Unruly Places
Lost Spaces Secret Cities And Other Inscrutable Geographies
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
Alastair Bonnett’s tour of the world’s most unlikely micro-nations, moving villages, secret cities, and no man’s lands shows us the modern world from surprising new vantage points, and is bound to inspire urban explorers, off-the-beaten-trail wanderers, and armchair travellers. He connects what we see on maps to what’s happening in the world by looking at the places that are hardest to pin down: inaccessible zones, improvised settlements, and multiple cities sharing the same space.
Consider Hobyo, a real-life pirate capital on the coast of the Indian Ocean, or Sealand, an abandoned gun platform off the English coast that a British citizen claimed as his own sovereign nation, issuing passports and making his wife a princess. Or Sandy Island, which appeared on maps well into 2012, despite the fact that it never existed.
Illustrated with original maps and drawings, Unruly Places gives readers a new way of understanding the places we occupy. It’s a stunning testament to how mysterious the world remains today.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In short, four-to-five page essays, social geographer Bonnett explores forbidding cities like the pirate stronghold of Hobyo, Somalia, the abandoned town of Pripyat, hard by the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, and the underground towns of Turkish Cappadocia; dejected dwellings, like the RV camp at LAX's Parking Lot E and the secret "Bright Light" CIA detention center in Bucharest; fake places, like the empty British towns built to distract German bombers from real ones and the completely imaginary Sandy Island, which appeared on maps of the Pacific for a century until it was discovered not to exist; a homey fox den and an inaccessible traffic island near the author's English home. Bonnett digs up interesting lore on these 47 offbeat sites that, together, "conspire to make the world seem a stranger place where discovery and adventure are still possible, both nearby and far away.",. Bonnett's charming, pensive prose and light-handed erudition illuminates the stubborn human impulse to find a home in the unlikeliest places.
