Disneyfication of the Metropolis: Popular Resistance in Seattle

Abstract

Soon after Disneyland opened in 1955, architects and planners began to adapt elements of the Disneyland model to urban design projects. Few recent attempts to revitalize the core of central cities and almost no major suburban and outer city mall have escaped the Disney imprint. The Disney Company began offering its own urban planning and design services to cities. In Seattle, Disney consultants were engaged over a period of three decades in efforts to shape and reshape the city's civic center. This paper examines the protracted debate that occurred over the design and redesign of the civic center and the ultimate rejection of the Disney. Company plan. The author examines the values embedded in the Disney model and how these were identified and contested through community action.

City Tour Guides: Urban Alchemists at Work

“…Such a distinction serves as a corrective to the overemphasis on the consumption side of tourism studies, most clearly evidenced by Dean MacCannell's classic, The Tourist (1973), John Urry's The Tourist Gaze (1990a; 1990b), Cohen's essay on tourist experiences (1979), and the collection Tourism: Bridges Across Continents (Pearce, Morrison, and Rutledge, 1998)—all of which provide scant to no mention of any of the interactional processes that display culture for tourists. the conventional perspective portrays the tourist as the “epitome of avoidance” (Sorkin, 1992: 231) and the most “acquiescent subject” (Turner and Ash, 1975), and a focus the guides themselves consider the other side of the coin. This said, a few words on the city guides'clients—from the guide's perspective—is necessary.…”

“…Across the Atlantic, in a lecture in Karlsruhe, Germany, Richard Sennett voiced similar fears over a consumerist vision of the city, claiming that the endless strings of GAPs, Starbucks, and Niketowns deny the contemporary urban dweller the chance to discover “the strange, the unexpected, the arousing,” and that, correspondingly, “shared history” and “collective memory” were slowly being forgotten (2005). Emerging in the 1990s, the popular “Theming” or “Disneyfication” meme (see Sorkin, 1992; Warren, 1994) tracked the rise of “corporate culturalism” in places like Times Square, Berlin's Potsdamer Platz, London's Canary Wharf, Los Angeles' Universal Studios' CityWalk, Las Vegas' Fremont Street Experience, New Orleans, French Quarter, and Boston's Faneuil Hall (see Delany, 1999; Du Gay and Pryke, 2002; Gotham, 2007; Gottdiener, 2001; Gottdiener, Dickens, and Collins, 1999; Knox, 1992; Rojek, 1993; Roost, 2000). These highly trafficed, ersatz areas are portrayed as ossifying urban culture and nurturing “sanitized razzamatazz” (Muschamp, 1995).…”

The Annihilation of Space by Law: The Roots and Implications of Anti‐Homeless Laws in the United States

“…Stacy Warren (1994) ended a recent article on the Disney Corporation's failed attempts at urban planning in Seattle by reflecting on the fact that homeless people were actively involved in the planning process created at the end of the 1980s in the wake of Disney's failure. She quotes a homeless man's remarks on a questionnaire he filled out in 1989: "thank you for having me and other individuals to be part of the [Seattle] Center -warmth, etc.…”

Planning and Urban Rivalry in the San Francisco Bay Area in the 1930s

“…While transforming bridges, roads, and the airport into spectacles, merchants also asserted the city's cosmopolitan identity, which they hoped would lure travelers to the city from throughout the Bay Area and the West and from around the Pacific. San Francisco merchants and planners, by focusing on the creation of fantasies in the 1930s, helped spawn a new way of looking at infrastructure and planning in the United States two decades before Disneyland (Warren 1994).…”