The City of the Car
Milton Keynes is a particularly interesting example for the conference theme "Social Worlds, Natural Worlds". Before it was designed and built in the late Nineteen-Sixties most of it was green meadows (Picture 1 - Meadows outside Milton Keynes which will soon become part of the Milton Keynes expansion scheme). Today, some forty years later, Milton Keynes is an urban landscape, organised in a grid pattern. What meets the eye is monotonous housing estates (Picture 2 - one of the many uniform residential estates of Milton Keynes) and primarily roads. Most of the roads are dual carriageways which separate the residential areas and can only be crossed at a few places either through dark underpasses or over pedestrian bridges. The many fast roads determine the soundscape of this "New Town". There is practically no place in Milton Keynes where the noise of motorised traffic is absent. Milton Keynes presents itself proudly as "the city of the car" and one of its landmark features is the many roundabouts that connect the dual carriageways that run through the city (Picture 3 - note that the pictures also shows that natural climatical conditions such as fog cannot be kept outside artificially built environments - one possible way of how "nature" always has an influence on everyday social worlds). Nature is certainly not absent in Milton Keynes; there are many green spaces and parks and there is even a grid square with a little forest in which one can meet deer. However, the landscape it not "naturally" shaped; all the park spaces and lakes have been designed and created by human beings. Animals, once living in the wild, have adapted to the modified environment and are now part of an urban ecology with squirrels, foxes, rabbits and many other animals and plants thriving in Milton Keynes. However, many of these animals become victims of the heavy traffic and the roads are seamed with roadkills (Picture 4).

Driving cars is taken seriously and seems so important in Milton Keynes that not even in the city centre it is possible to get around easily by walking. Many signs were put up to remind those that get around on their feet - probably the most "natural way" of getting around for human beings - that they "do not have priority" over the predominance of motorised mobility (Picture 5 - Milton Keynes, city centre). As a consequence there is no such as thing as a pedestrian area and the inner city landscape is dominated by vast car-parks for the endless stream of cars that clog the inner city roads. The heart of the city is a shopping mall, which was one of the biggest ones in Europe when it was erected (Picture 6 - Milton Keynes Shopping Mal). One of the main spare time activities of the residents of Milton Keynes is to spend their time in the Shopping Mall dispensing their income on consumer goods (Picture 7 - Example of shop in the City Centre). At least the centre of Milton Keynes is almost a showpiece example of what Marc Augé calls "non-places"; places without history that are only defined by their function. In the centre of Milton Keynes citizens do not have another choice but to be become consumers. There is nothing that can be done that is not commercial. Entertainment and nightlife take place in a grey hangar-like building that is called "XScape" (Picture 8). Inside the building one finds more shops, a cinema, chain-pubs, fast food outlets, chain-restaurants and a range of nightclubs. Particularly interesting in this context is that in the building one also finds various simulations of nature. For instance, there is a courtyard with artificial trees and artificial night sky, climbing rocks made of plastic and most strikingly an artificial ski slope, for which half of the building needs to be cooled down so that the artificial snow does not begin to melt (Picture 9).