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.