It’s a metaphor. But what for?

This feels like a metaphor for something. I just can’t think what. No-one knows quite how it began. There are several creation myths, but most likely it was just a simple accident, a crash of two of those three-wheeled taxis that abound in southeast Asia. They met at a city intersection.

It is hard for us to imagine the traffic there. Here we have lines on the road and signs on poles and police to enforce the road code. There the traffic exists in a state of nature. The big or brave get through. The weak or timid defer. In this Darwinian world there are abundant crashes, and this one was catastrophic. The two vehicles became enmeshed with each other and were damaged beyond repair – no mean achievement in this impoverished city where anything can be and is repaired.

Stuck on the teeming intersection, the two taxis became an impromptu traffic island. People and vehicles flowed around them, like water round a rock. But because there was no agreed direction of flow this led to more accidents. Some of the newly crashed vehicles stayed and the island grew by accretion.

Here we’d expect the authorities to clear the road, but there the authorities are corrupt. No-one shifts anything without a hefty bribe and this is a poor area of town. So the blockage stayed and grew until eventually it filled the intersection and suddenly there was no way through at all, however hard the taxis sounded their horns. People could still walk round or over the mass of dead vehicles, and they did, but it was no longer a vehicular thoroughfare.

And the moment vehicles stopped passing through it, people moved into it. They made homes of a sort within the tangle of vehicles. They spliced into looping black electrical cables to light their new homes. They dug down into the road, like a plant putting down roots, till they breached a sewer and a water main. The temporary dwellings slowly became permanent. But that was far from the end of it.

The blocked streets became a trap. Unwary drivers would be lured down them only to find themselves faced with an impassable mass of dead vehicles, where bandits would be waiting. The drivers fled and their vehicles were stripped then added to the new village which continued to grow and fill the roads towards the next intersections. Soon a lively real estate market evolved with actual written deeds entitling the bearer to the occupancy of such and such a former vehicle, as numbered and identified on an unofficial official map.

The cross-roads that became a fill-in village gained a certain fame. Intrepid Western tourists began to visit – though only with a guide and only during daylight – and were delighted by the native life they saw.

Eventually even the somnolent city authorities realised they had something of value on their hands and began to promote it.

But the original local residents were unhappy. They missed the convenience of their roads and resented the mass of newcomers. They wanted the vehicle-village bulldozed and their crossroads back.

The authorities solved the problem with unusual felicity by reinforcing the roofs of the crashed vehicles and then crudely paving over them. Thus they recreated the intersection in the form of a flyover for vehicles, resting on a living village. It is one of the most remarkable urban sights on earth and one that I would very much urge you to go and see if it actually existed.

But it does still feel like a metaphor for something. I just can’t think what.