On his book Beyond the Map: Unruly Enclaves, Ghostly Places, Emerging Lands and Our Search for New Utopias
Cover Interview of February 20, 2019
In a nutshell
In Beyond the Map I explore our
curious but intense relationship to place by telling the story of thirty-nine extraordinary
places. It’s a geographical roller coaster. But it’s not just a thrill ride. Beyond
the Map takes us to new islands that are rising in the Arctic; a ‘Garbage
City’ in Cairo; a guerrilla garden in England; and remnants of a utopian undersea
village. Each of the thirty-nine chapters offers a unique and surprising story
and, I hope, pushes us to think about why place matters, and why we still pour our
hope and dreams into it.
It is often said that the planet is
becoming ever more the same: that unique places are disappearing and that there
is nowhere new left to explore. Beyond the Map turns all that on its
head and shows that the world is riddled with strange, hidden places; some are
remote and exotic, but others are just around the corner or under our feet.
There is a new mood in the air: a rising
rebellion against blandness and sameness, and it has been a long time coming. You
don’t have to walk far into our coagulated roadscape to realise that, over the
past hundred years or so, we have been much better at destroying places than creating
them. I see that every day in my home city, Newcastle, in England’s far north, which
has been pulled apart and rebuilt so many times that its now hard to recognise.
The resulting landscape feels impermanent; temporarily bolted into view. To
illustrate that point, one of the chapters takes us to the bizarre and dilapidated
‘skywalks’ that some hare-brained local planner carelessly strung across
Newcastle city centre in the 1970s. So many of us have to pick our way through
something similar; the soon-to-be-debris; broken layers of other people’s grand
and not so grand plans.
So that’s Beyond the Map. It is a
travel book with a difference. It takes us to deeply unusual destinations – it
even includes a chapter on a noisy traffic island – in order to think about
what place means to us.
[T]he Holocaust transformed our whole way of thinking about war and heroism. War is no longer a proving ground for heroism in the same way it used to be. Instead, war now is something that we must avoid at all costs—because genocides often take place under the cover of war. We are no longer all potential soldiers (though we are that too), but we are all potential victims of the traumas war creates. This, at least, is one important development in the way Western populations envision war, even if it does not always predominate in the thinking of our political leaders.Carolyn J. Dean, Interview of February 01, 2011
The dominant premise in evolution and economics is that a person is being loyal to natural law if he or she attends to self’s interest and welfare before being concerned with the needs and demands of family or community. The public does not realize that this statement is not an established scientific principle but an ethical preference. Nonetheless, this belief has created a moral confusion among North Americans and Europeans because the evolution of our species was accompanied by the disposition to worry about kin and the collectives to which one belongs.Jerome Kagan, Interview of September 17, 2009
In a nutshell
In Beyond the Map I explore our curious but intense relationship to place by telling the story of thirty-nine extraordinary places. It’s a geographical roller coaster. But it’s not just a thrill ride. Beyond the Map takes us to new islands that are rising in the Arctic; a ‘Garbage City’ in Cairo; a guerrilla garden in England; and remnants of a utopian undersea village. Each of the thirty-nine chapters offers a unique and surprising story and, I hope, pushes us to think about why place matters, and why we still pour our hope and dreams into it.
It is often said that the planet is becoming ever more the same: that unique places are disappearing and that there is nowhere new left to explore. Beyond the Map turns all that on its head and shows that the world is riddled with strange, hidden places; some are remote and exotic, but others are just around the corner or under our feet.
There is a new mood in the air: a rising rebellion against blandness and sameness, and it has been a long time coming. You don’t have to walk far into our coagulated roadscape to realise that, over the past hundred years or so, we have been much better at destroying places than creating them. I see that every day in my home city, Newcastle, in England’s far north, which has been pulled apart and rebuilt so many times that its now hard to recognise. The resulting landscape feels impermanent; temporarily bolted into view. To illustrate that point, one of the chapters takes us to the bizarre and dilapidated ‘skywalks’ that some hare-brained local planner carelessly strung across Newcastle city centre in the 1970s. So many of us have to pick our way through something similar; the soon-to-be-debris; broken layers of other people’s grand and not so grand plans.
So that’s Beyond the Map. It is a travel book with a difference. It takes us to deeply unusual destinations – it even includes a chapter on a noisy traffic island – in order to think about what place means to us.