Chapter 5: Becoming
Chapter 5, Becoming, brings the discussion to a dialectic relationship between theme parks and cities, and to the ways in which the two merge into a generation of conceptual hybrids. It discusses the imposition of ‘the theme park model’ upon urban public spaces across the world, and the resulting production of PROPASt: privately-owned publicly-accessible space typically organized around a specific theme, the archetypal manifestation of total landscape in urban public space. The chapter employs the metaphor of ‘healing’ in order to speculate on what may happen when the ‘theme park model’ is employed towards the ‘healing’ of urban spaces. The book also claims that, in order to properly understand and frame urban public space as a public resource, a systematic understanding of both the external variables and its complex innerworkings is a must: public agencies, elected public officials, and promoters of public space commonly see and present isolated sites and sporadic manifestations of public space and provide simplistic schemes for their (re)design. Even when they understand public space holistically they often come to predictable ‘solutions’ that challenge the idea of public space as a public good. As a result, public space is compartmentalized, individualized, and privatized through the ‘rhetoric of therapy.’ Such a ‘therapeutic ethos’ of total landscape prefers varied forms of private ownership and management, some of which is discussed in detail in this chapter (such are the public-private partnerships). It will be also argued that just like Henry Ford had set standards of assembly-line based industrial production, Walt Disney had set standards for the production of ‘public experience’ enveloped in the therapeutic, family-value themed narratives.
PROPASt is typically produced through a mechanism called Urban Entertainment Project, that has been naturalized as the way to ‘revitalize problematic urban areas.’ Most revitalization projects revolve around a flagship project such as waterfronts, sports arenas, museums or entertainment districts, including Walt Disney Co.’s projects for the transformation of 42nd Street in New York City. In many ways, PROPASt is a theater of operations and similarly to theme park it is woven into the framework of total landscape by the interlocking of the domains of media with that of material environment, by the elimination and denial of social conflict through private management and private security forces, by consensus entertainments, and other characteristics. Some forms of public-private partnerships will be discussed, such as Business Improvement Districts (BID), and more specifically the Bryant Park BID in New York City as a typical example. The other form of privatization discussed is the inauguration of privately owned public spaces by the New York City in 1961, with the adoption of a new zoning resolution that had enabled the city to trade off with developers by offering extra floor area bonuses to developers willing to construct open spaces for public use designed by following the Zoning Resolution standards. Other forms of developing PROPASt will also be discussed, such as Times Square in New York City or the Japanese examples like Festival Gate in Osaka and Canal City in Fukuoka. All of them came into being through the rhetoric of therapy and healing.
Like theme parks, PROPASt is also extremely marketing sensitive. Many PROPASt are symbolic projects linked into an intricate web of cross-marketing schemes and, just as theme parks, they are not core-generating revenues but a vehicle for diversifying corporate portfolios. What puts the PROPASt apparatus in motion are scores, by effectively connecting different constitutive elements of the environment into a coherent arrangement of forces within the theater of operations. Scores determine, among other characteristics, the character of pseudo-events, their environmental disposition, the time of occurrence and duration, frequency, number of performers, and the way they interact with tourists; urban tourism is the single largest source of revenue for most propast developers. Realistic challenges that cities encounter in face of urban tourism, such the problem of controlling an escalating influx of tourists that goes beyond the carrying capacity of historic urban centers, has in many cities been resolved by mechanisms that move the experience of urban public space closer to total landscape. Tourist cards, explicit and strict behavior codes, way-finding systems that disperse the urban tourist to highly predetermined locations, and urban safaris are just some ways in which urban communities across the world strive to find sources of economic revitalization within the framework of competitive urbanism. Economic benefit of all the above is questionable to all but PROPASt developers. In fact, the data shows that many such ‘healing’ projects usually suffer from profit-leakage and have a negative sum economic effect on the micro-economic environment. Thousands of small business and individuals are evacuating areas immediately surrounding emerging PROPASt in search of a more affordable place to live and do business. Finally, as with the theme park industry, when the urban entertainment industry reaches the point of maturation, the PROPASt market will be consolidated by multinational media and entertainment conglomerates buying out smaller property owners, such are varied redevelopment corporations and revitalization agencies. In that respect, the door is currently wide open to those who would have an interest in potentially owning entire cities.
In its concluding part, Chapter 5 will discuss a common notion that PROPASt operates as a behavioral laboratory and exhibits restrictive interest in human behavior as well as a restrictive menu of possibilities for human interaction. That has a direct effect on physical, visual, social, and psychological accessibility. But the control exercised in theme parks and PROPASt cannot be placed on entirely different grounds from the control exercised in the society as a whole, where varied policies of exclusion are the norm. In that sense, PROPASt offers a vision of civility bounded by consumption (Zukin 1995: 55), and protected by gates, entrance-fees and private security forces in an aggressive attempt at combining general access with social control. A boom in the number of private security forces in the 1990s has been followed by the sophistication of surveillance technology and a parallel erosion of public authority. Partnerships between state police and private security agencies have now grown into a security industrial complex that commodifies ‘security’ in the name of public safety (Jennings 2005). The use of biometric technology in all this has marked a quantum leap in the convergence of surveillance technology, laws that enable fast data collection and analysis, and dehumanization of data, all inevitably leading towards a ‘total information convergence’ in all aspects of contemporary life (O’Harrow 2005). Given that the authority of the security apparatus over public spaces and public life is growing exponentially, the above are terrifying developments that, without doubt, point at the militarization of public life through PROPASt. Finally, Becoming addresses the question of representation of ‘desirable urbanity’ across scales that can be identified in the ways in which PROPASt, public art, galleries, museums, sport halls, theaters are all linked in a never-before-experienced ways in terms of the aestheticized urban public experience. Dimensions of human experience in the public space have been radically remapped as propast fabricates notions of new civility by spatializing new propositions for civic life and configuring them into a web of social relationships and social processes which are then represented by public art, mass media, edutainment and other practices that reconfigure the cognitive, perceptual and lived aspects of civic life ≡