Unruly Places: Lost Spaces, Secret Cities, and Other Inscrutable Geographies
Bonnett divides places into helpful categories. Hidden Geographies includes tunnel labyrinths below old cities and oddities like an established community within a Philippine cemetery. We visit Dead Cities like the skyscrapered, yet bizarrely empty, attempts by China and North Korea to proclaim ideological success. Unused spaces enclosed by highways fall within No Man’s Lands. Lost Spaces range from tiny islands that come and go, with shifting conditions, to Leningrad, Russia, which was renamed St. Petersburg. International airspace, a peninsula-consuming Greek monastery, and a Somalian pirate feral city fall under Spaces of Exception. A section on breakaway nations includes a chunk of India within an Indian enclave in Bangladesh. Floating Islands come made of pumice, trash, ice, and modern building materials. The strongest places concern human adaptation. These Ephemeral Places contain a parking lot where work-desperate airport employees, including many pilots, lay over in RVs. The erudite Bonnett explores the roots of place all the way to childhood hideaways, yet the book doesn’t build. The many locations remain detached. --Dane Carr