Marc Augé

Augé defined the anthropological place by three traits: it is about identity, relations and history. The village square tells you who you are, puts you in contact with others and accumulates a past. The non-place has none of the three. The terminal, the waiting room, the hypermarket, the motorway junction and the hotel room are designed for you to pass through, not to stay, and in them we are all exactly alike: a ticket, a code, a customer.

His most quoted and most forgotten qualification is that a non-place is not a type of building but a way of being there. The same airport is a non-place for the passenger and a place full of history and relations for someone who works there every day. And he never condemned them: he recognised that they produce a real freedom, that of anonymity, the relief of being nobody for a few hours.

Born in Poitiers in 1935 and dead in 2023, Augé directed the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris. He did fieldwork for years in Ivory Coast and Togo, and on returning applied the same tools to his own society, a turn that in French anthropology was almost a provocation.

In the Metro (1986) is the most elegant result of that turn: an ethnography of the Paris underground, with its unwritten rules, its itineraries and its shared solitude. Non-Places (1992) made him famous worldwide and lent architects and planners a concept they have often used more loosely than Augé himself allowed. Oblivion (1998) argues that remembering and forgetting are the same operation, and that a city needs to forget too.