Non-places are not ‘empty’—they are different.

A place of anonymity, loneliness, uprootedness.

A non-place is not defined by its lack but by its difference from other places.

Modernization and globalization are leading to a rapid increase in meaningless functional places worldwide.

These spaces create no individual identity, have no common past, and create no social relationships.

The space of non-places creates loneliness and uniformity.

Non-places create two different but interrelated realities: concrete spaces that are constituted in relation to specific purposes (e.g., traffic, transit, consumption), and the relationship that the individual maintains with them.

Non-places are characterised by their provisional nature: One can only stay in them for a moment; they are not meant to be lingered in. They correspond to an open construct that can be composed of an infinite variety of possible realities that only ever appear for a brief moment, because non-places embody an in-between space in transit, whose boundaries are constantly shifting, even discontinuous, and constantly interrupted.

Non-places never exist in their pure form; new relations are composed within them. In today's world, places and spaces, places and non-places overlap and permeate each other.

Place and non-place are fleeing poles; the place never completely disappears, and the non-place never completely re-establishes itself, a confused game of identity and relation that constantly finds its reflection anew.

All it takes is a poster or a screen to communicate between the individual and the public through non-human mediation.

An example of the occupation of space by text are all the invitations we encounter on our streets, in our shopping centers or at the outposts of the banking system on our street corners; they are addressed indiscriminately to each of us (“Thank you for your visit”, “Have a good trip“, “Thank you for your trust”), and indeed to any one of us: they create the ‘average person’’ defined as a user of the transport, commercial or banking system. They create them, and in the end, they individualize them. A passenger of the non-places thus only finds his identity at the border control, the payment point, or the supermarket checkout.

Non-places describe the process of cultural transformations. They correspond to real places, but are by no means to be understood as a ‘nothing’ that is nowhere to be found. Non-places are places beyond all other places that are in a constant state of becoming and change; they have set themselves apart from the urban context and indicate a change in both the social and structural interweaving of the urban network.