CROSSROADS IN CULTURAL STUDIES
Fourth International Conference
June 29 - July 2, 2002, Tampere, Finland
Themes and the City: Themed Environments and the
Construction of Urban Imaginaries
Organiser: Markus Reisenleitner
Ingram, Susan (University of Victoria,
Canada) THEMING AND THE CRYSTAL PALACE: A HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE
The contribution this presentation would like to make to the panel lies in its
attempt to locate theming historically by focusing on the Great Exhibition of
1851 in London. Just as identities are never just there but can only be learned
in specific historical moments, this presentation aims at establishing that
theming as a cultural practice was also never "just there" but emerged
under particular historical circumstances. It will show how the things on
display in the Crystal Palace were organized to provide not only knowledge about
these things but also to make available secondhand knowledge about faraway
places and times to those without the purchasing power to experience them
firsthand. It was not a question of novelty or innovation per se but rather in
the bringing together of enlightenment and entertainment, spectacle and
speculation, nationalism and empire, and placing it all under the rubric of
all-purpose consumption that the Crystal Palace for the first time successfully
united these phenomena on the level of mass culture, creating what I will argue
could be regarded as the first theme park. What this presentation is
particularly interested in exploring is why this happened in what was arguably
the most powerful urban center of its time.
Szabó-Knotik, Cornelia (University of
Music and Performing Arts, Austria) MUSIC CITY UNLIMITED? VIENNA, THE
CONTEMPORARY CAPITAL OF MUSIC
Theming, a global trend of urban mise-en-scène, has been integral to Vienna's
self-representation. Since the 19th century Vienna has continuously presented
itself as a "city of music," as the "capital" of music. With
an increasingly nostalgic touch, this city has cheerfully embraced the qualities
of a museum, preserving and conspicuously displaying its cultural values, and of
a theme park dearly devoted to classical music. This contribution analyses
recent developments against the historical backdrop of Central European
urbanization and music life. In the early 19th century, when music life began to
professionalize, it made the topography of Central Europe's cities a battlefield
for the definition of culture in the course of developing national identities.
Transforming public space into a battlefield is generally indicative of a
conflict between a dominant and a marginalized form of culture; the current
theme-park trend in Vienna has developed in parallel with an increasing
world-wide awareness that western musical "elite culture" (the
"high-brow") is about to be marginalized by the transformation of
bourgeois music life, which has been undergoing fundamental changes on many
levels, in regard to the identity of composers, performers and audience, the
aesthetics of music, and its channels of distribution and reception. This trend
is picked up by current practices in the business of leisure which, for the sake
of an 'event culture', makes places special by providing visitors of all ages
with the most up-to-date and desirable experience of "fun," child-like
fascination and astonishment, as well as to the city's having been turned into
an artificial fantasy island of classical music, in which the markings of public
space correspond not only to certain media practices (space as an important
category of the web), but also to more traditional physical and architectural
practices monuments, buildings and halls acquire their function and meaning
in relation to the importance of musical culture.
Gow, Andrew (University of Alberta,
Canada) THE MALL, THE CHURCH AND THE ULTRA-ORTHODOX PIZZA JOINT: ENCLAVES AND
VERSCHACHTELUNG AS NEGATIONS/CONFIRMATIONS OF DOMINANT INSTITUTIONAL CULTURES
What do a family-run kosher pizza and deli in West Edmonton Mall, the Scouting
Room at Holy Trinity Anglican Church (both founded 1911), and the HUB Mall and
Student Residences within the University of Alberta have in common? These spaces
work both to resist and to confirm the dominant cultures that surround them.
Natalie Zemon Davis has argued that in early modern Europe, carnevalesque
entertainments and rituals of inversion (Mardi Gras, Carneval, boy bishops,
etc.) acted as relief valves that allowed people to vent their frustration with
the dominant order, but in the end functioned more to confirm that order than to
undermine it. This functionalist-structuralist view of culture is suggestive in
many ways, but has no room for the multiple slippages or aporia between
institutional hegemonic discourses and putatively resistant praxis. Taking a
number of 'resistant spaces' in the built environment of a northern 'indoor
city,' where indoor space is (quasi-)public space, I examine how the architects
or builders of these stages and the actors on them enact resistance in
particular ways: a worn-out, family-run kosher pizza joint in the enormous Mall;
a Scouting group with deeded, permanent privileges to use particular rooms in a
church; a commercial mall-cum-student residence in the middle of a very large
university. Each of these also tends to confirm and support the dominant
surrounding culture; yet neither attitude seems to prevail. In each case,
resistant uses of these spaces define them vis-à-vis the hegemonic practices
that both frame them and make them possible. Tension defines all these examples.
van der Horst, Hilje (Delft University
of Technology, The Netherlands) CREATING MULTICULTURAL SYMBOLISM IN THE CITY
(HILJE VAN DER HORST)
In diverse projects in the Netherlands the built environment of cities is
altered with the aim to reflect the mixed population in the area. Sometimes
buildings with a 'foreign' architecture are placed in it, sometimes it concerns
smaller elements, such as a fountain or an artwork. These initiatives are aimed
at exoticizing the environment. At a more 'instrumental' level they are
sometimes part of creating a multicultural 'funshopping' area. In other cases
they are aimed at creating places of identification for people with roots in
other cultures. There is an underlying assumption that immigrants feel excluded
in an environment that is dominated by Dutch material culture. By incorporating
'exotic' elements in this environment it is thought to create a sense of
belonging for the immigrant population. In doing so the initiators aim to
portray a certain kind of multicultural environment that is positive, exotic,
tolerant, harmonious and often has an emphasis on consumption. Frequently it is
also part of an effort to create a new identity for a neighbourhood that is
typically portrayed as dangerous, poor, dirty and black. These strategies aimed
at multicultural imaginaries are usually top-down, initiated by housing
corporations, organisations and municipalities. The discourses they use differ
strongly from the intentions of, for example, individual shopkeepers who try to
communicate the origin of the food or products they sell on the outside of the
shop or from the building of mosques and other religious centres. This paper
will discuss the foregoing topics in the light of different case studies. This
paper is based on recent research in the Netherlands in which many initiatives
of multicultural building were studied, professionals in the field were
interviewed and many photographs were taken.
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