Foreword
Excerpt, pages 13-14
When I started writing the Total Landscape and decided to keep the focus on theme parks, I hoped that this book could be written as a diary of an archeological excavation. In that sense I was hoping that the book would be similar to Paul Virilio’s Bunker Archeology, in which Virilio documents concrete bunkers built on the cost of Normandy by German forces during the World War II (Virilio 1994). Virilio rightly understood bunkers and fortifications as clear expressions of Hitler’s military understanding of territory, time, and subsequently of the concept of ‘military space.’ But Virilio’s good fortune was in the fact that Hitler and his military commanders were long gone by the time he visited the coast of Normandy, back in 1960s. My problem was in that despite an overall decline in attendance due to the decrease in purchasing power, and the fact that the age of extra-large theme parks was gone, theme parks have been in demand as a conceptual and operational model in a variety of fields and professions. Just as I enjoyed Virilio’s discovery of the half-buried German bunkers and his interpretation, my reader, I hoped, would one day open these pages and would be able to understand the rationale of a strange civilization that had built such monstrous structures in order to produce ‘the most transient, yet lasting of products: human experience.’ My belief has been that exposing minute details and facts of the production of theme parks would in fact expose the historical and human condition of the present, hence the total landscape not as a theoretical framework but as a condition. In that sense, theme park is the ur-form of total landscape. I was coached by Walter Benjamin’s attempt to create an ‘Ur-history of the 19th Century’ with his unfinished Arcade project through which Benjamin collected images of 19th Century Paris that captured small, particular moments and then attempted to present them in a form of montage. Such images, whether pictorially or verbally represented, were supposed to reveal the ‘total historical event,’ the perceptible ur-phenomenon in which the origins of the present would be found (Buck-Morss 1991: 71-77). As Buck-Morss writes, Benjamin transferred Goethe’s concept of the urphänomen that emerged in Goethe’s writing on the morphology of nature, to his own work on history. The concept of ur-phenomenon suggests that there are ideal forms that can reveal, through an act of ‘irreducible observation,’ both object and subject of knowledge, and potentially their relationships. For Walter Benjamin, postcards, ads, street signs, posters and many other artifacts of the late nineteen century Paris were precisely such symbols. To my mind, theme parks are such ‘ideal symbols’ of the Twentieth Century where ‘general reveals itself immediately in a particular form’ (Simmel 1918: 57). Theme parks themselves are thus the theory of total landscape.
The question then was how to represent the complexity of theme parks, and especially of urban public space, without simplifying them—how to talk about so many interrelated domains without appearing a dilettante? The resulting narrative is for the most part free from any attempt to work explicitly in either theoretical or critical mode, as well as from attempts to instrumentalize knowledge towards operational aims because this is neither a ‘how to make a theme park’ book nor a ‘how to design public space’ manual, although it sheds light on the actual processes of designing and operating both theme parks and public spaces. In doing so, I have tried to minimize the professional jargon from all fields involved and allow the general public to get a sense of complexities beyond each of the professional practices at work without simplifying their intricacies. In order to open the book to non-design audience, I have also tried to present my theoretical observations within the narrative context and avoid too many normative declarations.
This book has been a long time coming and in the process, I have accumulated an impressive amount of research materials from a variety of sources and all imaginable academic and professional disciplines. I have met a wide range of people and learned a great deal about things I cared about as well as about topics I could not care less about. At times, I felt that different materials had pulled me their ways and often I felt lost in view of the complexities involved in this kind of research. At the same time I struggled to bring all the relevant material to the eyes that may be different than mine, as I desired to speak to designers of all kinds, to marketing professionals, to sociologists, anthropologists, geographers, and many others including the lay reader. Keeping this ship on its course, whatever the course may have been in the last ten years, was not a trivial task. I believe many of those struggles will be obvious to careful readers, together with the fact that this book does not ‘celebrate’ either Walt Disney’s or other theme parks.
Writing a book on something as complex as theme parks and public spaces without explicitly referencing ways in which their cultural and social meanings are contested on the ground through daily practices was a hard task, but it was done on purpose. The assumption that at this point in time seems realistic is that in-between theme parks and the increasingly privatized urban public spaces, there are subtle differences of degree rather than kind, and the purpose of my effort has been to identify, unearth, and study the common framework of the two in order to eventually learn how to manage it in regard to its most promising possibilities. For promising possibilities are embedded within the grounded and critical social practices of both individuals and social groups inscribed in space and time. Despite all the challenges to be mapped out later in this book, it has been precisely the populist appeal of mass entertainment and mass consumption that potentially, just potentially, carries an energizing force within it for the traditionally marginalized social groups, for women, children, teenagers, people of color, the poor, the old, and many other ‘good natured crowds,’ both as producers and as consumers. Despite all my efforts, I did not find evidence that there is a critical mass of resistance practices that can mount a significant challenge to the condition of total landscape, even though, one could argue, we all simultaneously produce it and consume it. After all, as Christine Boyer rightfully asked, ‘who raises a voice in opposition to this corporate organization of culture?’ (Boyer 1994: 65) More importantly, there is no evidence that there is de facto a meaningful dialogue between those who produce theme parks and public space, and those who ‘enjoy’ them. The only form of ‘exchange’ between the two camps is marketing analysis. One of the reasons for that has also been an explicitly materialist conceptualization of both theme parks and privatized public space that tends to disable alternative interpretations and contested meanings potentially generated by varied social and cultural groups. Ironically, total landscape offers a vision of social space without society. But rightly so, because if there is no voluntary, desirable, meaningful and constructive communication between individuals, ‘there is no such a thing as society,’ as Margaret Thatcher famously declared. Thus, by purposefully excluding the point of view of those who ‘produce through the act of consumption—guests, visitors, tourists and citizens—I wanted to be realistic in identifying the current state of the question ≡
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