{"id":12,"date":"2019-01-26T20:28:22","date_gmt":"2019-01-27T04:28:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/layeringplace.wordpress.com\/2019\/01\/26\/on-different-ways-to-see-a-place\/"},"modified":"2019-01-26T20:28:22","modified_gmt":"2019-01-27T04:28:22","slug":"on-different-ways-to-see-a-place","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sustainingplace.com\/index.php\/2019\/01\/26\/on-different-ways-to-see-a-place\/","title":{"rendered":"On Different Ways to See a Place"},"content":{"rendered":"

Looking forward to 2019, Chuck Wolfe reflects on how time living in London\u200a\u2014\u200aand exposure to many other places during 2018\u200a\u2014\u200ahas highlighted how the physical shell of the old often frames today\u2019s sociocultural realities around the\u00a0world.<\/strong><\/h4>\n
Isleworth, Hounslow, London<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

My time living in London for the last year\u200a\u2014\u200aas well as exposure to many other places\u200a\u2014\u200ahas highlighted how the physical shell of the old often frames new sociocultural realities. Consequently, amid displacement and gentrification in so many places around the world, we seem to forever debate who owns the city, who should live where, and what urban forms should prevail.<\/p>\n

Encountering these heady topics brought me back a few years, when I last thought extensively about the strength and fragility of urban places, and the inherent ironies of surviving town forms.Then, as now, I focused on examples of, and the contrast between, the idea and reality of a place.Then, I asked a more direct question: What happens when the socio-cultural underpinnings for a town are taken away, leaving only the physical form?<\/p>\n

In France in 2013, I had just seen a small urban settlement\u200a\u2014\u200aonce called Brov\u00e8s\u200a\u2014\u200athat has ceased to exist, other than as a physical, roadside reminder. I had read about French ghost towns before, in Mark Byrnes\u2019 CityLab <\/em>piece<\/a> on Goussainville-Vieux Pays\u200a\u2014\u200alost to the Charles de Gaulle airport flight path\u200a\u2014\u200aand in other, haunting accounts of Oradour-sur-Glane<\/a>, the village-scale, preserved memorial to a wartime massacre of long ago. But this time, even without a catastrophic event, a village had vanished, with no apparent story to offset the sudden find.<\/p>\n

What we see is not the whole\u00a0place.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

That Fall, on our way to Barg\u00e8me<\/a>, my brother and I had crossed Le Grand Camp de Canjuers, a military installation in the Var region of Provence, an area well known for resistance operations during World War II. The expansive plateau and limestone surroundings are punctuated by military roads and fences, and frankly, there was little that was remarkable along the way. That is, of course, until a townscape appeared, just off of the highway, shown in the images presented here.<\/p>\n

The former village of Brov\u00e8s is a stage at first deceptively alive with structure\u2013like the English village, or an American New England town, a church and surrounding buildings dot the landscape. But it is a remarkably silent landscape, a silence with military \u201cinterdit\u201d (in English, \u201cno entry\u201d) signs that begged for research.<\/p>\n

Subsequently, I learned that Brov\u00e8s is one of several villages and hamlets<\/a> abandoned in the 1970s in favor of Le Grand Camp de Canjuers. Google \u201cBrov\u00e8s,\u201d examine its new, remembrance website<\/a> about ongoing affiliations and reunions, and you can see the story even more clearly, with old postcards, others\u2019 images and makeshift video adding poignant, multimedia flair.<\/p>\n

In particular, a video<\/a> posted by Marc Moitessier on vimeo <\/em>in 2012 includes a first-hand account (a \u201ct\u00e9moignage\u201d) of the back story. Several other videos are available<\/a> on the remembrance website.<\/p>\n

In 2011, Jean-Baptiste Mallet, a Marseilles journalist, also told the back story of Brov\u00e8s (link no longer available) in an article framed around long-term looting of the townsite and the prospects for restoration. As Mallet explained (translated to English):<\/p>\n

Here, the tower has no bell. Crows ring the hours. The passage of time has smashed roofs, broken tiles, cracked the church, buried the laundry\u2026 and destroyed the facades of old farmhouses. All this accelerated by looters plundering\u2026 stone, wrought iron and antique\u00a0tiles.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Like the Moitessier video cited above, Mallet\u2019s story proceeds in a way more salient to the human side of place and home. He spins a tale of a ninth-century village, continually inhabited, with houses handed down from generation to generation, until 1974 when long-term military camp plans were finalized, and the last residents were given just a few days\u2019 notice to leave. He concludes (again, translated):<\/p>\n

Brov\u00e8s no longer has any legal existence. In a Kafkaesque process Brov\u00e8s-born citizens who renewed their identity papers found their documents stamped \u201cn\u00e9 \u00e0 Seillans\u201d, a commune\u200a\u2014\u200aa larger municipality to which Brov\u00e8s was attached.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Places survive differently.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

There is a larger French sociopolitical picture, of course, that speaks to military defense decisions of the Cold War era. But I recall from 2013\u200a\u2014\u200aand several subsequent visits\u200a\u2014\u200ahow the silence of Brov\u00e8s provided a stark and confounding contrast. I found while photographing the townscape that without its people, the urban form along the highway had little voice, a lesson for today, and the pending New Year.<\/p>\n

Images (other than the indicated video) composed by the author in Isleworth, Hounslow, London, and the former Brov\u00e8s, Provence, France.<\/em><\/p>\n

\n

Originally published at <\/em>www.planetizen.com<\/em><\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Looking forward to 2019, Chuck Wolfe reflects on how time living in London\u200a\u2014\u200aand exposure to many other places during 2018\u200a\u2014\u200ahas highlighted how the physical shell of the old often frames today\u2019s sociocultural realities around the\u00a0world. Isleworth, Hounslow, London My time living in London for the last year\u200a\u2014\u200aas well as exposure […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"content-type":"","advanced_seo_description":"","jetpack_seo_html_title":"","jetpack_seo_noindex":false,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"_wpas_customize_per_network":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pc03Hh-c","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":false,"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sustainingplace.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sustainingplace.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sustainingplace.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sustainingplace.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sustainingplace.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/sustainingplace.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sustainingplace.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sustainingplace.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sustainingplace.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}