Mirabel was converted to a freight airport, but even that did not prove lucrative – for many years its desolate and empty terminal was used as a film set. Canadian prime ministers attempted to lure evicted farmers back to the region, with little success. In 2014 the terminal building was demolished at a cost of $15 million.
But it is Spain – home of the proliferating ‘ghost airport’ phenomenon – that provides the best contemporary example of the pillaging of public funds for useless structures.8 With a population of 47 million people, Spain now houses 52 airports. (Germany, a country with double the population of Spain, has 39). Out of those 52 Spanish airports over two-thirds are failing – in some, no aircraft ever lands or takes off. Yet the airports are staffed and maintained at enormous expense.
Territories
I did not know much about the zad before I was invited there to participate in a discussion on communal imaginaries, but I knew enough to bring a pair of rubber boots as I had heard the place described, rather unappealingly, as a swamp. When I mentioned this to my hosts they firmly corrected me – I was not in a swamp, I was in a bocage. Translating this book, the word ‘bocage’ posed a problem, mostly because the bocage is, as far as I can tell, a landscape unknown in the Americas, because of our lack of a feudal history. The problem is not unlike that of Antonio Gramsci, who as a young Sardinian student attending school on the mainland, wrote an essay about a woodland animal from his island, a snake-like creature with legs, but could not find the Italian word to name it. There is no name, his teacher told him, because such an animal does not exist. At first I tried ‘copse’ – obscure to Americans but known to the British – until I finally settled on the English ‘bocage’ – a little-used, long-ago borrowing from the French to mean ‘little woods’. A bocage is actually a mosaic of prairies and cultivated fields of variable shapes and sizes, enclosed and separated by shrubs, hedges and clusters of trees. As Anne Berger points out, it is, by all measures, a modest landscape, one that is on a human scale, or to be less anthropocentric, a scale conducive to humans and smallish animals like rabbits and small deer, or river fish. There is nothing sublime or transcendent about a bocage – the vast vistas needed to unleash soaring sentiments are lacking. The eye is always stopped by a hedge which, even if it limits the gaze, does not block physical entry.9 You can always jump over a hedge or walk through a wood – in the end, the only way to experience the contours of a bocage is really by moving through it. Geographer-novelist Julien Gracq, close witness to the mutation of the French countryside and a great amateur of the bocages of his native region, wrote that nothing had marked his generation more than the unbelievably unchanging nature of the rural and urban landscape in France for more than third of a century – between 1914 and 1950. Everything, it seems, changed at a very rapid pace during the Second Empire, through the Belle Époque, and up until 1914. And everything resumed that chaotic pace again, beginning in the 1950s. In between, though, time was frozen.10 Yet even during that stationary moment, Gracq foresaw the fragility of the bocage and the sad fate awaiting it. In a radio interview in 1977, he commented:
I remember when I wrote a little article on the bocage for the Annales de Géographie in 1934 where I said that the bocage would soon be gone, that it would die from social transformation. The editor was frightened by that kind of peremptory judgment. But in fact, the bocage did disappear, or is in the process of disappearing, perhaps for reasons other than the ones I predicted.11
Anyone who has driven through large swathes of the French countryside in recent years has witnessed, perhaps without realizing it, the forces that destroyed the bocage: a kind of rural reification and aggressive ‘redistricting’ process familiar to urbanists, which in the countryside is called ‘remembrement’. Mobilized most intensively throughout the 1980s and 1990s, ‘remembrement’ occurs when a territory that allowed subsistence is reoriented and restabilized to maximize profits. With the arrival of large farm machinery, hedges and other natural obstructions were leveled to create vast single-owner agribusiness parcels for mono-cultural cultivation, especially in Brittany. Today, there is a growing recognition of the important ecological degradation in the form of water pollution and soil erosion that occurs when water-retaining shrubs and trees are destroyed in this way. But the process continues.
Yet the polemic unleashed by Notre-Dame-des-Landes and the Susa Valley cannot be seen simply as one of technology versus nature. Consider the specificity of the two territories in question and the genesis of their landscapes. The Susa Valley is as far from a pristine Alpine ‘Heidi’ environment as one can imagine. Historically a prime strategic point for conquerors from Hannibal to Caesar to pass through, it is now a highly urbanized area that bears the scars of earlier modernization efforts and transportation construction – the valley is crossed by major motorways leading to the Fréjus tunnel. And nothing in the history of a bocage lends itself to a cult of pure nature or the pastoral dynamic of retreat. What Raymond Williams used to call ‘the sweetness of the place’ is always a construction – and one made in part out of interventions and influences from the outside.12 A bocage is, as Gracq points out, an artificial formation, a very human endeavour, or better, the result of neither man nor nature alone but of their alliance. A bocage is not on the side of nature or on the side of humanity against nature. We might see it as an enduring record or testimony to the lives and works of the humans and non-humans who have dwelt within it. The bocage offers a graceful example of the way in which nature is, above all, historical. For it was the peasantry as a form of collective life that fashioned the bocage over centuries, and without the use of machines. And – irony of ironies – in a place like the zad where right now the question of the common use of a territory is the most pressing one of the day, the creation of the bocage, historically, corresponded to the end of communal usage of land in Brittany: the hedges were first and foremost enclosures delimiting and attributing land parcels to individuals or groups of peasants who were allowed to farm them in return for a portion of crops given over to the landowner. The bocage was a segmentation of space resulting from the privatization of the commons. And now, in a kind of delightful paradox, in the form of the zad it has come to figure as the possibility of restitution, a kind of restitution of the land back to the collective. Where once people fought the bocage to defend the commons, now it is the bocage that is defended as a common good.13
Neither can the battles of Notre-Dame-des-Landes and the Susa Valley, as they emerge in the pages of this book, be understood in terms of the usual confrontation between, on the one hand, those who know, the sujets supposés savoir, the allegedly neutral technocrats and policy experts, and, on the other, the uninformed who must learn to abandon their narrow and myopic self-interest and submit to ‘progress’ in the service of the general good. It is a war between two dueling logics, two argumentations, two knowledges, two futures that I will call, for now, the ‘airworld’ versus the territory. The two knowledges are, of course, not symmetrical in terms of the power behind them. For the airworld, it is the global luxury trade, the third of the world’s traded goods – the iPads, Peruvian roses, and farmed salmon now flown by air – which is powering world growth and which is what, in fact, now and in the final determining instance, matters.14 Market laws, which continue to be as indisputable as they are indemonstrable, still decree that infrastructure equals the modernization that fuels economic growth. The quality prized above all others here seems to be frictionlessness – the ability to move people and goods in and out as quickly and effortlessly as possible. To this end, cities need to connect more easily and intensely to each other than to the towns, villages, and countryside just beyond their borders – these last are, of course, now destined to slow or precipitous but, in any case inevitable, decline. As for the cities, these would become nothing more than high-density urban centers linked to intercontinental neighbourhoods.
