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Airspace.
I live near a neighborhood in Nashville called 12 South. When I first moved here in 2021, I took walks from the large, green Sevier Park down 12th Avenue. On 12th, I passed local establishments like White’s Mercantile, built into an old gas station, and other local favorites like 12 South Taproom, Portland Brew, and Halcyon Bike Shop. Five years later, I take that same walk from the park and find those local establishments have been replaced with large shopping complexes filled with more familiar stores like Lululemon, Birkenstock, and Anthropologie. I find that this sweet little street is moving toward homogenization with many other popular neighborhoods I visit in other cities.
They’re all looking the same.
Airspace.
Through the internet, I have access to the same shows as everyone else. The same social media feeds. I see the same ads. The same memes. I learn the same way of speaking. Of thinking. Through the internet, I am part of a global culture where home isn’t a local saint, a neighbor who owns that little shop on the corner, or the local park where I know the names of the other dog parents. Instead, I find myself wanting to find the closest Lululemon, Starbucks and Anthropologie.
Airspace.
Anthropologist Marc Augé described places like airports, motorways, hotel rooms, and supermarkets - where people are transient, anonymous, and stripped of local or historical identity - as ‘Non-Places’.
Journalist Kyle Chayka later expanded on this by saying that “the interchangeability, ceaseless movement, and symbolic blankness that was once the hallmark of hotels and airports… has leaked into the rest of life”. He called this ubiquity of generic spaces ‘Airspace’.
Airspace.
When I first moved to Nashville, I knew very few people and often felt homesick for the place I had just come from, Burbank, California. When feeling this way, I’d often go to Macy’s. Walking through Macy’s in Nashville, I may as well have been in Macy’s in Burbank. When I imagined it was true, I was indeed there, walking down aisles of things that repeat and repeat and go on repeating. Go out of Macy’s, down the escalator and into the food court where sneakers skid and echo on shiny, waxed floors.
I went to Macy’s. I went to Target and the movie theater and Hobby Lobby and Home Depot, too, when I needed comfort. I walked those aisles that are the same in every city. The sections for light bulbs and paint and nails. That perfect bright orange logo. The hot dog truck in the parking lot. I may as well have been at the Home Depot in Burbank again, choosing plants for the front yard or paint the color of terracotta for bedroom walls. The Home Depot, in those brief moments, was home to me.
Airspace.
We - a people whose identity and home have become the generic, the repeatable - drift through these vacant options like particles of dust seeking a place to land. We search for home in that which does not know our name, does not know whether or not we are alive, and won’t fill empty seats at the dining room table at night.
And perhaps the search itself suggests there is a more meaningful place to land.
