The great French philosopher of the quotidian, Michel de Certeau, argued that “space is practiced place.” What he meant by this is that while places are given spatio-temporal locations, commonly assented to, space is the particular way we choose — both as individuals and groups — to inhabit or otherwise traverse them. Private ownership and other property titles and exclusions on land use necessarily impede some people’s ability to “practice place,” while enhancing others. But really, the means we’ve commonly employed to practice place for a long time now were already grossly circumscribing our personal space.

Before we began sitting in the little metal cells we call cars, we were sitting in slightly larger ones called railway carriages. There’s an interesting coincidence (but maybe there’s really no coincidence at all) between the entirely novel view from the train experienced by 19th century travellers and the inception of photography as a specular technology. Early rail travellers were surprised and often sickened by the way the rapid onward motion of the vehicle smeared the foreground, while also reducing the landscape to something they were observing, rather than in.

Either looking to the far and mid-distance, as if the train window framed a picture; or gazing at the onrushing blur immediately before them, these folk felt deprived of a sensual and felt engagement with place, by reason of this novel way of practicing it. At the same time, viewers of the first photographs were gripped by the way quite ordinary objects’ appearances were captured with incredible fidelity, and would often be far more absorbed by the details of, for example, a silver-backed clothes brush, than they were with the whole picture. 

Was one technology compensating us for what the other deprived us of, namely, a subjective and autonomous experience of practicing place? I rather think so — and think so with far greater fervour every time I watch someone with their head bent over their handheld computer (“smartphone” is surely a misnomer by this point), as if it were a breviary, study of which might elevate them from this sublunary world… to the next. Yes, sitting there poking at little buttons, while all around them is unrealized space. The important thing here is imagination — the successor to death-by-satnav, is the rather more prosaic stumbling-by-satnav, as people navigate smaller and smaller distances using their handheld computers.

I live on a right, tight, little island that’s been so subjected to the impress of the human, for so many centuries, that the last truly significant transformation of its countryside was the Iron Age deforestation that took place before the Roman conquest of CE43. Even as a small child I was acutely aware of the anthropic character not just of London — the great pile of red brick within which we lived — but of the fields and woods surrounding it. 

Any illusions I had of some primordial wilderness remaining in among the suburban sprawl and the light industrial clutter were entirely dispelled when I began to read about the history of the British countryside in depth, and realized that even such trackless wastes as Rannoch Moor in the Scottish Highlands, were in fact the consequence of intensive sheep grazing, and therefore just as human in their essence as any town or city.

Claustrophobia is a malaise that afflicts not just me — but many of the British: The acronym NIMBY (Not in My Back Yard) is applied to those who resist new developments of any kind, whether these be for the wind turbines required to achieve net-zero carbon emissions, or new-build houses necessary to address a persistent and ongoing housing shortage. But the truth is pretty much all of us are NIMBYs, since an Englishman’s home is indeed, as the proverb asserts, his castle.

The truth is that there’s plenty of room in the Britain Isles — although not necessarily that much space. It’s an elusive distinction, but in teasing it out I think we can learn a lot about the way we move around this world, whether we live in a comparatively small and built-up country, or a vast landscape whose inhabitants hymn from birth its spacious skies, purple mountain majesties, and amber waves of grain.

We’re used to the notion — at least if we’re relatively affluent and live in so-called developed economies — that our movements are in an important sense free: We could go here — or we could go there. The truth is, I venture to suggest, rather different: For the most part we are the prisoners of a metric that inexorably calibrates the time we take to travel a certain distance, against the money it costs. Yes: We’re all taxi drivers and our bodies are our vehicles — or Uber ones, more precisely, for this lifelong go-round we’re self-employed and lack any in-work benefits. Even our leisure travel — whether it’s some world-girdling vacation trip, or a stroll round the block — is subject to the same calculation not of liberty, but confinement. 

Which is why — for example — automobile advertising always makes freedom a selling point: Get in this vehicle and it will transport you anywhere you want to go — look at it switch-backing up those mountain majesties! Thrill, as it breasts those amber waves of grain! Just mind you have the necessary income to keep up the payments, and pay for gas — and remember that to do so, you’ll be spending most of your daylight hours working for the man, not haring about beneath spacious skies. 

Your car, meanwhile, will be squatting outside doing nothing at all — and yet at the same time, by its very material existence alone, defining how you interact with the world. The car isn’t just an instrumental object, to be employed for this or that journey, its illusory potentials effectively foreclose on your approaching the world any other way. We see this most clearly with the modern era of the automobile, poised as we are in the narrow sliver of time between the introduction of GPS navigation systems, and their supersession by autonomous vehicles. Around twenty years ago, when satnav was just coming in, there was a rash of news stories about situations at once tragic and faintly risible, that drivers had got themselves into by slavishly obeying what was on the dash-mounted little screen full of pixels, rather looking through the big one right in front of their eyes.

These stories abated after a few years — but was it, I wondered at the time, because people had stopped relying exclusively on their satnav; or, rather, than they’d simply learned to use it better? (The alternative hypothesis is that the new technology had exerted a Darwinian selection pressure on motorists, and all the really dumb ones had been… eliminated.) Better in this sense: They could, with greater facility and increased experience, operate quite safely within the representation of place rather than its reality; they were, in an important sense, no longer even travelling in the “world” as it used to be understood.

But as I say, the anthropic character of that world long precedes the technological assemblage of the satellite array, the web, and the portable internet-connected computer which allows us to locate ourselves within it with such extraordinary speed and accuracy. Indeed, it’s my contention that the revolutionary impact on humans’ very sense of reality this assemblage entails has gone — relatively speaking — unremarked on, precisely because we were all softened up for it well in advance. Marshall McLuhan observed that media technologies such as manuscript copying survived long after the introduction of mechanical printing — but the inverse could also be the case: Long before satnav we were already travelling about in an abstraction of the world, rather than the world itself.

Since GPS navigation supplies absolute location, but hardly any orientation, the more its used, the more its users become incapable of orienting themselves: They come out of subway stations and airports and wander off along sidewalks lost in contemplation of the little-blue-dot-that’s-them, and before long bump into someone doing the same. 

By contrast, even the most rudimentary use of a paper map demands that you imaginatively place yourself somewhere — that you become oriented. From here on, the spotting of road signs, the identification of buildings and the layout of intersections is simply accretional — and before long, you’re breasting the mighty Pacific swell, piloting outrigger canoes all the way to some distant atoll using the data supplied by winds, tides, and migratory birds. I exaggerate — but not much. Be honest: If you’re an older reader, can you remember what it was like to drive — for example — into a strange city (or even a foreign one), at night, and to find your way to a specific destination? Just one of the many weird sequels of the rise of GPS has been its annihilation not just of our previous ways of navigating the world, but even our memory of these ways. 

As it is to the representation — so it is to the reality. Unable to orient ourselves effectively anymore (if we even could to begin with), the world outside of our computerized navigational systems returns to a curiously underimagined state: here be dragons. There’s a lot of this unrealized space in backyard Britain. I often ask people here how much they think there is, using this criterion: A built-up area is one in which 75 percent of any given square mile is covered with concrete, brick, or asphalt. On this basis, I’ve had people tell me they believe as much as 60 percent of Britain’s landmass is a built environment — and these aren’t ignorant youngsters, but middle-aged types who’ve presumably already spent decades moving about on it.

When I tell them that in fact only 0.1 percent of this green and pleasant land is urbanized to this extent, they feel pretty stupid — but it’s only a momentary lapse, and they soon get back to exactly the sort of practices that foster this compelling delusion, principally, driving all over the place — and also flying, entraining, and indeed compulsively engaging with the world via mechanised transit systems. 

“Men can see nothing about them that is not their own image; everything speaks to them of themselves. Their very landscape is alive.” So, Guy Debord, the French Situationist, glossed Karl Marx. Debord’s concept of the dérive, or aimless stroll, was as a means of reappropriating this living landscape from the depredations of the capitalist system — but neither he, nor Marx, viewed the anthropic character of the world given to us by technology as anything but desirable. Neither thinker seems to’ve felt what I suspect many reading this article do — and which I certainly have — which is that nowadays, no matter how far we may physically travel in this world, we still seem to’ve gone nowhere, what with the same products on sale, in the same built environments compounded of sheetrock, prestressed concrete, glass, and aircon’ systems. 

Built environments the Dutch “starchitect” Rem Koolhaas characterizes as “Junkspace” — and which he defines in his extraordinary dithyramb of the same title — as “the residue” humans are leaving behind on the earth. Writing in 2001, he observed that “there is already more Junkspace under construction in the twenty-first century than has survived from the twentieth.” Koolhaas’s Junkspace devolves into what Debord calls “formless masses of urban residue” — and it’s this stuff, for the most part, that we inhabit, in the US quite as much as the UK. 

Yes, of course, Americans have a sense of their own “ample geography,” but to even get out of town and see that geography seems impossible without the distorting lenses of technology. The ultimate example of this is, of course, the Uber driver himself — who may well know the streets of Kabul with far, far greater accuracy than he does those of Kansas City, but who pilots you effortlessly to where you want to go. Sometimes, I’ll get in an Uber and the driver will have an array of six or seven screens in front of him — and this isn’t even counting the instrument display for the car itself. 

It’s just about the greatest antithesis to Walt Whitman’s “original relation to the universe” conceivable, and I’m sorry, the poverty of imagination on display in the American practice of place is, if anything, worse than that of the British. It’s almost as if, far from having thrown off the trammels of the Old World, Americans — with the obvious exception of First Nations ones — have imposed some weird simulacrum of it on their perception of the new one; much as the Hudson School painters of the early nineteenth century attempted to domesticate on the canvas the unbounded landscape they saw before them.

Please, stop it! Instead of striking out for the territory, be where you are “for the first time” — as the most famous American poetic exile to Britain puts it — and know that place by encountering it unmediated by vehicles or satellites. 

Stop! Stop imagining that places are fungible, and that to practice them is to either buy them, or at least lease them for a while. The most essential form of creating individual space is to go your own way. A path through a built environment not anticipated by its planners is known as a “desire line;” let all the routes you take be ones you’re freely desirous of, rather than the ones dictated for you by the computerized calibrations of space, time, and of course… money.