Read Online Unruly Places: Lost Spaces, Secret Cities, and Other Inscrutable Geographies by Alastair Bonnett - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Alastair Bonnett
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fox tapeworm. It’s an infection that can be transmitted to humans, causing large cysts that require chemotherapy. Although the Institute of Parasitology at the University of Zurich has shown that distributing bait that expels the parasite is a more effective and sustainable way of dealing with this problem, the threat of the spread of small fox tapeworm will provide considerable ammunition to those who want to launch a war against the urban fox. However, the British, who have the longest experience of dealing with urban foxes, have come to the conclusion that trying to exterminate them is futile. Local authorities have given up that costly effort and found that the fox population soon reaches a state of equilibrium that foxes and most humans can live with.
I hastened away from the dark patch of wood, though retreating backward out of the bushes wasn’t easy. Dirty water trickled off my hand and I felt a little cheated. Urban foxes may be fairly common, but they have developed the knack of disappearing into the city, so when they do appear it often takes people by surprise. That morning I’d read that construction workers in London had discovered a young fox living off their leftover sandwiches on the unfinished seventy-second floor of the Shard, the UK’s tallest building. They decided to take the fox to an animal shelter, which released it back into the city. It was a gesture that carried a different type of ecological argument: while it’s occasionally difficult to share the city with foxes, it is also inevitable. The release of the fox also acknowledged a bigger idea: that topophilia and biophilia are mutually sustaining—or, to put it another way, that accepting that the city is a multispecies environment benefits us all by enriching, enlivening, and, ironically, humanizing our sense of place.
North Cemetery, Manila
14° 37′ 53″ N, 120° 59′ 20″ E
Who is more off the map, the living or the dead? Most of our streets, towns, buildings, and nations are the creations of the dead and carry their names. The living parade in their kingdom like ghosts. In an era that mythologizes the living as go-getting gods, able to reshape and revolutionize everything we touch, it is an uncomfortable situation. It’s this mismatch, this discomfort, between our self-regard and our sneaking sense of watery insubstantiality, that explains much about our horror of the dead. We resent the power that the dead have over us, their effortless capacity to reduce us to shadows.
One way to rid ourselves of this tomb envy is to come to an accommodation with the deceased. We’ll stop being frightened of them if they give us access to their places of rest. The living have a lot to gain from the arrangement, since it could result in a lot less fear and a lot more housing space. This brings me to North Cemetery in Manila, the densely packed megacity that is the capital of the Philippines. North Cemetery represents a new kind of urban environment, the lived-in graveyard, and has between three thousand and six thousand living residents, many of whom live in and around its substantial family tombs. High city rents make the free space of the cemetery an attractive option for the poor, but this is more than just another story about destitution. It’s also about a realignment of people’s spatial relationship with the dead.
With the growth of the world’s population and the mounting challenges of making a living from the countryside, cities around the world have been getting bigger and fuller. As demand has increased, rental prices have become too expensive for many ordinary people. Cemetery living is one of the solutions to this problem. It’s not as visible in the United States or Europe but it still happens. I used to have a colleague who lived for years in a camper van in a graveyard in northern England. He found the right patch of ground and got by on very little. But his housing choice remained an eccentric one.
You have to go
I hastened away from the dark patch of wood, though retreating backward out of the bushes wasn’t easy. Dirty water trickled off my hand and I felt a little cheated. Urban foxes may be fairly common, but they have developed the knack of disappearing into the city, so when they do appear it often takes people by surprise. That morning I’d read that construction workers in London had discovered a young fox living off their leftover sandwiches on the unfinished seventy-second floor of the Shard, the UK’s tallest building. They decided to take the fox to an animal shelter, which released it back into the city. It was a gesture that carried a different type of ecological argument: while it’s occasionally difficult to share the city with foxes, it is also inevitable. The release of the fox also acknowledged a bigger idea: that topophilia and biophilia are mutually sustaining—or, to put it another way, that accepting that the city is a multispecies environment benefits us all by enriching, enlivening, and, ironically, humanizing our sense of place.
North Cemetery, Manila
14° 37′ 53″ N, 120° 59′ 20″ E
Who is more off the map, the living or the dead? Most of our streets, towns, buildings, and nations are the creations of the dead and carry their names. The living parade in their kingdom like ghosts. In an era that mythologizes the living as go-getting gods, able to reshape and revolutionize everything we touch, it is an uncomfortable situation. It’s this mismatch, this discomfort, between our self-regard and our sneaking sense of watery insubstantiality, that explains much about our horror of the dead. We resent the power that the dead have over us, their effortless capacity to reduce us to shadows.
One way to rid ourselves of this tomb envy is to come to an accommodation with the deceased. We’ll stop being frightened of them if they give us access to their places of rest. The living have a lot to gain from the arrangement, since it could result in a lot less fear and a lot more housing space. This brings me to North Cemetery in Manila, the densely packed megacity that is the capital of the Philippines. North Cemetery represents a new kind of urban environment, the lived-in graveyard, and has between three thousand and six thousand living residents, many of whom live in and around its substantial family tombs. High city rents make the free space of the cemetery an attractive option for the poor, but this is more than just another story about destitution. It’s also about a realignment of people’s spatial relationship with the dead.
With the growth of the world’s population and the mounting challenges of making a living from the countryside, cities around the world have been getting bigger and fuller. As demand has increased, rental prices have become too expensive for many ordinary people. Cemetery living is one of the solutions to this problem. It’s not as visible in the United States or Europe but it still happens. I used to have a colleague who lived for years in a camper van in a graveyard in northern England. He found the right patch of ground and got by on very little. But his housing choice remained an eccentric one.
You have to go
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