Placelessness: The Places We Build—and Forget

 There’s a curious thing that happens when you first step off a train in a truly great city.

Not the airport—no, no. Airports are nowhere. But the train station. The great Victorian beasts of Europe, or the limestone caverns of the American Northeast. You step off, and what you smell—if you're lucky—is coal smoke, diesel, perhaps a faint suggestion of a pretzel cart, and something else: ambition.

You see, cities are not just places where people gather to live. They’re ideas. Living ideas. They are the grandest, most enduring expression of our desire to be with each other—and our greatest complaint about having to do so.

Nowhere is this more apparent than in how we build them.

In the 19th century, we built up—cathedrals, skyscrapers, ambition in limestone. In the 20th, we sprawled. American cities, in particular, spilled out like gravy on a plate. It wasn’t that we lost our appetite for the city—it’s that we built them to be consumed by the automobile.

And what followed was something historians a century from now may well refer to as the Great Cultural Flattening. Drive from Scottsdale to Sacramento, and you may as well have kept the same radio station on the whole way.

The same coffee shops, the same banks, the same grinning men in khakis telling you what percentage off you’ll get if you buy today.

What we’re watching is not the death of cities, but a strange kind of forgetfulness. The erosion of local color under the bland tide of what the French—God bless them—call la mondialisation. Globalization. But it's more like placelessness.

And yet, despite all this, there’s still that marvelous little street in Boston, with the fishmonger who knows your name. There’s still a rooftop garden in San Francisco, where you can hear both the foghorns and the cicadas.

These, I think, are the things worth remembering. And worth defending.

For in the end, geography is not merely the study of land and weather—it is the study of us. Where we live, how we live, and why, after all our building and dreaming, we seem to end up longing for the same thing: a place with a name, and a neighbor who nods at us on the street.

Comments

  1. David Tyler Rand-McKayJune 20, 2025 at 10:58 AM

    You ever look at a strip mall and wonder... what was here before?

    Once upon a time, the city grew from a spring, or a hill, or the meeting of two rivers. But now? It grows from zoning codes, concrete, and the convenience of off-ramps.

    Geography isn’t just where things are. It’s why they are. And the tragedy is this: we build and forget.

    The homes, the parks, the old cafés—they vanish. Replaced by sameness.

    And one day, when the parking lot cracks and the lights flicker off, we’ll ask again—what was here before?

    And there may be no one left who remembers.

    ReplyDelete

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