The Dilemma of Placelessness
Placelessness was defined by geographer Edward Relph in the 1990s to describe the loss of uniqueness in the way spaces looked and felt as a consequence of uniformity imposed by commercialisation. You could be at a mall, toll booth, a McDonald's or a suburban housing complex anywhere in the world and would not be able to tell where you are.
A permaculturist friend who also works on landscaping gardens with developers and homeowners in Goa told me recently that he was now refusing any clients who were asking him to make their gardens instagrammable. These clients wanted to make gardens with grass and monsteras — plants not native to Goa that dominate the Instagram aesthetic — so that they could rent their villas to people who would naturally post photos of themselves enjoying the ‘view’ or doing a meditative yoga pose next to ornamental palm.
This trend is having devastating consequences for the biodiversity of Goa as developers increasingly turn pristine lands with old forests and babbling brooks into instagrammable villas with lawns and pools.
Placelessness though has great psychological consequences too as human communities lose the sense of rootedness in the lands they occupy. The privileged spread themselves across physical and digital landscapes out of choice and the desperate move in search of economic opportunities or survival.
If humans aren’t invested in or aren’t even aware of their connection to their natural landscapes then they will be active or passive participants in a lifestyle that perpetuates destruction. I don’t have any handy ideas on how to solve this problem. If you are reading this then my appeal to you would be to (resist the screens and) pay attention to where you are and the people and the creatures that come with it and to connect in whatever way you can.
A poem in Lao Tsu’s Tao Te Ching has haunted me for years and I haven’t ever been able to articulate why. His seemingly Luddite utopian vision, I suspect, has something to do with a soul’s freedom that can only come with being rooted.
EDIT (Nov 22, 2024): I am noticing more people reading this post recently — could you tell me in the comments what you were looking for when you ended up here?
I wrote this little post as part of a month long writing challenge 3 years ago to explore new ways of relating to the world. I wasn’t writing it for anyone at the time and it was just a seed of a thought. Perhaps I can now write something more useful now. Would appreciate your thoughts or questions in the comments.
Notes and Sources:
- The Busride, a Goa based design studio is writing about the tyranny of aesthetic and placelessness as a consequence of the breakdown of the lines between our screens and physical spaces. They call this world Analgesic-land, a place where we sacrifice real engagement on the altar of aesthetics.
- Learned a little about the psychological and philosophical consequences of placelessness from Amanda Hooykaas: The Study of Placelessness: Toward a Conceptual Framework
