Vanishing act
If Burning Man is the planet’s biggest flash mob and largest leave-no-trace event, then it’s also the world’s most transitory city
EVERY YEAR, in the weeks leading up to Labor Day, a temporary metropolis emerges from the barren alkali flats of Nevada’s Black Rock Desert. Meticulously surveyed, the concentric circles and spokes of Black Rock City’s dusty streets fan out across some seven square miles of dry lake bed (or “playa”), providing an iconic geography for one of North America’s more bizarre annual rituals: Burning Man.
But the chaotic arts and music festival, known for its high hedonism, is as much an exercise in evanescent urban planning as it is a radical social experiment. Come Labor Day, Burning Man’s deeply ingrained leave-no-trace ethos takes over. Attendees pack up gear, artists break down installations, and theme camps dismantle projects so elaborate that one wonders whether Burning Man is actually an engineering fair. Show up to the event a month late, and you’ll be hard-pressed to find any trace of the booming city of 70,000 that once sprawled across the desert..