Prologue

My grandpa used to tend mint, tomatoes, and cucumbers in his modest garden that occupied a church aisle’s worth of space behind his house. He listened to doo-wop classics on an old stereo while painting his deck with his grandchildren. He spent every Saturday depositing soda cans and bottles at the local King Kullen, where he shopped nearly every other day. Two or three times a week, he and my grandma would go to a rickety, outdated, tavern-like restaurant riddled with dollar-store nautical decorations, sometimes as a date, other times to meet up with their many longtime friends. Grandma loved being treated like a VIP by their favorite waitress. Pop Pop complained that he had exhausted the menu options; he wanted to switch it up.

My grandpa is dying—not dead. And yet I use the past tense because, for the last eight months, we’ve lost him to a vacuum of medical-speak, pureed chicken, quarantine gowns, exposed penis, two-at-a-time visits, corporate waiting areas, unidentifiable monitor blips, bed-sore-resistant foam boots, piss receptacles that don’t seal properly. In his illness, Pop Pop has left behind the vibrant spaces of his day to day life, and has entered a vortex of the non-place.  

The term “non-place” was popularized by anthropologist Marc Augé as a “space of contemporary consumption,” marked by the “contractual relations” through which the user or consumer engages with it, or rather with the power mechanisms behind it. In this sense, Augé elaborates,

a person entering the space of non-place is relieved of his usual determinants. He becomes no more than what he does or experiences in the role of passenger, customer or driver.

Though healthcare spaces are supposed to provide rehabilitation and prognosis, my grandpa is still a customer. Plain and simple. Welcome to the US of A. It costs several thousands of dollars a night to keep him in a clinically lit room, with a roommate who is often behind a curtain, having their own isolated experiences despite being two feet from Pop Pop. The hospitals, rehab clinics, medical specialist practices, and ambulances he navigates distort his experience of time and reality. During his stay at Mount Sinai, his room received no direct sunlight. The hospital has multiple towers nestled inside one large complex, so, whatever natural light came through to my grandpa’s room was first filtered through the windows of the principal structure. From my perspective as a visitor, this space produces an assembly line of nameless (and, with enough exposure, faceless) doctors, orderlies, nurses, nurse practitioners, infectious disease experts, and the ceaseless drone of equipment that reminds one of the other poor souls experiencing the same void in other rooms and hallways all around you.

I’m writing in a way that’s both descriptive and critical, informed by personal experience and secondary sources. Architecture critic Kate Wagner, whether in her column for The Nation or on her personal blog, performs this balancing act quite well. She’ll examine design flaws as granular as the measurements of a house’s bay windows, or as extensive as “capitalist rot” creeping into our living spaces, or the spectacle of ruin porn through theoretical and personal lenses. This kind of writing, be it journalistic, scholarly, or memoir (or perhaps all three enmeshed), is capable of not just capturing the liminality of a non-place, but also attaching a history, a politics, a culture, or a resonance to them—dimensions that are often absent in the immediate experience of these spaces. Pop Pop may be lost inside their absence, but he’s not an absence himself. Writing about his odyssey through these municipal spaces helps me remember that. It helps form a connection with him in a place where connection seems so impossible.

Further Reading/Viewing

***These sources vary between accounts of non-places, critiques of them, and responses to them.

Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity (Marc Augé, 1995).

• The founding text for the concept of a non-place. Augé cites a variety of examples, from airports, to bus terminals, to shopping centers and malls, to industrial ephemera. These spaces favor immediate, consumable experience over any sort of historical, cultural, or political context.
• Even in cases of, say, a mall retail store’s marketing about diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI), these reforms (or rebranding strategies) are still fraught, insincere, and compromised within the framework of a non-place.
• See “rainbow capitalism” as an example.

“Hospitals Have Gotten Too Nice” (Elisabeth Rosenthal, 2023).

• Rosenthal, unnerved by marketing campaigns in the medical field, critiques healthcare spaces’ “lifestyle” branding.
• Treatment of illness as a “journey” more than actual treatment of said illness.
• Hospitals and clinics repurposed as experiences and sanitized of their gloomier reality. Very much deserving of the non-place label.

Keane (Lodge Kerrigan, 2004)

• A man searches for his daughter, who apparently went missing months before the film’s opening, in the labyrinthine, overcrowded corridors of Port Authority bus terminal in Manhattan.

“The Port Authority Bus Terminal: Myth, Mystery, Mess” (Margaret McCormick, 2014).

• A brief, critical history of the urban planning and design choices that factored into (and backfired on) the PABT’s (d)evolution.

“The Rise of the Productive Non-Place: The Contemporary Office as a State of Exception” (Tim Gregory, 2011).

• An essay that applies the transitory, identity-less characteristics of “non-place” to office work environments, offering a political critique of corporate space.

Project X (Laura Poitras & Henrik Moltke, 2016), short documentary (not to be confused with the 2012 party-gone-haywire movie of same name).

• This documentary uses technical language from internal documents related to the daily functions of the building that serves as its main subject—TITANPOINTE, a windowless, concrete skyscraper in NYC, purported to be an NSA surveillance hub and a repository for telecommunication servers.

“Dubai, the World’s Vegas” (Andrew Marantz, 2017).

• Short travel piece in which the author describes his moving through transitory spaces in Dubai, literally seeing the city without ever leaving what was essentially a giant, hermetically sealed supermall. Indoor ski slopes, horizontal escalators, retail store connecting to the next retail store, etc.
• Marantz’s article recalls another Augé quote: “A paradox of non-place: a foreigner lost in a country he does not know (a ‘passing stranger’) can feel at home there only in the anonymity of motorways, service stations, big stores or hotel chains.”

“Shipping Out: On the (Nearly Lethal) Comforts of a Luxury Cruise” (David Foster Wallace, 1996).

• Sardonic travelogue that morphs into cultural criticism of a cruise ship’s non-placeness.
• Recent companion piece of sorts: “I Really Didn’t Want to Go” (Lauren Oyler, 2023) critiques Gwyneth Paltrow’s Goop brand through a single case study of her time aboard the company’s new cruise line.

“Third Places” (a syllabus by Lia Schifitto).

• This piece offers a manual for understanding the practice of a “third place,” which can be seen as a creative, resistant, or practical response to an otherwise unattractive or malevolent non-place.
• “The concept of making space where we are not supposed to ‘exist.’ We will explore this concept with two unique examples: guerilla urban gardening and cultural production in abandoned housing.” 

“No Place to Be” (Jake Romm, 2023).

• Critical essay that uses the series How To with John Wilson as a central focus for exploring how the apolitical, ahistorical space—from The Vessel, to perpetually scaffolded buildings, to the privatization of previously public spaces or commons—can be prime fodder for “organic culture” to once again reclaim it or carve out meaning in its crevices.
• Similar idea to Lia Schifitto’s third place—the public (re)co-optation of otherwise exclusionary spaces.

Preliminary Research

• Look into places that may be considered “liminal” or in the realm of “non-places.” Preferably local, or even in passing while you’re traveling—something you can conveniently visit. Like a local mall, or a retail/department store, or an airport, or a train station, or an industrial site, or a dentist’s office. 
• Jot down blurbs for each, about what defines them as a non-place. Do you have any memories associated with them? Comfortable ones, unnerving ones, nonconsequential?
• Browse an official website, or parent company website, etc. Any primary material that you can find on this non-place to flesh out its purpose, its function, and the structures of power that undergird its existence.

Fieldwork

Go out there and experience a non-place…

1. First visit – just let it wash over you. Augé, skeptically, notes that a user of these spaces “tastes for a while—like anyone who is possessed—the passive joys of identity-loss, and the more active pleasure of role-playing.” 

Postscript: back home, write a journal entry after the fact. What did you experience? What was it like? What details can you remember?

2. Second visit – take notes in the moment. If you’re someone, like me, who gets anxious about writing in a notepad in public, then use the notepad on your phone. You’ll fit right in. 

Postscript: consult secondary literature. Do your notes conflict with these critical ideas/accounts? Are they further enlivened by them? Pick out a couple core sources that support, enhance, or challenge your first-hand experience with the non-place.

Writing

From here on out, we draft, we revise, we tweak for a balance between immediate encounter, personal reflection, analysis, and critique. We attempt to inject meaning and feeling into what is, ultimately, a hermetic enclave anchored right in the middle of (and yet walled off to) historical, political, cultural, and social forces that drive the course of our lives.

To generate the process, think about the following notion, parsed from all the above: 

Non-places are neither first, nor second, nor third places but straight-up liminal, divorced from context or culture, powered by transactional relations, ephemeral to a fault, distortions of time and space and perception of reality—like that now abandoned pharmaceutical lab out east on Long Island that I drove by recently. Chairs strewn across the lawn as if a mass exodus had just happened yesterday. Concrete facades and tinted windows obscuring the scattered filing cabinets and documents within. Maybe-working, maybe-defunct security cameras over every entrance. Empty parking lot. Busy road right on the other side of the bushes. 

Eerie, fascinating, seemingly apolitical yet steeped in political intrigue. When I Googled this company, I discovered they were convicted years ago of having unethically developed and manufactured their products. An essay of the sort we’re concerning ourselves with is begging to be written—a post-apocalyptic space in a pre-apocalyptic world.

Epilogue

To return to Lia Schifitto’s concept of a third place, “The rule here is that it has to be a place you and others share; a common space.” Until we participate in creating such a place out of the detritus, a non-place will always be nothing but a place of lone, coerced experience. A simulation of community is just there as set dressing to make you feel like it’s all worth it. In Pop Pop’s situation, his dissociation within the non-place doesn’t feel worth it to me until I write about it. Until I share cultural fragments from the outside world with him. Until we bring him home. Or bring home to him, in the form of 1950s Spotify playlists, ice-cold Coke specifically from McDonald’s, ham and cheese and mustard on rye, updates about what we’ve watched on his favorite channel, SyFy, and photo albums of his grandkids so he doesn’t forget.

Tyler’s syllabus references Third Places, a syllabus by Lia Schifitto.