Disneyland as the ultimate utopia and cities build in its example. Would you want to live in the Disney world?
Gottdiener (1995) compares Disneyland to the nearby located city of Los Angeles. He compares six themes: transportation, food, clothing, shelter, entertainment, social control, economics and politics. Many things are better in Disneyland, like the transportation system. In Disneyland you are a pedestrian, while in Los Angeles you are a passenger and the car is a necessity. The architecture in Disneyland is based on fantasy, while in the city it’s about functionality.
Gottdiener states that in “contrast to the Los Angeles region, Disneyland is a utopian urban space” (Gottdiener, 1995, p. 105). First of all, Disneyland is a theme park and not a city, so it couldn’t be a model for a city. Second, the image Gottdiener creates of Disneyland in his comparison is simply false. For instance, about politics he declares that Disneyland has a participatory democracy, while in fact Disneyland has no democracy at all, but a dictatorship ruled by its owners the Disney Company. Besides this Gottdiener himself describes many of the negative aspects of the park. In the 1960’s hippies and later on punk rockers weren’t allowed to enter the park. Their image didn’t fit the image of the theme park and these youthful idealists could destroy the peaceful harmony of the park.
Social control is an important element of Disneyland. “In Disneyland social control is refined to an art, the art of moving crowds by their own motivation instead of coercion” (p. 109). I simply call this pure manipulation. Not only is the appearance of the people in the park controlled and manipulated, but their freedom of movement as well. I would not call Disneyland a model for utopia, although the real cities aren’t that much better.
My birth city, Maastricht, has recently developed a policy (link in Dutch) to regulate the drugs tourism. Major Leers wants to direct the traffic outside the city's centre and to do this he wants all the coffeeshops to move to the border with Belgium. You can draw comparisons of this manipulative idea to the manipulation of the freedom of movement in Disneyland. Hwoever, there is one important difference: the governors of Maastricht were by its inhabitants, while in Disneyland a commercial company is ruling.
The social control in the cities and in the theme parks goes even further. In Maastricht there is a security system of camera’s placed everywhere in the city. The cameras can follow any person in the city everywhere, including inside the houses. This way the government can keep track of the suspicious inhabitants. But isn’t the idea that the government can get inside your private space a bit too much?
I would never want to live in the so-called utopia of Disneyland. Living in a theme park would be like living in a dictatorship and I’m far to attached to my freedom to give it up for someone's vision of utopia.
Literature
Gottdiener, M. (1995). Postmodern Semiotics. Oxford: Blackwell.