Universal Space
Sitting near me on the Eurostar train from Brussels to London, a Belgian family chatters away about their upcoming arrival in the United Kingdom. From the sounds of it, this is the first trip to the British Isles for several of them, in particular the little boy. As the train emerges from the Chunnel onto British soil under a (surprisingly) blue sky, he jumps excitedly at the window to catch a glimpse of this wondrous foreign land. Surveying the landscape of rail infrastructure and beyond, he exclaims, with obvious disappointment, “It looks exactly the same!”.
And I can’t say I blame him. Sometimes it really does.
Sitting in front of me on the Eurostar train from London to Paris, two British men discuss, at length, the DVD projects they are developing for their company. Not particularly paying attention, I instead stare out the window at suburban Paris. Before my eyes passes a world of wires, rails and ugly apartment blocks, the monotony broken only by the pervasive graffiti covering every surface unfortunate enough to face the tracks. Tall, colourless buildings litter the landscape, very obviously built in the 1970s before aesthetics were invented. This could really be anywhere in Europe, I think to myself. Change some of the advertised brand names and pay a little less attention, and it could easily be a North American city. Add a lot more buildings, trash on the tracks and heavy smog, and you are looking at China.
When did everything start looking so similar, I wondered.
The other day, I was on the Metro here in Montreal on my way to a photo exhibition. As I tried my best to observe the people around me while explicitly not doing so, I got a very strange sensation. I could have been absolutely anywhere. The faces I saw, I had seen on the Metro in Paris. The fatigue and the blank stares, I had seen on the subway in New York. The harried post-9-to-5 look, well I had definitely seen that on the tube in London. The Asian students, the gangbangers, the veiled women, the businessmen, I had all seen them before. I just couldn’t get over it: this underground metro car could have been anywhere in the Western world. Absolutely anywhere. Sure the maps have different lines, the seats might face in different directions and the trains have different shapes. But I was no longer specifically in Montreal. I was just on a generic Western underground transportation system.
I was just another generic face.
As I sat in Paris-Charles De Gaulle the other day, waiting for my flight to Montreal, I took in my surroundings while fighting hard against sleep. Terminal 2F was a cavernous affair, a world of glass and shiny white. The boarding gates went off into the distance, ready to lift people off to their respective corners of the world. Blue signs with arrows told people where to go. Big screens blared information at us all. Mainland Chinese tourists noisily made their way by, burdened with the bags of the duty free they had just plundered. I got to thinking: change the language on the signs, remove some of the very French-looking Police Nationale officers, and this could have been anywhere in the world. Major international airports are the ultimate space with no place: they all do the same thing, get designed by the same few architects, and offer the same global consumer experience (albeit perhaps with a slight variation in brand names).
Welcome to Planet Generica.
Over the past month, I’ve defied my supposed return ‘home’ by ending up in New York, Ottawa, Paris, Brussels and London. It’s been a world of highways and trains, anonymous terminals and passport controls. I’ve had coat pockets burdened with the coinage of three different currencies, a wallet confused by the nationality of the bank notes within. A backpack stuffed with receipts, boarding passes, bus tickets, withdrawal slips and reservations, some in English and others in French. A few of the really crumpled ones are even in Turkish and Chinese, forgotten relics from travels past. My watch is six hours behind my cell phone, neither telling me what the time is where I currently am. The New York subways grinds into the station, and I’m getting out in the City of London. The RER pulls out of Gare du Nord in Paris- or was it Gare du Midi in Brussels? Regardless, I know that my stop is Place-des-Arts in Montreal. That’s where the Canadian Parliament buildings are.
Ours is an urban world of honking traffic, glass towers, trendy neighbourhoods, metro systems and ubiquitous coffee shops. The miracle of flight shuttles us from a place where you can get Lays potato chips to a place where you can get Walkers crisps instead. You can pay for that latte in dollars, pounds or euros. No one cares. The cars might drive on the left instead of the right, but they are still cars, made by the same companies.
Somewhere in the world, there must be a city factory. This factory produces a basic ‘urban area’ model, and it certainly is popular. It’s a model with ring roads and highrises, sprawling suburbs and gentrifying inner cities. It’s a model with shopping malls and modernist glass boxes. Major roads even come included with generic road signs and traffic jams. Office towers sit quietly, waiting for logos to appear on their top floors. Trendy locals are sprinkled liberally throughout the map, waiting to be programmed in the appropriate language, as are the masses of immigrant labour. It’s a model that promises “originality, edge and urban hip” in its sales brochure, while offering a numbing sameness in its actual product.
Upon receipt, all the respective nation has to do is fill in the signage with their own language, their own corporate logos, and maybe paint a few things in a colour they like. Voila, the universal city, available now for any culture or creed.
Next Post: Unique Place (or why what I just wrote is wrong)