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Non-place or nonplace is a
neologism
A neologism Greek νέο- ''néo''(="new") and λόγος /''lógos'' meaning "speech, utterance"] is a relatively recent or isolated term, word, or phrase that may be in the process of entering common use, but that has not been fully accepted int ...
coined by the
France, French anthropologist Marc Augé
Marc Augé (born September 2, 1935 in Poitiers) is a French anthropologist.
In an essay and book of the same title, ''Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity'' (1995), Marc Augé coined the phrase "non-place" to refer to s ...
to refer to anthropological spaces of transience where human beings remain anonymous, and that do not hold enough significance to be regarded as "places" in their anthropological definition. Examples of non-places would be
motorways
A controlled-access highway is a type of highway that has been designed for high-speed vehicular traffic, with all traffic flow—ingress and egress—regulated. Common English terms are freeway, motorway and expressway. Other similar terms i ...
,
hotel rooms
''Hotel Rooms'' is a 2013 release from Tyson Illingworth, better known as tyDi. It is a compilation of his non-dance music tracks, some of which had been previously released. The album features the vocals of Tania Zygar, Audrey Gallagher, Kane, ...
,
airport
An airport is an aerodrome with extended facilities, mostly for commercial air transport. Airports usually consists of a landing area, which comprises an aerially accessible open space including at least one operationally active surfa ...
s and
shopping mall
A shopping mall (or simply mall) is a North American term for a large indoor shopping center, usually anchored by department stores. The term "mall" originally meant a pedestrian promenade with shops along it (that is, the term was used to refe ...
s. The term was introduced by Marc Augé in his work ''Non-places: introduction to an anthropology of supermodernity''.
The perception of a space like a non-place is strictly subjective: any given individual can view any given location as a non-place, or as a crossroads of human relations. For instance, a shopping mall is not a non-place for a person who works there every day.
The concept of non-place is opposed, according to Augé, to the notion of "anthropological place". The place offers people a space that empowers their identity, where they can meet other people with whom they share social references. The non-places, on the contrary, are not meeting spaces and do not build common references to a group. Finally, a non-place is a place we do not live in, in which the individual remains anonymous and lonely. Augé avoids making value judgments on non-places and looks at them from the perspective of an ethnologist who has a new field of studies to explore.
With regard to the classification of shopping malls as non-places, more recently an
Italian
Italian(s) may refer to:
* Anything of, from, or related to the people of Italy over the centuries
** Italians, an ethnic group or simply a citizen of the Italian Republic or Italian Kingdom
** Italian language, a Romance language
*** Regional Ita ...
researcher from the
University of Bergamo
The University of Bergamo ( it, Università degli Studi di Bergamo; acronym: UniBG) is an Italian public university located in Bergamo, Italy. It was founded on 11 December 1968 and is organized in seven departments, three campuses and forty-one ...
, Marco Lazzari, developed a survey on a large sample of adolescents, and showed that the mall is a place where teens do not meet by chance, nor with the sole purpose to buy something, but to socialize, meet friends and have fun. Whereas shopping malls are (at least in
Italy
Italy ( it, Italia ), officially the Italian Republic, ) or the Republic of Italy, is a country in Southern Europe. It is located in the middle of the Mediterranean Sea, and its territory largely coincides with the homonymous geographical ...
) yet prejudicially regarded by adults as non-places, they seem to be natively concerned with the identity of the so-called
digital natives
The term digital native describes a person who has grown up in the Information Age, information age. Often grouped into Millennials, Generation Z, and Generation Alpha, these individuals can consume digital information and stimuli quickly and com ...
.
From Places to Non-Places
A significant debate concerning the term and its interpretation is described in
Marc Augé
Marc Augé (born September 2, 1935 in Poitiers) is a French anthropologist.
In an essay and book of the same title, ''Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity'' (1995), Marc Augé coined the phrase "non-place" to refer to s ...
's writings under the title of "From Places to Non-Places". The distinction between places and non-places derives from the opposition between space and place. As essential preliminary here is the analyses of the notions of place and space suggested by
Michel de Certeau
Michel de Certeau (; 17 May 1925 – 9 January 1986) was a French Jesuit priest and scholar whose work combined history, psychoanalysis, philosophy, and the social sciences as well as hermeneutics, semiotics, ethnology, and religion. He was kn ...
. Space for him is a frequented space and intersection of moving bodies: it is the pedestrians, who transform the street (geometrically defined by town planners) into a space.
Mark Fisher's notion of non-time
For
Mark Fisher
Mark Fisher (11 July 1968 – 13 January 2017), also known under his blogging alias k-punk, was an English writer, music critic, political and cultural theorist, philosopher, and teacher based in the Department of Visual Cultures at Goldsm ...
, whereas cyberspace-time tends towards the generation of cultural moments that are interchangeable,
hauntology
Hauntology (a portmanteau of ''haunting'' and ''ontology'') is a range of ideas referring to the return or persistence of elements from the social or cultural past, as in the manner of a ghost. The term is a neologism first introduced by French ...
involves the staining of particular places with time: a time that is out of joint. A “flattening sense of time” appears to Fisher as a byproduct of Augé's non-places, which by being absent of local flavour are indeterminate temporally as well as locally. He describes music created decades in the past as deprived of any sense of disjuncture with the present,
a clear connection with his theory of
capitalist realism
The term "capitalist realism" has been used, particularly in Germany, to describe commodity-based art, from Pop Art in the 1950s and 1960s to the commodity art of the 1980s and 1990s. When used in this way, it is a play on the term "socialist r ...
.
See also
*
Sense of place
The term sense of place has been used in many different ways. It is a multidimensional, complex construct used to characterize the relationship between people and spatial settings. It is a characteristic that some geographic places have and some ...
*
Liminality
In anthropology, liminality () is the quality of ambiguity or disorientation that occurs in the middle stage of a rite of passage, when participants no longer hold their pre-ritual status but have not yet begun the transition to the status they w ...
*
:de:Das Ende der Welt
*
:de:Nicht-Ort
*
Cybernetics#Etymology
References
{{Reflist
Anthropology
Architectural design