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CHAPTER 1
The Controversy of Theming
THE EVOLUTION OF THE DISNEY CITY
China is full of places like Thames Town. But Western-like urban forms also flourish in many other rapidly urbanizing regions of the world. From the suburban developments at the fringes of Jakarta, Indonesia, to the new residential districts in Mumbai, India, entire cities are built from scratch emulating London, Paris, or Rome. The global success of styled environments demonstrates that theming strategies help the production and consumption of contemporary urban landscapes. Offering ready-made "places" for the rising middle classes, themed environments sell fast and ensure short term profits to their creators. Although the contemporary transplanting of cityscapes is deeply rooted in the mechanisms of the global economy, the theme park urban typology originated in the postwar United States. Disneyland, which Michael Sorkin defined as "the alpha point of hyperreality" (1992, 206), is acknowledged to be the prototype of the contemporary theme park. Here, I will synthesize the evolution of the theme park model and the criticism that surrounds it.
One might think that theming is distinctive to our times, given the relevance it has acquired over the last three decades. Yet private and public spaces have long featured themed atmospheres. Throughout history, powerful elites created exotic environments for their private delight or to win public approval. We know, for example, that already in ancient Rome the décor of some private dwellings offered affluent citizens the experience of some exotic elsewhere. The trompe-l'oeil Pompeian painting styles are a good example. The same experience was made accessible to the masses on the occasion of triumphal parades, when whole cities were temporarily transformed into staged and themed processions (Favro, 1994). In medieval Europe, the hortus conclusus, an enclosed garden, reproduced Paradise on earth. Contextually, the urban décor of public religious processions made sure to remind common people that Paradise — or eternal damnation — was indeed just around the corner. Later, the most prestigious residences of Russia and Europe encompassed entire villages, where aristocrats and their cohorts could enjoy romanticized pastoral atmospheres. The pleasure garden provided larger publics with the same delights during the eighteenth century. These eclectic assemblages of exotic atmospheres became very popular throughout the United States, Europe, and the colonial world (Harwood 2002; Shenker 2002; Young 2002).
If theming has existed for a long time, its association with mass consumption is a more recent phenomenon, and one that scholars trace back to the rise of the modern leisure industry. The theme park typology has conceptual predecessors in three nineteenth-century architectural genres that combined leisure and consumption: the amusement park, the World's Fair exhibitions, and the department store. The first originated in the United States in response to the recreational demands of a rising middle class. Carnivalesque atmospheres, together with the celebration of technological progress, appealed to diverse clienteles, including women and children (Adams 1991; Peiss 1986). The department store likewise generated great excitement in fin-de-siècle Europe and the United States. For the first time, passersby could admire the choreographically displayed products, walk through sensational architectures, and appreciate the new, efficient retail stores without feeling obliged to buy anything. These private — yet open to the public — marketplaces soon became the symbols of a new consumer culture and its associated urbanity (Clausen 1985; Lerner 2015; Sloane and Conant Sloane 2003). Finally, the World's Fairs that first emerged in the mid–nineteenth century displayed people, objects, and images that had never before been juxtaposed. As complex microcosms, these exhibitions compressed time and space to offer a voyage autour du monde, complete with stereotyped visions of colonial territories and celebratory representations of the West (Çelik and Kinney 1990; Corbey 1993).
Amusement parks, department stores, and World's Fair exhibitions originated in diverse circumstances. However, they had four aspects in common: the construction of a totalizing experience, the accessibility of new publics, the involvement of vanguard technologies, and the primacy of visual consumption. These innovative aspects merged into the contemporary theme park, which is typified by Disneyland (Ottinger 2010; Schwartz 2003).
The opening of Disneyland on July 17, 1955, in Anaheim, California revolutionized the leisure industry, but Disneyland's socio-cultural and economic implications went far beyond the realm of recreation. Walter Elias "Walt" Disney envisioned a clean, rigorously confined, and controlled space. Walt's city would be very different from the carnivalesque amusement parks he had experienced as a child. Representing the prototype of a new urban utopia, Disneyland stood as an alternative to both the postwar dispersed city and the messy contemporary urban center (Bryman 1995; Koenig 1994). Disneyland displayed America at its best: traditional towns, beautiful landscapes, and a sprinkle of magic, surrounded by a circular railroad. The Sleeping Beauty Castle, located at the park's center, was the only landmark visible from everywhere in the park. It stood as a symbol of enchantment and reassurance. Main Street, the re-creation of an idealized nineteenth-century American streetscape, led the guests from the park's entrance into its four themed lands — Fantasyland, Frontier-land, Adventureland, and Tomorrowland. Inspired after Disney's hometown of Marceline, Missouri, Main Street became a model for designers and architects. Throughout the nation, preservationists brought the Main Streets of small towns back. These architects gave historic towns a pristine condition they had never possessed in reality by demolishing the buildings that did not match with the "old West" narrative and substituting these buildings with authentic-looking constructions. Concurrently, entirely new nostalgic constructions substantiated the collective longing for a preurban Anglo-Saxon America (Francaviglia 1981).
Three revolutionary qualities made Disneyland the prototype of the contemporary theme park. First, the park had an exclusionary character that it conveyed implicitly, through visual codes and access policies. Disneyland's homogeneous visual environment constituted a symbolic system of approved behaviors. Those who did not look or act in accordance with this system were denied access to the park. Another exclusionary feature was the ticketing policy, which required visitors to Disneyland to purchase a single, expensive entrance ticket rather than pay for access to each individual attraction, as had previously been the norm. These aspects, together with the location of the park in a destination reachable exclusively by car — Disneyland was located in a 185-acre extraurban area close to a highway exit — limited access primarily to middle- and upper-middle-class families.
Disneyland's second revolutionary innovation was to involve the media in both the production and promotion of the park. In contrast to most Hollywood producers, Walt Disney viewed the advent of television as a business opportunity. He built Disneyland in partnership with the weakest television network at the time: the American Broadcasting Corporation (ABC). The network covered part of the construction costs in exchange for Disney's production of the TV show Disneyland, screened weekly on the ABC network.
Finally, the park's third major innovation reflected Disney's ideological confidence in "the ultimate rightness of technological progress" (Thompson 1971, quoted in King 1981, 120). The attractions were regularly changed, reflecting the latest technological improvements. Disneyland's "imagineers," the engineers in charge of creating dreamy imaginaries, developed cutting-edge machines that surprised guests with both the sensational atmosphere and the unprecedented efficiency of the system.
These three aspects of Disneyland's business model — the selection of clienteles via implicit methods of exclusion, the involvement of the media in a mutually beneficial partnership, and theconstant search for innovative technologies — revolutionized the amusement industry. But Disneyland also symbolized an innovative approach to urban design, expressed in the Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow (EPCOT). Conceived by Disney in 1964 as a fifty-acre residential community for twenty thousand residents, EPCOT would function as a testing ground for new ideas in urban planning. The city was located within the twenty-eight thousand acres in Orlando, Florida, that the company purchased in 1966 for its second and larger park, Walt Disney World.
In the mind of Disney, no unemployment, unmarried cohabitation, public drunkenness, poverty, or even sadness would be permitted in the city of tomorrow. Moreover, since no one would own the houses, the residents would have no voting control (Wallace 1985). The residential community that the Disney Company ended up opening in 1982 is a more cautious version of Walt Disney's original conception. After Walt's death, the Disney Company considered the project too ambitious and converted the residential community into a resort. EPCOT, a kind of permanent World's Fair, is now divided into the "Future World" and the "World Showcase" areas, each encompassing several exhibit pavilions. The socioeconomic implications of the original EPCOT plan, however, resonate into the present (Manheim 2002; Marling 1997; Viladas 1988).
The opening of EPCOT initiated a new turn for Disney. Under the guidance of its CEO Michael Eisner, the corporation created the Disney Development Company in 1985 and became a real estate titan over the following years. Designed between 1987 and 1992 in Osceola County, Florida, the town of Celebration is an example of the neotraditional urban form promoted by Disney. The residential community extends over 4,900 acres on former swampland, surrounded by a green area of similar size.
The designers, Cooper, Robertson & Partners and Robert Stern, emphasized mixed land use, high density, and green preservation to offer upper-middleclass clients a traditional village, complete with a Main Street, an artificial lake, and a marina. Star post-modern architects were invited to design Celebration's civic buildings. Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown designed the bank, Charles Moore the Preview Center, Philip Johnson the Town Hall, and Aldo Rossi an office building. The residential areas encompassed condominiums and single houses built in diverse vernacular styles — Disney offered customers a choice among styles such as the "Classic," the "Victorian," the "Colonial," the "Mediterranean," and the "French." The Celebration Pattern Book circulated during the construction process, prescribing buildings' proportions and color palettes. After construction was completed in 1996, home-buyers were asked to sign the Declaration of Covenants, a prescriptive list of behaviors and maintenance rules meant to ensure that the atmosphere in the town remained faithful to Disney's original spirit (Frantz 1999; Ross 1999).
Celebration is one of many traditional urban settings built as an ideological — and commercial — reaction to the modernist city. The sociologist Mark Gottdiener (1997) explains the reasons for this phenomenon by arguing that theming strategies enable contemporary urbanites to convey their social status. During the nineteenth century and at the beginning of the twentieth, patterns of social distinction appeared explicitly in the urban/rural dichotomy, in the distinction between poor and wealthy districts, as well as in the different dimensions of residential units. Gottdiener argues that turn-of-the-century suburbanization processes made this distinction less obvious because location and architectural typologies were no longer indexical to specific roles in society.
As city dwellers demanded new ways to emplace their status, designers began to incorporate symbols that expressed economic and cultural differences into the built environment. This phenomenon became increasingly relevant beginning in the 1950s, when the diffusion of the automobile, the standardization of construction techniques, and new patterns of production created a desire for new modes of social differentiation. Modernist planners did not satisfy this desire. They rather conceived decontextualized urban landscapes meant to actualize values of progress, efficiency, and universality. No space was made to convey difference in the modernist city, where buildings, blocks, and streets looked the same everywhere. Theming emerged as a reaction to this homogenization. With its pervasive use of pop-culture motifs and profound association with consumption, theming defined a new kind of city. This new city, Gottdiener tells us, embodied a melding of material form and commercial culture that continues to this day.
The Disneyfication of the metropolis became a global phenomenon during the 1980s, when the new systems of production and consumption associated with economic liberalization incentivized the diffusion of the themed city (Warren 1994). Andrew Ross (1999) observes that out of the global North theming strategies succeed especially in those regions that experience the advancement of a capitalist consumer economy, the sudden rise of living standards, and a sustained exposure to American culture. Indeed, the political elites and profit seekers of most rapidly urbanizing countries heavily resort to theming. Materializing the pressures of the global economy, styled settings offer growing middle classes ready-made atmospheres for consumption while also ensuring quick profits to their developers (Piazzoni and Banerjee 2017).
John Hannigan (1998) argues that the theme park urban model, which he names "Fantasy City," possesses five central features. It is theme-centric — everything from individual attractions to the image of the city itself conforms to a scripted theme. It is branded — its theme is closely marked by one or a set of corporate identities. It is modular — standard components can be assembled in multiple configurations. It is solipsistic — physically, culturally, and economically isolated from its surroundings. And, crucially, it is postmodern — constructed around technologies of simulation. The development and global diffusion of the Fantasy City has provoked opposed reactions among academics and commentators. As I will show next, while some critics celebrate the themed city, by arguing that it satisfies people's needs, others deplore theming by arguing against its exclusionary implications.
THEMING AND FAKENESS
Theming is a polarizing practice. Since the opening of Disneyland, critics have discussed the socioeconomic and cultural implications of the urban theme park model. Their reactions tend to converge on two arguments. Some observers respond enthusiastically to Disney's city. They argue it provides the kind of space that people want and that architects and planners have long neglected. Other commentators remain critical of theming, contending that it inevitably produces a fake, exclusionary, and controlling city. These scholars link the production of themed settings to problematics of hegemony, privatization, and authenticity. In the scholarly conversation around theming, authors tend to attribute the defense of theming to commentators in the professional fields — architects, designers, or journalists — and ascribe a more critical perspective to academic inquirers. This view, I would suggest, implicitly trivializes the arguments in favor of theming. It assumes that the observations of those who favor styled milieus are driven by practical considerations and lack the depth and intellectual sophistication of those who are critical. In this section, I hope to demonstrate that the debates surrounding the ethics, politics, and meaning of theming reveal nuanced interpretations on both sides.
There have long been theming enthusiasts in both the professional and academic worlds. In his keynote speech at the 1963 Urban Design Conference at Harvard, the real estate developer James W. Rouse defined Disneyland as "the greatest piece of urban design in the United States" (quoted in Marling 1997, 170). He argued that the standards of the park in terms of design, popular success, and technological advancement should be a model for architects and planners. Rouse's lesson has been taken up by organizations such as the Urban Land Institute, the American Planning Association, and — of course — the Themed Entertainment Association, which have assisted professionals and researchers in interpreting, designing, and managing themed settings (Hannigan 1998). While these institutions are primarily motivated by profit, scholars have praised the Disney city on more theoretical grounds. The world-famous architect Charles Moore argued in 1972, for example, that Disneyland recreated "all the chances to respond to a public environment" that had disappeared in the modernist and sprawl models. According to Moore, Disneyland allowed interaction and participation. It "created a place" by providing a "whole public world, full of sequential occurrences, of big and little drama, full of hierarchies of importance and excitement." To those who objected that the park was, in fact, private and expensive to enter, Moore replied: "Curiously, for a public place, Disneyland is not free. You buy tickets at the gate. But then, Versailles cost someone a great deal of money, too. Now, as then, you have to pay for the public life" (2004 [1972], 126).
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Excerpted from "The Real Fake"
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