sure-fire ingredients for prime real estate. How long can floating houses be sold as a luxury option? It turns out that there are good reasons why living on the water was once confined to the poor. In many parts of the world, the unaffordable dream houses of the future may well be the ones built on solid, high ground that is a long way from the sea.

At what point does a ship get so big that it is no longer merely a means of transport but a real place?
The World
is a huge private cruiser that has been circling the world since 2002 and has become a home away from home for its residents. It’s also a floating gated community, an enclave of affluence. Perhaps it’s also a plush lifeboat, full of refugees from the rest of us.

At home I have a few minutes of Super 8 film of myself, at age three, on the upper deck of the SS
Chusan
, dressed in a crisp white shirt, tie, and smart checked trousers. It was 1967, and my family was on its way to Canada via the Panama Canal. The
Chusan
was scrapped in 1973, one of the last of the old-style ocean liners, and for a decade or so it looked as if ship travel was going to be fully supplanted by air travel. But it seems that people love boats too much for that to ever happen. Over the last thirty years cruise holidays have taken off, on ever more grandiose vessels, and currently the biggest one can carry more than six thousand passengers.
The World
, launched in 2002, isn’t on that scale, but it has unique aspirations. Its “130 families” own their apartments and together own the ship. Short holidays on board have been possible, but the real selling point is that
The World
allows you to “travel the world without leaving home.” The idea that
The World
is owned and controlled by the residents is reinforced by the fact that the ship’s itinerary is determined “collectively.”

The World
is very expensive. Apartments range in price from $2 million to $7 million. On top of that, owners pay an annual maintenance fee, which is 6 percent of what their apartment cost, as well as on-board expenses. The owners’ identities are well protected, though we do know that
The World
is where the mining billionaire Gina Rinehart, whose father prospected for and discovered asbestos at Wittenoom, spends some of her “downtime.”

The World
tours the planet in private and isolated splendor. It is both the ultimate adventure and the ultimate secure community, catering to the two seemingly incompatible desires of the ultra-wealthy: to live in pampered seclusion and to drink deep of the very best the earth has to offer.
The World
’s brochure promises a “life of spontaneity. An enchanting and intriguing life. A passionate and adventurous life.” It’s a distillation and fulfillment of the art of being rich.

It seems to work. This is “the first time I have seen privileged people visibly happy,” noted one French journalist after a short stay on board. Other reactions to the same spectacle have been, predictably, more critical.
The World
fits nicely into Robert Frank’s notion of “Richistan,” a label that tut-tuts disapprovingly at the high jinks of the super-rich and also hints at something more important, their increasing geographical segregation. Sociologists Rowland Atkinson and Sarah Blandy describe
The World
as “secessionary affluence.” They see it within a spectrum of economic enclavement, which ranges from small things, such as a Buick SUV called Enclave, to the growth of private jet use and the “mobile mansions” being built by Boeing. For many the self-isolation of the rich is emblematic of everything that is wrong with our era of public squalor and private wealth. Soon after its launch,
The World
was being criticized for its exclusivity. One undercover British reporter claimed that a “deep gloom pervades the ship. The atmosphere is funereal; you’ll find more ambience in an out-of-season seaside resort.” Residents complained bitterly to her of the holidaying riffraff on board: “How would you feel if you spent millions for an apartment and people who had spent a few hundred pounds had access to the same facilities as you?” Many of these complaints are from the short period before the residents rebelled and took over full ownership in 2003.

The rise of Richistan may be a social disaster in the making, but
The World
should be acknowledged as a pioneer. One of its more original appraisals came from visitors from the Seasteading Institute, a San Francisco–based nonprofit group that advocates floating cities and also enthuses about Sealand (see
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). They look at
The World
as a forerunner and are keen to learn from its mistakes. Their summary is terse: “beautiful, inspiring, elegant, and wasteful.” What really struck the Seasteaders was how much of the public space on board was not being put to good use: “The upper deck tennis court had puddles and piles of ship’s supplies next to it. There are 5 or 6 restaurants, but only 2 are open at a time, because demand was just not that high.” It seems that this particular “floating city” would have worked better on a more modest scale. They go on to argue that although the ship’s low occupancy rate doesn’t bother the residents, it does suggest that future projects need to be wary about succumbing to the cruise holiday cliché that bigger is better.

To return to the tennis court,
The World
is the only ship with a full-size court, which is one of its many unique selling points. But it’s a feature that highlights the futility of trying to turn ships into real places. After all, a full-size tennis court is hardly a big deal on dry land. It’s only when you find yourself somewhere inherently cramped that it becomes a luxury, and that’s true of many of the features on the boat. The restaurants, the theater, and the spa become special and glamorous simply by being stuck out at sea, but the games of tennis aren’t likely to be any better or the meals any tastier. To take what would be fun for a week and turn it into a lifestyle seems like an error of judgment. The only other people who spend long periods of time in transit are those who have no choice: refugees, salesmen, sailors. Confined and often uncomfortable living conditions are an inevitable consequence of living on the go.
The World
is an aspirational home, but it can never be a real one.

It seems unlikely that what remains essentially a mode of transport can ever develop a sense of community. It might be objected that the ultramobile rich aren’t interested in community, as shown by their propensity to erect large walls between them and us and drive in fortified 4 x 4s. But they should be, because the alternative is a footloose existence swept clean of authentic histories and relationships. The kick to be got from living on a big boat with swinging chandeliers and tennis courts is obvious. But such vessels can only ever offer transitory and labored simulacra of what ordinary places achieve effortlessly.

51° 13′ 33″ N, 0° 40′ 25″ W

Many of the most unkempt and unruly places spawned by the geographical imagination are also the most transitory. They are conjured out of very little and sit lightly on the earth, often unnoticed by passersby. These ephemeral places may take the form of improvised townships shaped by or for refugees or for the increasing number of highly mobile workers that modern economies require, but they can also be happy places of temporary escape: a festival city, a child’s secret playing spot, or the Hog’s Back lay-by.

The Hog’s Back is a pleasant grassy hill near Puttenham, a village in Surrey’s commuter belt. In a letter to her sister from May 20, 1813, Jane Austen writes fondly of the surrounding landscape seen in fine weather: “I never saw the country from the Hog’s Back so advantageously.”

Today the Hog’s Back lay-by and its surrounding fields and woodland are renowned for dogging. According to the website Let’s Go Dogging, “Dogging is a global phenomenon that often involves outdoor sex in car-parks, wooded areas and the like.” Let’s Go Dogging has conferred on the Hog’s Back the title of “second-most popular dogging site in Europe.” A sister website, Swinging Heaven, is also a big fan, claiming that “this place has been used for over 50 years as a sexsite.” Swinging Heaven lists it along with sixty-one other dogging spots in Surrey, which include some secluded areas in Great Windsor Park, an extensive acreage owned by Queen Elizabeth II.

The word “dogging” derives from a lie that became a euphemism. The idea is that men and women would pretend to be “just taking the dog for a walk” as a cover for nipping out for
en plein air
or in-car sexual encounters with strangers. More interesting is understanding why such a place, with its convenient parking lot but also with its fresh breeze, soft grasses, and mossy wood, sets the blood pumping. Turning ordinary landscapes into what the British police designate as public sex environments (PSEs) implies a hidden and deeply kinky side to geography.

It was David Bell who introduced me to the relationship between sex and geography. David is a tall, elegant professor at the University of Leeds with a waspish sense of humor. In 1994 he delivered a paper to the Association of American Geographers called “Fucking Geography.” In 2009 he reprised his theme with an article for one of the learned journals: “Fucking Geography, Again.” Professor Bell’s insistence that geography should be fucked, not once but until its eyes bulge, has been met with much nervous coughing and feigned indifference. His argument turns on the need for geography to take sexual desire seriously, as something that both shapes people’s spatial behavior and might shake up the discipline’s conservative bent. To this end he has studied the geography of dogging. It turns out, however, that his real interest is in appropriating dogging into a vocabulary of resistance and subversion. Other academics are pursuing the same angle. For Dr. Fiona Measham of Lancaster University, dogging is “evidence of a continued desire by some to take risks and to resist the regulation, containment and commodification of physical pleasure.”

But the idea that outdoor sex is an act of resistance seems contrived. It tells us more about the political desperation of social scientists than it does about dogging in places like the Hog’s Back. A more promising approach is pursued by Rowan Pelling, onetime editor of
Erotic Review
. What is it about those “tempting beds of moss”? she asks, before concluding that the “countryside acts as a powerful aphrodisiac.” It’s an idea with an impressive cultural pedigree. One of the oldest forms of literature is the “meadows of love” poetry found in ancient Greek pastoral lyric. It’s a poetic tradition that doesn’t just throw in urgent streams, crushed flowers, and sweat-flecked horses as a backdrop. Nature isn’t only a picture frame for sex—it
is
sex. The controversial theologian David McLain Carr has recently taken the argument a little further by arguing that Eden, the first garden, was an erotic landscape—paradise as both a tease and a turn-on. But the sensuality of the fields and woods predates religion; it’s atavistic, exciting, and excessive. It calls us back.