This may come as a shock but the world has changed.
It is still possible in England to ‘live in the country’, somewhat detached from the strictures of modern life. Some of my older ‘country’ relatives grew most of their own vegetables and kept chickens (some even caught fish and shot grouse and pigeons for food).
However 55% of the worlds population now live in cities, and cities are machines that need constant tending by their inhabitants to run smoothly. Cities need ‘nonplaces’ as adjustment points to make the city machine run and cities need transactional people to lubricate the city processes.
Is supermodernity dehumanising? I rather think so. But (heresy trigger warning) perhaps there are simply too many people to live lives of agency and individuality.

Interesting article, but there is so much more to talk about on this subject. Luxury hotels which are almost identical wherever one goes, and ersatz localism where restaurants and air bnbs conform to a clichéd tourist version of authenticity.

And especially, as a commenter has astutely noted – the relation to somewheres/anywheres. The development of “non-people”, who gravitate towards these non-places and are essentially tourists even in their own country.

Interesting article. I wonder if this is a linked idea? The Somewheres and Anywheres idea (that seemed to receive publicity around the EU referendum in the UK).
Then thinking about travelling and passing through an airport. Worldwide they are so similar, one could be anywhere and I suppose (from this article) that you really are anywhere (or nowhere perhaps).
I am happy to class myself as a Somewhere person, the idea of “home” is strong within me. My Wife is less easy to compatmentalise, but I would say definitely leaning towards an Anywhere. She seems very happy and relaxed in airports, I find them stressful. I am one of those who plans and checks and looks for the signs to the gates and has my paperwork (or App work) all to hand etc etc. My Wife relaxes and doesn’t do anything (perhaps a little light shopping!).
I wish airports provided me with a sense of being at home when away!

“The airport is perhaps the ultimate non-place, a “discontinuous city, whose vast populations … are entirely transient, purposeful and, for the most part, happy.””
I can assure you that I am never, EVER happy when I am at an airport. I can’t stand airports and can’t wait to get out of them again. Leeds-Bradford is a place I’m especially keen to get in and out of quickly.

This is the endgame of globalism, a world of standardized, homogenized, interchangeable non-places, where the world looks mostly the same whether one lives in Rio, Beijing, London, or NY, where every man is an island looking out at the same dull ocean. A world no longer underpinned by cultural values, but by the generic, sterile doctrines of academia, scientifically designed doublespeak. Emphasize tolerance by enforcing ideological conformity. Be inclusive by excluding contrarian views. Increase diversity by breaking down all the values and institutions that led different groups of humans to form their own unique civilizations. Eliminate race, religion, nationality, borders, political parties, languages, and so on until there’s nothing left but a bland, mass produced, vacuous monoculture. Fortunately for us, there are other forces in nature besides technology, communications, money, economics, and the designs of our political overlords, and this will never work the way some think it will. I’m inherently more optimistic than Orwell. Like a psychological corollary to Newton’s third law, there are reactions corresponding to every action. If one applies a force to an object, there is necessarily a counter-force reaction. The more cultures, religions, and ideas any system tried to suppress or replace, the more force it would have to apply, and the greater the counter-force would become. The end result would be a tense system filled with paranoia, suspicion, anger, and civil strife. Like an overloaded boat, the system would be under constant strain. Governing would be an exercise in constantly whacking moles, dousing fires, and plugging leaks. Even a stiff breeze would send the boat teetering dangerously, to say nothing of an actual storm. See COVID for example, which is and was not much more dangerous than the flu, a threat to the sick, the old, the immunosuppressed, and so on, but wrought havoc upon our economy, supply chains, communities, relationships, political environments, and even our own psyches, and its effects are far from over. IMHO, the fears of some Orwellian global state are misplaced. They can have no final victory, for the same reason we can’t turn off gravity, go faster than light, or herd cats. We should fear, however, the damage an elite class deluded by the promise of utopia can cause in the attempt.

Referencing the ‘radical’ act of walking across the arrows in Ikea reminds me that the arrows we saw appearing everywhere during Covid became something to be contravened. Lockdowns became the ultimate experiment in atomisation.

Really doesn’t live up to its title.

Why exactly are non-places robbing us of life, when looked at superficially they seem to provide us with a frictionless world centred on our needs? Why then are they so alienating, at least to some, while others love the reassurance that wherever they go they will get the same bundle of shops services and facilities (or tourist book versions of “otherness”) without ever coming up against any resistance. Where does their unreal quality come from – so striking to some of us, those I suppose who draw back and observe, or experience these places in ways they were not designed for – while others look perfectly, if oddly, at home.

The picture looks like an Edward Hopper.

Kind of interesting, although it doesn’t seem to expand much on Durkheim’s description of anomie from the end of the C19th. Maybe history really has ended.

I enjoyed this, and think that’s because the author is a scholar of Ballard, whose novels (I think) prefigure such an anthropology of non-places. (“Supercannes”?). I read Ballard when I was too young to understand him properly; this piece makes me want to re-read the later works.

Great to see Marc Augé acknowledged in a British context. His book was one of those works that changed my life. What the Englsh translation the title misss out is that ‘non-lieu’ n French has several meanings. The main one is legal and refers to a case that has ben dismissed. That adds a richness to the psychogeographic anomie that characterises so much modern living and architecture.

We are widgets produced by the Industrial Widget Corporation.

Interesting article. I think most of us oscillate between the home and the journey, the somewhere and the anywhere. Life is a journey after all. Modernity though pushes us relentlessly into consumer units. If I have a sense of home, then being a passenger is quite pleasant. I like airports and bland hotels, watching people going to different places for all sorts of reasons, while there is not much else I can do. Maybe another coffee? Well, in small doses, I appreciate home so much more when I get back.

This article misses the biggest non-place of them all: school.

Ah… this sort of thing is one of the reasons why I read UnHerd. De Certeau and Augé gave me news eyes on my world. A timely reminder to re-read.