Figure 1: The world as a collection of fragments: screenshot from the Second Life map.
4.3 Mobility: Walkers, Passengers and Strollers in the City
“Freeze” (fig. 2-4) is a classic theme for a Flash Mob and a very contradictory one at the same time. If Flash Mobs in general emphasize on mobility in the city, this one does so by asking participants to freeze in place at the exact same moment for
approximately 5 minutes. Many well-known public spaces around the world have successfully hosted “Freeze” events, such as Grand Central Station in New York (31/02/2008), Trafalgar Square in London (16/02/2008), Eiffel Tower, Paris
(08/03/2008). Simple in both its conception and its accomplishment, this Flash Mob focuses on public spaces with great concentration of people as well as increased motion, such as the central train station in the case of New York. As many people normally rush through the place towards a specific direction, when part of them suddenly comes to a sudden halt, confusion is created. Both commuters and tourists slow down for a while, perplexed about what is happening and how and whether they should react to this. It is only after the Mobbers freeze and the people around them slow down that everybody realises how fast everything moves when in the city. Further, when the five minutes go by and participants re-join the moving crowd as if nothing happened, the bodies’ speed becomes the focal point.
116 Figures 2-4: Frozen Grand Central.
The “freeze” performance has a double role: on the one hand, it indicates the fast pace at which everything appears and disappears in the city by applying its opposite, absolute stillness, and on the other, it points out the phenomenon of the virtualisation of the real in the contemporary environment, in which a public space instantly transforms into a filmic scene. Both of them together illustrate the different layers and the different speeds in which the contemporary city functions. The movement, communication, and temporality that Flash Mobs suggest may oppose the traditionally static concept of place, but at the same time open up to a more progressive, global and extrovert problematic. At an era “when things are speeding up and spreading out” (Massey, 1991, p.24), mobility becomes a central feature of the world today and a constitutive element of place, rather than a threat. Within this context Flash Mobs produce an event-based place using contradictory elements: a public space, the people within it, and a surreal fun scenario. In less than ten minutes they manage to create a scene and assign specific roles: the space becomes a stage and the people turn into the performers and the audience, only for a short period of time. They might be just for fun, but they have something important to say: cities today are not just about the built and fixed
environment, but are equally about the event and the ephemeral. Contemporary cities may well be outlined by movement, the rapidly changing scenes and the cinematic experience of space. The most flexible and heterogeneous component of the city, the urban crowd, consisting of walkers, commuters and tourists, may suggest a spatialising process.
Studying the world through the urban crowd means exploring it through constant motion. The traditional concept of place that is associated with rootedness and the desire for fixity and security is currently being challenged due to mobility. Increased motion denotes equally breaking the world into fragments and weaving places together.
For Michel de Certeau walking becomes a spatialising process. The city becomes a
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stage “that has neither author nor spectator” (Certeau, 1984, p.93) composed out of multiple intertwining paths. In this act of moving, space is experienced as a series of performed places. Space and place together outline the contemporary city as a field of fragments and alterations. Place constitutes an “instantaneous configuration of
positions” (Certeau, 1984, p.117) indicating fixity and stability, and consequently space is “practiced place”, composed of “intersections of mobile elements” (Certeau, 1984, p.117). Then the space of the city signifies the action and the intersection of everyday life movements. It is the animation, the transformation, and the appropriation of places by the moving bodies (Certeau, 1984, p.95).
De Certeau sees the urban experience through walkers and voyeurs, as these are the protagonists that make up this constantly changing scenery. At a further deconstruction of walking, on ground level, their footsteps form the systems that compose the city.
“Their swarming mass is an innumerable collection of singularities. Their intertwined paths give their shapes to spaces. They weave places together.” (Certeau, 1984, p.97) Walking is thus defined as a “space of enunciation” (Certeau, 1984, p.98), since it makes places exist and emerge, it establishes relations between them and finally it creates sequences. Thus the ephemeral and the temporal do not refer to anything that breaks through the world’s reality, but instead, to all these allusive and fragmentary stories that come out of everyday life and transform space. Movement and non-fixed images become the characteristics of this everyday scene. Instead of homogenous and continuous, the urban environment is then produced by “masses that make some part of the city disappear and exaggerate others, distorting it, fragmenting it, and diverting it from its immobile order” (Certeau, 1984, p.102). It is the mass, the urban crowd as a collectivity that signifies placeness through mobility.
Articulating the city through the mass movement clearly signifies a different
attachment to the ground and a different conceptualisation of “home”. If to walk means
“to lack a place” according to de Certeau (1984, p.103) then in the contemporary world of increased mobility “home” is nowhere, or equally everywhere. People today seem to
“dwell within mobilities” (Urry, 2002, pp.257-8) at all levels, they commute and they travel to a degree that constant displacement is undertaken almost for its own sake. In his essay “Travel and Dance”, Siegfried Kracauer questions mobility in the modern world through the practices of travel and dance. Kracauer suggests that both practices emphasize on the detachment from the ground rather than the interaction with space:
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“they are no longer events that happen to unfold in space and time, but instead brand the transformation of space itself as an event” (Kracauer, 1963, p.67). Space becomes an event, a temporary configuration, as long as there is no chance of attachment or appropriation with the things that surround us. But, going back to the Flash Crowd metaphor, if movement becomes detached from significance, do we progress from a world of places-fragments to a world of non-places?
In “Non-Places” Mark Augé (1995) argues that the contemporary world [Supermodernity] is dominated by transit points, mediating places that transfer individuals from one place to another. These transit points are “non-places” and constitute the “real measure of our times” (Augé, 1995, p.79). Non-places refer to a wide range of spaces, from means of transport and commercial places to virtual space:
“all the air, rail and motorway routes, the mobile cabins called ‘means of transport’
(aircrafts, trains and road vehicles), the airports and railway stations, hotel chains, leisure parks, large retail outlets, and finally the complex skein of cable and wireless networks that mobilise extraterrestrial space for the purposes of communication so peculiar that it often puts the individual in contact only with another image of himself”
(Augé, 1995, p.79).
Places and non-places are then opposed polarities, the former never being entirely deleted and the latter never completely fulfilled, composing together the contemporary everyday life. Clearly a world dominated by transit points is a temporal and ephemeral world, full of screens, signs and texts, machines and electronic devices that establish specific behaviours and suggest “wordless” means of communication. Non-places constitute the expression of supermodernity that has everything in excess:
“overabundance of events, spatial overabundance and the individualisation of
references” (Augé, 1995, p.109). And since transit points are to be passed through, they can only be measured in units of time; hence everything is temporal and refers to the present. By extension, anything fixed and relational, even history, has to be transformed into spectacle in order to survive. Everything becomes an instant image and an event ready to be consumed, and then replaced by something else after a short while.
Although Augé considers non-places to be habitable, this makes individuals in supermodernity more passengers than dwellers. Putting oneself in the position of the passenger results according to Augé to the loss of place and the loss of identity.
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Journeying through non-places and hence increasing the time spent there, makes individuals more powerful and omnipresent. This relates to a loss of focus and an indifferent attitude against place. Following Augé, the accumulation of places signifies the negation of place (Augé, 1995, p.85), but also, interestingly, the indifference to the spectacle itself: “as if the position of the spectacle were the essence of the spectacle, as if basically the spectator in the position of the spectator were his own spectacle” (Augé, 1995, p.86). This makes the traveller’s space the archetype of non-place. Consequently, the rapidly-changing environment of non-places imposes a different way of behaviour upon individuals. Journeying signifies the passage from the “passive joys of identity-loss” to the “more active pleasure of role-playing” (Augé, 1995, p.103). The “traveller”
hence proves his identity entering into this system, and then, becomes a passenger, receding into a state of solitude and similitude.
In Niven’s future, the movement through non-places that Augé describes will be replaced by teleportation. Instead of commuting as anonymous individuals through non-places, people will be able to teleport instantly only to significant places and important events. Hypermobility will give place to instant displacement and meeting will be “for the clubs”. The image of the “urban dweller” and the opportunity for chance encounters in the streets will become a nostalgic past. Non-places will cease to exist; nevertheless places in the form that we know them today may also disappear. The story of Flash Crowds suggests that within the electronic age place become “instant” too, it appears whenever something triggers a public gathering and it quickly disappears thereafter.
4.4 Crowds and Placeness