The following texts and positions serve as inspiration for the projects 10.000 Moving Cities and Non-Places. They explore how globalisation, urbanisation and social change shape places, cultures and identities – and why different places are becoming increasingly alike. Concepts and perspectives such as the non-place, creolisation, cultural homogenisation and hyperselection offer different ways of approaching this tension.
Non-Place
Non-place, or nonplace, is a neologism coined by the French anthropologist Marc Augé to describe anthropological spaces of transience in which people remain anonymous and which do not hold enough significance to be regarded as “places”. Examples of non-places include motorways, hotel rooms, airports and shopping malls. The term was introduced by Marc Augé in his work Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non_place
According to Augé: “Super modernity produces non-places, meaning spaces which are not themselves anthropological spaces and which do not integrate to earlier places (…) A world where people are born in the clinic and die in hospital, where transit points and temporary abodes are proliferating under luxurious or inhuman conditions (hotel chains and squats, holiday clubs and refugee camps, (…); where a dense network of means of transport which are also inhabited spaces is developing; where the habitué of communicates wordlessly, through gestures, with an abstract, unmediated commerce (i.e. credit card transactions); a world thus surrounded by solitary individuality”.
Augé, Marc. “Non-Place: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity [1992], translated by John Howe.” (1995).
Invisible Cities
If on arriving at Trude I had not read the city’s name written in big letters, I would have though I was landing at the same airport from which I had taken off. The suburbs they drove me through were no different from the others, with the same little greenish and yellowish houses. Following the same signs we swung around the same flow beds in the same squares. The downtown streets displayed goods, packages, signs that had not changed at all. This was the first time I had come to Trude, but I already knew the hotel where I happened to be lodged; I had already heard and spoken my dialogues with the buyers and sellers of hardware; I had ended other days identically, looking through the same goblets at the same swaying navels.
Why come to Trude? I asked myself. And I already wanted to leave.
“You can resume your flight whenever you like,” they said to me, “but you will arrive at another Trude, absolutely the same, detail by detail. The world is covered by a sole Trude which does not begin and does not end. Only the name of the airport changes.”
Calvino, Italo. “Invisible cities” William Weaver (London: Vintage, 1997) (1997): 53.
Introduction to a Poetics of Diversity
The merging or creolization of cultures, languages, and religions, as Glissant first studied in the Caribbean, can now be observed all over the world. His theory of the ‘creolization of the world’ pertains to questions of national identity in view of the colonial past that characterises his Antillean identity. He broaches the urgent question of how best to escape the threat of cultural homogenisation, and how we can work to sustain the positive force of creolisation— a plurality of cultures— within the terms of an ongoing global exchange.
Édouard Glissant
Introduction à une poétique du divers (1995; Paris: Gallimard, 1996). Introduction to a Poetics of Diversity, trans. Celia Britton (Liverpool University Press, 2020).
… he discusses with great insight what seem to me to be the most important issues surrounding globalisation: homogenisation and extinction. His theory of the ‘creolization of the world’ pertains to questions of national identity in view of the colonial past that characterises his Antillean identity. He broaches the urgent question of how best to escape the threat of cultural homogenisation, and how we can work to sustain the positive force of creolisation— a plurality of cultures— within the terms of an ongoing global exchange.
The Monotonization of the World
Monotonization of the World. The most potent intellectual impression, despite the particular satisfactions enjoyed, of every journey in recent years is a slight horror in the face of the monotonization of the world. Everything is becoming more uniform in its outward manifestations, everything leveled into a uniform cultural schema. The characteristic habits of individual peoples are being worn away, native dress giving way to uniforms, customs becoming international.
Countries seem increasingly to have slipped simultaneously into each other; people’s activity and vitality follows a single schema; cities grow increasingly similar in appearance. Paris has been three-quarters Americanized, Vienna Budapested: more and more the fine aroma of the particular in cultures is evaporating, their colorful foliage being stripped with ever-increasing speed, rendering the steel-grey pistons of mechanical operation, of the modern world machine, visible beneath the cracked veneer.
This process has been underway for a long time: before the war [Walther] Rathenau prophesized this mechanization of existence, the dominance of technology, would be the most important aspect of our epoch. But never have the outward manifestations of our ways of life plunged so precipitously, so moodily into uniformity as in the last few years. Let us be clear about it! It is probably the most urgent, the most critical phenomenon of our time.
Symptoms. One could, to make the problem distinct, list hundreds. I will quickly select just a few of the most familiar, uncompromising examples, to show how greatly customs and habits have been monotonized and sterilized in the last decade.
The most conspicuous is dance. Two or three decades ago dance was still specific to nations and to the personal inclinations of the individual. One waltzed in Vienna, danced the csardas in Hungary, the bolero in Spain, all to the tune of countless different rhythms and melodies in which both the genius of an artist and the spirit of the nation took obvious form. Today millions of people, from Capetown to Stockholm, from Buenos Aires to Calcutta, dance the same dance to the same short-winded, impersonal melodies. They begin at the same hour. Like the muezzin in an oriental country call tens of thousands to a single prayer at sundown—like those twenty words, so now twenty beats at five in the afternoon call the whole of occidental humanity to the same ritual. Never, except in certain ecclesiastical formulas and forms, have two hundred million people hit upon such expressive simultaneity and uniformity as in the style of dance practiced by the modern white race of America, Europe, and the colonies.
A second example is fashion. Never before has such a striking uniformity developed in all countries as during our age. Once it took years for a fashion from Paris to reach other big cities, or to penetrate the countryside. A certain boundary protected people and their customs from its tyrannical demands. Today its dictatorship becomes universal in a heartbeat. New York decrees short hair for women: within a month, as if cut by the same scythe, 50 or 100 million female manes fall to the floor. No emperor, no khan in the history of the world ever experienced a similar power, no spiritual commandment a similar speed. Christianity and socialism required centuries and decades to win their followings, to enforce their commandments on as many people as a modern Parisian tailor enslaves in eight days.
A third example: cinema. Once again utter simultaneity in all countries and languages, the cultivation of the same performance, the same taste (or lack of it) in masses by the hundreds of millions. The complete cancellation of any individuality, though the manufacturers gloriously extol their films as national: the Nibelungen triumphs in Italy and Max Linder from Paris in the most German, most nationalistic constituencies. Here, too, the mass instinct is stronger and more authoritarian than the thought. Jackie Coogan’s triumphal appearance was a more powerful experience for our day than was Tolstoy’s death twenty years ago.
A fourth example is radio. All of these inventions have a single meaning: simultaneity. Londoners, Parisians, and Viennese listen at the same second to the same thing, and the supernatural proportions of this simultaneity, of this uniformity, are intoxicating. There is an intoxication, a stimulus for the masses, in all of these new technological miracles, and simultaneously an enormous sobriety of the soul, a dangerous seduction of the individual into passivity. Here too, as in dance, fashion, and the cinema, the individual acquiesces to a herdlike taste that is everywhere the same, no longer making choices that accord with internal being but ones that conform to the opinion of a world.
One could infinitely multiply these symptoms, and they multiply themselves from day to day on their own. The sense of autonomy in matters of pleasure is flooding the times. It will soon be harder to list the particularities of nations and cultures than the features they share in common.
Consequences. The complete end of individuality. It is not with impunity that everyone can dress the same, that all women can go out in the same clothes, the same makeup: monotony necessarily penetrates beneath the surface. Faces become increasingly similar through the influence of the same passions, bodies more similar to each other through the practice of the same sports, minds more similar for sharing the same interests. An equivalence of souls unconsciously arises, a mass soul created by the growing drive toward uniformity, an atrophy of nerves in favor of muscles, the extinction of the individual in favor of the type. Conversation, the art of speaking, is danced and sported away, theater brutalized into cinema; literature becomes the practice of momentary fashions, the “success of the season.” Already, as in England, books are no longer produced for people, but increasingly as the “book of the season”; as in radio an instantaneous form of success is spreading which is announced simultaneously from all European stations, and annulled a second later. And since everything is geared to the shortest units of time, consumption increases: thus does genuine education—the patient accumulation of meaning over the course of a lifetime—become a quite rare phenomenon in our time, just like everything else that can be achieved only by individual exertion.
Origin. What is the source of this terrible wave threatening to wash all the color, everything particular out of life? Everyone who has ever been there knows: America. The historians of the future will one day mark the page following the great European war as the beginning of the conquest of Europe by America. Or, more accurately, the conquest is already rippingly underway, and we simply fail to notice it (conquered peoples are always too-slow thinkers). The European countries still find the receipt of a credit in dollars a cause for celebration. We continue to flatter ourselves with illusions of America’s philanthropic and economic goals. In reality we are becoming colonies of its life, its way of life, slaves to an idea profoundly foreign to Europe: the mechanical idea.
But our economic obedience seems to me minor compared to the spiritual danger. The colonization of Europe would not be so terrible politically; to servile souls all slavery is mild and the free always know how to preserve their freedom. The genuine danger to Europe seems to me to be a matter of the spirit, of the importation of American boredom, of that dreadful, quite specific boredom that rises over there from every stone and every house on all the numbered streets. The boredom that does not, like the earlier European variety, come from calmness, from sitting on the park bench playing dominoes and smoking a pipe—a lazy waste of time indeed, but not dangerous. American boredom is restless, nervous, and aggressive; it outruns itself in its frantic haste, seeks numbness in sports and sensations. It has lost its playfulness, scurries along instead in the rabid frenzy of an eternal flight from time. It is always inventing new artifices for itself, like cinema and radio, to feed its hungry senses with nourishment for the masses, and it transforms this common interest in enjoyment into concerns as massive as its banks and trusts.
America is the source of that terrible wave of uniformity that gives everyone the same: the same overalls on the skin, the same book in the hand, the same pen between the fingers, the same conversation on the lips, and the same automobile instead of feet. From the other side of our world, from Russia, the same will to monotony presses ominously in a different form: the will to the compartmentalization of the individual, to uniformity in world views, the same dreadful will to monotony. Europe remains the last bulwark of individualism and, perhaps, of the overly taut cramp of peoples—our vigorous nationalism, despite all its senselessness, represents to some extent a fevered, unconscious rebellion, a last, desperate effort to defend ourselves against leveling. But precisely that cramped form of resistance betrays our weakness. Rome, the genius of sobriety, is already underway to wipe Europe, the last Greece in history, from the table of time.
Defense. What to do now? Storm the capitol, summon the people: “To the trenches, the barbarians are coming to destroy our world!” Cry out once more in Caesar’s words, this time more earnestly: “People of Europe, preserve your most sacred possessions!” No, we are no longer gullible enough to believe that with associations, with books and proclamations, we can rise up against a world-encompassing movement of such a monstrous sort and defeat the drive to monotonization. Whatever one might write, it remains a piece of paper cast against a gale. Whatever we might write, it does not reach the soccer players and the shimmy dancers, and if it did, they would no longer understand it. In all of these things, of which I am mentioning only a few, in the cinema, in radio, in dance, in all of these new means for mechanizing humanity there is an enormous power that is not to be overcome. For they all fulfill the highest ideal of the average: to offer amusement without demanding exertion. And their insurmountable strength lies in the fact that they are unprecedentedly comfortable. The new dance can be learned by the dumbest servant girl in three hours; the cinema delights the illiterate and demands of them not a grain of education; to enjoy radio one need only take the earpiece from the table and hang it on one’s head, and already there is a waltz ringing in the ear—against such comfort even the gods would fight in vain. Whoever demands only a minimum of intellectual, physical, and moral exertion is bound to triumph among the masses, for the majority is passionately in favor of such; whoever continues to demand autonomy, independence of judgment, personality—even in entertainment—would appear ridiculous against such an enormously superior power. If humanity is now letting itself be increasingly bored and monotonized, then that is really nothing other than its deepest desire. Autonomy in the conduct of one’s life and even in the enjoyment of life has by now become a goal for so few people that most no longer feel how they are becoming particles, atoms in the wash of a gigantic power. So they bathe in the warm stream that is carrying them off to the trivial. As Caesar said: ruere in servitium, to rush into servitude— this passion for self-dissolution has destroyed every nation. Now it is Europe’s turn: the world war was the first phase, Americanization is the second.
Source of English translation: Stefan Zweig, “The Monotonization of the World” (1925), in The Weimar Republic Sourcebook, edited by Anton Kaes, Martin Jay, and Edward Dimendberg.0 1994 Regents of the University of California. Published by the University of California Press, pp. 397-400.
Source of original German text: Stefan Zweig, “Die Monotonisierung der Welt,” Berliner B‘orsen Courier, February 1, 1925.
Hyperselection and the Loss of Diversity
A more contemporary perspective on this tendency towards increasing uniformity is offered by psychologist Jose C. Yong of James Cook University. Together with his colleagues, Yong describes a process they call hyperselection. It occurs when intense competition makes systems increasingly effective at identifying successful characteristics, optimising them and repeatedly selecting them, while alternatives are progressively filtered out.
This process can initially produce efficiency and improvement. At the same time, constant optimisation reduces variation. In fields such as music, entertainment, science and sport, successful patterns can be reproduced again and again, while riskier, more idiosyncratic and less predictable alternatives are given fewer opportunities to persist. Yong and his colleagues describe this as a loss of adaptive variance: differences that may appear inefficient in the short term but can provide the diversity necessary for long-term adaptation, resilience and the emergence of something new.
This idea is particularly relevant to urban development. Commercially successful shops, restaurants, architectural models and development concepts can be copied and reproduced across different locations, while those that are less economically competitive or more difficult to scale gradually disappear. Cities thousands of kilometres apart may consequently contain the same retail chains, cafés, luxury stores and property developments. Local characteristics do not necessarily have to be deliberately removed; they can gradually disappear because standardised and already proven models possess competitive advantages.
Digital platforms, data analysis and artificial intelligence can accelerate this process further. They make it possible to identify with increasing precision which products, images, spaces or forms of content attract attention and succeed. These patterns can then become the basis for producing even more of what has already proven successful. A feedback loop emerges between selection, optimisation and repetition: the more precisely success can be measured, the more strongly environments and cultural products can be optimised towards already established patterns.
In this sense, hyperselection can be understood as a contemporary extension of the process Zweig describes as the “monotonization of the world”. Augé’s non-places also acquire an additional dimension: the similarity of airports, shopping centres, hotels or commercial city centres can be understood not only as an expression of a globalised aesthetic, but also as the outcome of selection processes that favour what is predictable, reproducible and scalable.
This creates an interesting tension with Glissant’s idea of creolisation. Creolisation depends on the unpredictable encounter of heterogeneous elements, whereas hyperselection tends to reduce variation. One produces something new through difference and relation; the other stabilises already successful patterns through repeated selection. For cities, this raises the question of how spaces can be created and preserved in which not only the efficient and proven can survive, but also the distinctive, local, unfinished and initially unsuccessful.
Yong, Jose C., Simon S. Groome, and Edison Tan. The Sterile Society: Hyperselection and the Loss of Adaptive Variance. Frontiers in Psychology, 2026.
Personal website · James Cook University
Global Cities
In the book THE “100 MILE CITY”, Deyan Sudjic talks about how the world’s metropolism are becoming more alike. He argues that in the 1980s world metropolises completely share their relics of the industrial age to become organisms within aglobally uniform framework.
How should a city promote further connections and interrelations while still maintaining its uniqueness?
This is a question that every city within the globalizing world faces today.
The incorporation of cities into a new cross-border geography of centrality also signals the emergence of a parallel political geography. Major cities have emerged as a strategic site not only for global capital, but also for the transnationalization of labor and the formation of translocal communities and identities.
The late twentieth century was the age of economic globalization. The first part of the twenty-first century will be the age of the city, the urban age. For the first time in the history of humanity, more than half of the earth’s population is living in urban areas. Questions regarding the shape, size, density and distribution of the city have become increasingly complex and politicized, and the impact of the built environment on social inclusion and quality of life are at the forefront of discussions about urban planning. These are the issues that have led to the creation of The Urban Age Project, a network of organizations, individuals and research projects that focus on sustainable development in the world’s cities. The project gathered a group of internationally renowned professionals for six conferences held in six international cities – New York, Shanghai, London, Mexico City, Johannesburg and Berlin – to discuss the future of the contemporary urban environment. The conferences offered a platform from which to discuss how architects, urbanists and politicians should plan infrastructure and development without constraining growth and promote a better social and economic life.
Urban-Rural Connections: A Review of the Literature
Cultural diversity in a globalizing world.
Globalization is often seen as a unidirectional and unidimensional process, driven by a Western-dominated global market economy and tending to standardize, streamline and transnationalize in ways inimical to cultural diversity. The focus is on the threat posed to local cultural products and practices by globalized consumer goods and services — on how television and video productions are tending to eclipse traditional forms of entertainment, how pop and rock music are drowning out indigenous music, or how convenience food is blunting the appetite for local cuisine. Some forms of cultural diversity are clearly more vulnerable than others.
Vernacular languages are recognized as being particularly at risk, notably from the continuing expansion of English but also from the advance of vehicular languages such as Arabic, Hindi, Spanish and Swahili. This process tends to be exponential — as illustrated by the emphasis placed by many parents on schooling their children in vehicular languages at the expense of mastery of their mother tongue.