Augé’s best-selling book kicks off by imagining the experience of Pierre Dupont as he drives to Roissy airport, parks, goes through security, boards his flight and reads a magazine. His experience is far smoother than mine was: “He was enjoying the feeling of freedom imparted … by the certainty that, now he was ‘sorted out’, his identity registered, his boarding pass in his pocket, he had nothing to do but wait for the sequence of events.” Dupont flicks through ads for hotels and reads a book review that contemplates “the homogenization of needs and consumption patterns”. This is supermodernity: a globalised, homogenised, economy in which the same experiences and products are replicated in far-flung geographic locations.

It’s an unusual technique for scholarly writing. But Augé’s willingness to engage in make-believe in this way allows him to draw the general reader into what could have been an alarmingly theoretical essay on the state of anthropology.

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Why you should be a thick traveller

By Chris Arnade

Because French, and philosophically inclined, Augé, who died last month, is often lazily bracketed with the Derrida and Foucault and the like. But he was first and foremost a practitioner. He began his career with field studies of the Alladian cultures of the Ivory Coast, writing books about power, death, symbols — key touchstones of anthropology. And though French scholarship after the student protests of 1968 was marked by radicalism, Augé comes across as a genial thinker: political without being ideological, keen to build bridges in the Francophone academy at a time of upheaval.

Augé was keen to explain how the transformations of the contemporary world had made anthropology more complicated. “We are in an era characterized by changes of scale,” he wrote. “Images of all sorts, relayed by satellites and caught by the aerials that bristle on the roofs of our remotest hamlets, can give us an instant, sometimes simultaneous vision of an event taking place on the other side of the planet.” So far, so postmodern; what Augé called the “acceleration” of events is an idea that crops up repeatedly in political theory. The specifically supermodern condition that he identifies is the dominance of non-places.

We live in “a world where people are born in the clinic and die in hospital, where transit points and temporary abodes are proliferating under luxurious or inhuman conditions” — from “hotel chains and squats, holiday clubs and refugee camps”. In non-places, exchange between human beings is transactional: you buy a sandwich, or a massage, or a train ticket. Speech is replaced by text; signs direct behaviour, instead of people, giving instructions and advertising products. We are, therefore, isolated, in “a solitude made all the more baffling by the fact that it echoes millions of others”.

Anthropology has traditionally been interested in circumscribed places, the best example being the island, which allows one to consider a culture in its entirety; but non-places offer the opportunity to study a kind of psychic isolation. This “world thus surrendered to solitary individuality … offers the anthropologist (and others) a new object”.

The implications of the rise of these non-places are many and varied. For instance, access to the sort of anonymity they allow is granted only if we provide evidence of our individuality, in the form of identification documents; Augé foresaw that supermodernity would increasingly require us to prove who we are. He also goes so far as to speculate that non-places are terrorist targets not only for practical reasons, but also because they refuse the very idea of the historical territories that nationalist causes wish to restore.

Augé suggests, though, that we shouldn’t simply surrender to their ambiguous charms and to the seductive “feeling of freedom” they offer. Instead of giving in to the temptation to be passive, he suggests we can preserve our humanity through activity — observing, recording, storytelling. In this pursuit, he has influential fellow travellers. Take, for example, the writer Iain Sinclair, whose practice is psychogeography, which both examines and tries to subvert the behaviours produced by urban space; he was interested in precisely the kinds of non-places Augé identified — car parks and industrial estates. London Orbital, a book tracking a motorway, routed him through the Heathrow suburbs. Where Augé is an anthropologist with a poet’s touch, Sinclair is the opposite; he has the eye of an anthropologist but his project is that of an avant-garde poet, imagining afresh these overlooked zones.

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By Louis Elton

The attention Augé paid to the airport also aligns him with J.G. Ballard, who Sinclair visited in Shepperton on his orbital walk. Ballard’s 1997 essay on airports for Blueprint magazine comes across as a piece of rogue anthropology. “We are no longer citizens with civic obligations,” he writes, “but passengers for whom all destinations are theoretically open.” The airport is perhaps the ultimate non-place, a “discontinuous city, whose vast populations … are entirely transient, purposeful and, for the most part, happy.” Happy because, as Augé pointed out, anonymity can be a liberation; airports, because so familiar, provide a sense of being at home when far away.

Yet what at one moment can be experienced as liberation and comfort can, in another, become boredom and oppression. The non-place is double-edged. But supermodern life inevitably channels us into these non-places: we have no choice but to enter. We therefore need to learn how to endure them.

Augé, in search of guidance on how to do so, inclines towards the Jesuit priest Michel de Certeau, who in fact first used the term non-place. In his enduringly wonderful The Practice of Everyday Life, Certeau draws a distinction between the “strategies” used by institutions to control our behaviour public places — city-planning, for example — and the “tactics” employed by ordinary people to resist that control — such as climbing a high building to enjoy the view. Certeau’s book has become a kind of manual, which guides us towards imagining our own tactics, whether it be walking against the arrows on the floor of Ikea or pulling up our trousers to paddle in a fountain.

Non-places is an analysis rather than a manual, but it is clearly much inspired by de Certeau’s emphasis on the “itinerary”, the individual journey. To chart a path through non-places, we must become supermodern flaneurs. But above all, Augé argues for restoring a social element to places that impose upon us solitariness. Talking to strangers may be the best way to push against the dehumanising effects of supermodernity. Pleading with airport officials using words rather than glares may be the way to reassert agency in a non-place that would rob us of it.

Two examples are commonly cited to illustrate Johnson’s doomed romance with grands projets: the Emirates cable car and the aborted Garden Bridge across the Thames, both initiated when he was Mayor of London.

The cable car has indeed proved a largely unnecessary and expensive addition to the capital’s transport system (though it was, miraculously, completed in time for the 2012 Olympics).

How far the Garden Bridge can be classed as a BoJo folly is more questionable. It was the brainchild of Joanna Lumley, the actor and celebrity whose considerable powers of persuasion also convinced a hard-hearted government to allow several thousand former Gurkha soldiers and their families to resettle in the UK – an expensive undertaking that has not always ended well. 

Of course, a wiser mayor than Boris might not have been seduced. But it is worth remembering that there was a time when the idea of an eco-friendly bridge wreathed in greenery was well received by Londoners – before the restricted access and the size of the future maintenance bill hit home.

And anyway, to describe either the cable car or the unbuilt Garden Bridge as a grand projet is quite wrong. They were at best minor vanity projects for an attention-seeking mayor. 

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Where's our ambition for the North?

By Philip Blond

A grand projet is very different in its scale and ambition. It requires imagination, even vision – and yes, a wad of taxpayers’ money. But also a sense of both elevated purpose and the value of something that inspires.

The list of Mitterrand’s legacy includes the Pyramid at the Louvre, the Musée d’Orsay, the Opera-Bastille, the Grande Arche de la Defense, and the National (now Mitterrand) Library. The last, especially, has its critics – it ran late and vastly over-budget and used to be hard to reach, but it now takes its proud place in the Paris landscape. 

In general, though, the finished products offer something impressive to show for the time and money expended – something that might hark back, in a way, to the great civic building projects of the past, or to the era of the great international exhibitions. The political will behind them also gives them the great advantage that they are seen through to completion, not abandoned half-way. 

In fact, while much British scorn is reserved for other people’s grandiose schemes, it is not true that “we” can’t do them. How would you classify London’s Docklands, or the regeneration of Liverpool? Or the “new” universities of the 1960s and 1970s? Or Tate Modern, or the London 2012 Olympics?

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This last was a grand endeavour that – eventually and despite much national pessimism – won huge public support and left a legacy now revitalising a once-depressed area of east London. Political will, space for imagination (that opening ceremony) and the focus forced by a deadline all contributed to its success. It bust the original budget, yes – but, how many would now say that it was not worth it, to have a nation feel better about itself? 

In fact, far from dismissing grands projets, the UK would do well to consider a lot more of them. And not just them, but grands travaux – the more utilitarian, but no less inspiring, infrastructure projects at which the French in particular excel: the high-speed train network; the motorways, the Alpine tunnels, the bridges.

It is worth mentioning that two of these were the result of UK-French collaboration: the spectacular and supremely elegant motorway bridge across the Tarn at Millau (completed ahead of schedule in 2004), and the Channel Tunnel, which speeds more than 10 million people and 1.5 million lorries between the UK and France every year. Announced by Margaret Thatcher and François Mitterrand in 1984, the Eurostar was whisking its first passengers under La Manche 10 years later in a feat of engineering completed on time and rarely even remarked upon today. 

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If you're pro-immigration you can't be anti-development

By Peter Franklin

Which is a good point to return to Boris Johnson and the potential there might be for whoever becomes the next Prime Minister to embark on some serious 21^st century nation-building in the form of major new national infrastructure projects. 

Johnson himself is reported to have broached the possibility of the Channel Tunnel being supplemented by a bridge during a Franco-British summit last year, only to be slapped down by the famously unimaginative Theresa May. Yet a bridge providing a road link was part of the original Channel Tunnel discussion. It is technically feasible; it would help loosen the pinch-points at either end of the Tunnel and send a forceful message about how the UK might be “leaving the EU, but not leaving Europe”, as the politicians like to say. It could also appeal to the French President, Emmanuel Macron – himself no slouch in the ideas department. 

Johnson also highlighted the possibility of another bridge during the hustings this week in Belfast. There has been talk of a fixed link between Scotland and Northern Ireland for a while, with varying assessments of its feasibility. But what better way to send a message about the next Government’s determination both to preserve the Union and to look beyond the south-east than to initiate such a project?

Back to the south-east, and “Boris Island” airport is another Johnson project whose time may yet come. The new runway at Heathrow may now have parliamentary approval, but there are more consultations and more hurdles – especially ecological – to jump. With concern about climate change rising rapidly up the political agenda, and air and noise pollution increasingly recognised as harmful to health and quality of life, the marshes and birds of the Thames estuary may yet be sacrificed.

Another eco-friendly idea – also Johnson’s, as it happens – was to put the capital’s haphazard and congestion-prone North and South circular roads underground – as their equivalents mostly are in, say, Brussels and Paris. The idea was warmly received by local residents where plans were mooted, with the land freed above earmarked for housing and recreational space. But nothing came of it. Too difficult, too disruptive – and by then there was a new mayor. 

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By Paul Embery

Contrast the travails of Crossrail, designed to ease journeys into and across London – now running way over budget and more than two years (if we are lucky) over time. And then there’s the controversial north-south high-speed railway, HS2, which may never be built. The difficulties have been not only with the planning and implementation, but with the “selling”.

Where is the vision of what a more direct, faster, north-south railway could provide? Why was the chance to transform travel around the north of England, or the currently parlous east-west routes, not highlighted? Why has it all been so London-centric?

And why has no one picked up on the opportunity, since the Houses of Parliament need to be vacated for refurbishment, to look seriously at the possibilities of a new building – or even a capital – elsewhere? Or even an imaginative temporary structure, such as the Serpentine Gallery manages to construct on a small scale every year? Current plans are for an extraordinarily expensive adaptation of an existing building on Whitehall. Where is the imagination? 

It is beyond time for the UK to drop its supercilious and defeatist attitude to grands projets, and recognise that they can have multiple benefits.

At best, they can inspire, they can add aesthetic and cultural value, they can improve public facilities on a scale that is beyond the capacity of many local authorities. With political will behind them, they do come to fruition.

The next Prime Minister and his government should take a lead, but also invite ideas from around the country. They might be surprised at the vision and practical ambition that is out there, just waiting to be freed.