Chapter 4: Departing
Chapter 4, Departing, discusses departures from the standard theme park formula. The most common departures from the theme park are Retail Entertainment Centers (REC), a combination of retail shopping and themed entertainment in a themed, gated, sometimes indoor environment. The chapter discusses a few examples, including the largest REC of all: Las Vegas. In 1972, Tomas Maldonado noted that Las Vegas is ‘the final product,’ one might even call it almost perfect of its kind, of more than half a century of masked manipulatory violence, directed toward the formation of an apparently free and playful urban environment (Maldonado 1972). Another noted type of departure are those locally-bound, regional theme parks that focus exclusively on cultural, historic or geographically-defined themes such are ethnographic and heritage centers, or theme parks promoting particular religious worldviews. The chapter discusses the construction of restoration villages and open-air architectural museums such are the Polynesian Cultural Center, Shikoku Mura, Window on China, The Dracula Land, and Taiwan Folk Village. Since the mid-1980s, a stream of religious theme parks have been proposed and constructed: the chapter will discuss Heritage USA, the Holy Land Experience, Aparecida, and the Krishna-Lila theme park constructed as ‘a spiritual Disneyland’ to accommodate a newly formed township for families that relocated to Vrindavan ‘for the purpose of either retirement or to do service in the Holy Dhama.’ The second type of common departure is when such environments are turned into living-history theme parks, where a specific historical moment, or religious setting, is carefully detailed and preserved for the enjoyment of visitors and often permanent residents alike. The book places such nostalgic and profitable drives into a historical perspective by discussing Dreamland, Coney Island, Henry Ford’s Greenfield Village, and Colonial Williamsburg, Virginia, all virtual, nostalgic, fictional communities where people have inhabited an idealized, yet personal vision of the past. Similar drives have motivated many developers and entrepreneurs to develop contemporary living theme parks, such as the one based on the ex-East Germany as a thematic framework proposed in Prenden, twenty miles north of Berlin. Subsequently, the chapter discusses Huis Ten Bosch and Celebration as ideal examples of the escalating process of fabricating desires for living and working within the strict boundaries of theme park territories. Celebration is initially discussed within Walt Disney’s ideas related to the ‘city-making,’ and then in more detail in relation to its rationale and design.
The main emphasis in Chapter 4 is placed on discussing Huis Ten Bosch (HTB). Following the method established in Chapters 2 and 3, the discussion of Huis Ten Bosch is framed through Themeparking and Themeing. By its size and capital budget, Huis Ten Bosch is one of the largest private facilities ever built in Japan. The discussion places HTB within the system of urban spaces and that of social relationships in Japan. It also discusses the historical trajectory of HTB’s invention: the origin of its thematic envelope and the reasoning behind its development and promotion. Political and economic factors that underlie its conceptualization will be discussed in relation to its trade theater, the regional and national traffic infrastructure, and both the macro- and micro-economic impact that HTB had in the region. In order to make HTB’s impact on the region comprehensible, I will form a comparative framework between data from its first year of operation (the period between 1992-93) with the trends established at the peak of its economic performance (1996-97). The data for 1992-93 also include the impact that had occurred during the construction process that had taken place in the period from 1989-92. Socio-economic statistics clearly show the production capacity of the theme park apparatus: HTB has significantly improved the socio-economic environment not only in terms of the number of tourists and the level of expenditure in the area, but also in terms of other significant socio-economic factors such are employment, regional and national migrations, restructuring of the work force, tax revenues, and the supporting service industry it had generated.
With respect to the themeing of HTB, the chapter initially focuses on the displacement of visitors by the force of an alien visual and spatial ordering system, and the impact of an ‘exotic’ narrative theme. This clear semiotic distinction from the environment, enhanced by the mechanisms of social displacement, is maintained throughout the theater of operations and organized into eight principal theatra: Entrance theatron, Kinderdijk theatron, Mauruts square theatron, Nassau square theatron, Alexander square theatron, World Bazaar theatron, Utrecht theatron, and Palace theatron. Theatra are linked into a chain of environmental units by an intriguing example of the loop-plan, together with bridges and canals. Each theatron is then discussed in terms of its place within the loop pattern, its harlequin dress, sensory stimuli employed, and its role in the overall score. Each theatron is the site for a series of pseudo-events whose space and time of occurrence are strictly determined by the master score. From the nature of pseudo-events and socio-cultural processes of their production, the discussion moves towards the instrumental role of pseudo-events in organizing the spatio-temporal consumption of HTB, and in enhancing the control over its proper. Furthermore, the convergence of the ‘event-schedule’ with the three other elements of the theater of operations (internal pattern, harlequin dress, and sensory stimuli) is also discussed in relation to HTB Company’s distinctions between ‘software’ (event programming) and ‘hardware’ (physical planning) aspects of the theme park apparatus.
HTB provides a desirable introduction into the discussion of dialectic relationship between theme parks and cities because it was designed as a theme-park-town to be initially inhabited by 30 000 permanent residents. Due to economic recession and financial problems including undercapitalization, HTB is today inhabited by 750 people living in Huis Ten Bosch Hills. These issues are discussed as a way of closing the discussion of theme parks and opening the discussion on the specific type of departure from the conventional theme park formula to what is usually referred to as the imposition of ‘the theme park model’ onto the existing urban fabric, that is the process of expansion of the theme park apparatus beyond the strict boundaries of theme parks as a vehicle for the production of total landscape ≡