The bitter cold of a New York winter makes me long for travels to far-flung locations. That’s not on the cards this year, and so I am instead reading a book about said far-flung locations. Unruly Places is a compendium of mini-essays about the hidden or exceptional geographies of the world. Some of them are well-known – such as Pripyat, site of the Chernobyl disaster, or the floating garbage islands of the Pacific – but others are far more esoteric.

On that note, one that I found interesting from a markets perspective is the Geneva Freeport, a giant warehouse where things can be imported and exported essentially free of customs duties and other taxes. As author  Alastair Bonnett puts it: “The freeport vaults are able to conjure ever more exchange value out of cultural artifacts that possess only abstract worth.”

It’s worth a read, especially in conjunction with some of Izabella Kaminska’s thoughts on artificial scarcity. Here’s Bonnett:

At the same moment that consumerism coughs up great rivers of shoddy gizmos to be mashed up and drained away, it also brings forth increasing quantities of beautiful and rare objects: paintings, cars, wine bottles, sculptures;items that have to be dusted, photographed, and catalogs, to be prized and kept forever. Where once such valuables could be crammed into the houses of the elite, today their possessions are so plentiful that this is no longer an option. The relationship between the rich and their objects of infatuation has also changed. Now they buy them as investments, as an essential component of any serious wealth portfolio.

…

The trajectory toward ever more storehousing challenges the idea that ours is an age of the virtual, an era in which real obkects are increasingly irrelevant. While money flows by on computer screens, taking up no space at all, the storehouse culture has developed a power and life of its own, allowing and demanding more and more keeping, dusting, and inventory-taking. Such storage is only in its infancy, and it is not limited to art but includes all things of high value. Moreover, there does not seem to be any foreseeable limit on what can be amassed, since there is plenty of room under the earth or up in space. There may yet come a time whe the valuable object is understood to have a life cycle, but we can’t yet imagine that moment – when uniquely rare cars will be crushed, say, or precious art is fed to the flames. Until then, we will build more freeports, more storage, more shelves, more vaults for our treasure.

Unruly Places: Lost spaces, secret cities, and other inscrutable geographies