Museification and Disneyfication of cities

by Biljana Spirkoska

Zoning has proven to be an inadequate tool, by itself, for building livable communities. Zoning came at the price of a reduced civic life, sharpened social inequities and inflated housing prices, deepened division between races and between classes, and increased car dependency and related pollution. In response, the modernist principle of separation of functions - zoning has been abandoned and the periphery has assumed almost all the functions of the traditional center.

Quite opposite, contemporary downtowns are being subjected to a process of monoculturalisation. According to Eeckhout and Keunen, "the late-capitalist downtown is almost exclusively dedicated to three functions: consumption, finance and symbolic economy. This postindustrial symbolic economy comprises tourism, entertainment, culture, sports, the media and fashion industries, and an amalgamation of services logistically underpinning these activities." Further on, they explain that this monocultures can be found either in a form of "financial and office districts that bustle with life during the day and are spookily deserted at night", or "tourist zones that are populated at certain times of the day or in certain seasons only."

Given that tourism has become No. 1 World industry after the Second World War, mass tourism has developed into major source of income for the contemporary city centers. The "city trips" and "urban safaris" have become popular especially among middle-class and well-educated population groups which are fond by culture. Since culture attracts tourists, according to Sharon Zukin, it is "no longer a mere reflection, but a principal economic motor of the city’s material and social life". Given the circumstances, the worlds of finance, politics, and the arts have united into turning the arts and their major institutions like museums, opera houses, concert halls, and theaters, from not-for-profit to for-profit by privatizing them. Furthermore the economic importance of tourism has led to competitive self promotion of cities. As Eeckhout and Keunen point out, "in a globalizing economic system that is increasingly indifferent to questions of locale for the production of goods, cities have paradoxically had to start emphasizing their identities and differences again in competition for, on one hand tourists, and on the other, cultural and business elites. This competition of the cities to position themselves in the markets of mass tourism and the culture industries has foster a strong interest in the production of urban images.

More and more, cities are being presented or sold as collections of images."
In order tourists to understand what they are seeing they have been prepared through certain repertoires of qualified images from information brochures, from the advertizing, from guidebooks and from television reports. In other words, prior to the production of the real vision of the monument, that vision has been prefigured by experts in art history and in the creation of taste. This characteristic contemporary phenomenon, Jean-Louis Déotte defines as museification. According to him, museification of architecture, in monuments or in ruins, is subject to a process of exhibition that is destined to produce their "disappearance as objects in order to enter in glory a universe in which, thanks to the suspension of every particular quality, it will be possible to include them in the empyrean realm of trans-historical values."

In his book "Variations on a Theme Park", Michael Sorkin, draws parallels between the contemporary urban environments and the Theme Parks. He argues that the template of Disneyland, template of privatized, consumption oriented theme park intended to simulate a shared middle-class culture, in recent years is used as a model for actual urban transformations. In this transformations, the urban downtowns are presented as historical attraction and streamlined for consumption, and just as the suburbs of the 1920s are designed to address the needs of the middle-class, aestheticizing social differences, offering a reassuring environment without arms, alcohol, drunks, or homeless bums.

The Disneyfication of the contemporary city can be aligned also with the gentrification of historical and industrial areas. Typically these historical sites are transformed into a new type of urban shopping mall combining shops, restaurants, small-cart boutiques, and performance spaces. As M. Christine Boyer explains, in order to meet commercial-tourist aims in these pseudo-historical sites, "the histories of cities have been manipulated, recycled, simulated, and artificially resuscitated. The collective memory of cities has been exchanged for a fictive image transforming the city like the print of giant camera obscura."

In other words, the advance of the post-industrial society has changed along the course of the forces which configure the culture and the social life of our time. In response, a new type of society has evolved- the society of the spectacle and of the total commercialization of the object around us. The new No.1 industry is evolving and with it another way of seeing, which derives many consequences some of which mentioned in the text.

Reference:
― Ghent Urban Studies Team, 1999, The Urban Condition: Space, Community, and Self in the Contemporary Metropolis, 010 Publishers, Rotterdam.
― Berlage Institute, Fundació Mies van der Rohe, 2002, New working and living conditions in cities: forum & workshop at the Venice Biennale, Actar, Barcelona.