Chapter 1: You are Here
Chapter 1 excerpt, pages 18-19:
On a warm summer evening in June 1999, two consecutive news items that appeared on the Japanese NHK’s early news-hour caught my attention: first was the information that as little as one percent of all Americans possess more than 50 percent of the entire American non-residential real estate property. The second was that Walt Disney Co. is about to build a new theme park in Hong Kong. Asked whether this is a wise move for the troubled post-colonial economy of Hong Kong, an official in the Hong Kong Government said that although the actual contract with Walt Disney Company predicates large infrastructure and other investments on the part of the Government, the prestige that this project would bring, the number of people who would be employed in its construction and operation, and also the prospect of attracting five million Asian Disney fans a year to Hong Kong, all made the venture desirable and ultimately profitable. NHK news were occasionally interrupted and then followed by advertisements for special ready-made meals, high-tech dishes, exotic tourist destinations, super tools, car polishers, yacht shiners, supreme master cleaners, skin cleansers, moisturizers and softeners, and other such necessities. By discussing theme parks and privately-owned public spaces, this book attempts to understand tiny fragments of a globally emerging socio-economic system that produces and consumes specialized space just as it does with all other commodities. In such a system, the historically dialectic relationship between private and public domains seems to have been replaced by a homogeneous realm which stands close to the base of what Michel Foucault called ‘the sanitary society.’ For Foucault, the ideas of strict sanitation (hygiene) and discipline, when brought together form the ultimate stage of any panoptic, totalizing social realm. Namely, the symbiosis of the political and economic power, and the convergence of governmental and corporate interest have created new bureaucratic bodies based on an ensemble of normative procedures that have since organized the techniques for both the production and consumption of theme parks as well as other specialized spaces. Once such techniques become deeply associated with the human practices they generate, so deeply associated that in fact we confuse the two, they tend to become autonomous and to function independently from the social system they are intended to serve (Postman 1992).
Total Landscape, Theme Parks, Public Space unfolds on two parallel levels of discussion. On the first level, the book argues that the production of theme parks is achieved by employing a complex apparatus that simultaneously: fabricates consumer fantasies and desires in the media; constructs material routes that lead and transport consumers to theme parks or capitalizes on existing ones; and organizes the theme park as material construct, symbolic environment and an experience factory. On the second level, the book employs the theme park in identifying, dissecting and describing the properties of new, hybrid forms of privately owned public space emerging in urban environments worldwide. In that respect the book does not propose that theme parks are (or will ever become) desirable substitutes for democratic public space, but deliberately cuts across the ‘theme park model’ in order to understand the principle of systematic totality employed when such a ‘model’ is used to reconstruct public realm in the United States, Japan and Europe, and to discuss what its expansion out of the boundaries of theme parks means for the transformation of the public realm as a whole. Furthermore, by illuminating the relationship between theme parks and public space, the book offers an insight into the ethos, criteria for design and evaluation, and a new set of normative expectations for the increasingly privatized urban public space in the Twenty-First Century.
The theme park industry is today a truly global industry with over 250 million visitors annually at 50 most visited theme parks (O’Brien et. al. 2002b) that generate total revenue of nearly US$19 billion (Benz 2003a). Only Walt Disney theme parks have been visited by over one billion people since the opening of Disneyland Park in 1955 (Marling 1997: 14). Such large theme parks are designed as systems of breathtaking complexity and scale: Disneyland and Walt Disney World were in respective historical periods largest investments into privately owned public facilities in the history of mankind. Levels of investment into large theme parks and complexities of their design, execution and operation can scale-wise be compared only with the largest military installations and with some NASA programs. The complex design challenges that theme parks present are so immense that no single individual or a single disciplinary team can accomplish them successfully. Large theme parks are customarily designed, constructed, and operated by thousands of individuals working in multiple, interdisciplinary teams that simultaneously design its presence in the media, the material and immaterial routes that lead people to theme parks, their material environment, and guest experiences alike. In that sense every material object, sound, smell, or performance, together with the outside factors such are income levels, oil prices or weather, is designed as an adaptable, relational unit within a dynamic system in action whose complexity is symptomatic of total landscape. Miscalculating any of the elements within such a complex system brings the entire system into jeopardy.
Most theme park developments cover thousands of acres of landscape and some work as real towns. Walt Disney World Resort, for instance, is twice the size of Manhattan, has customarily over 25 million visitors a year, and employs over 30 000 people. The unrestrained imposition of the totalizing governing and design principles over such vast landscapes makes theme parks increasingly important case studies especially in regard to theme parks ‘inhabited’ by permanent residents. In Chapter 4, I will discuss a ‘theme park to end all theme parks’ (Hendry 2000:43): Huis Ten Bosch (HTB) which was designed and constructed in Japan as a theme-park-town to be inhabited by 30 000 permanent residents. I will try to argue that HTB, as well as all other theme parks, exist within the system of urban spaces and that of social relationships, rendering the theme park simultaneously as a spatial and social machine. Their significance for a critical understanding of the relationship between design and the key socio-economic processes that characterize the late Twentieth and early Twenty-First Century is essential ≡