When going for a walk in Maastricht in wintertime, at a time when the Winterland, the Christmas fair, is set up on the Vrijthof, the contrast between the city itself and the fair becomes evident. But why is this contrast so great? Both Mark Gottdiener and Manuel Castells have explanations for this phenomenon.
Winterland = Disneyland
The contrast between Maastricht and the Winterland can be understood when we look at a similar situation, namely that of Disneyland and Los Angeles. Mark Gottdiener, in his book Postmodern Semiotics, describes Disneyland as a
utopian urban space [...] It is a built environment that entertains, part of the growing and increasingly pervasive entertainment culture of our society that is manifested in material forms [...] it is a spatial representations of capitalist ideologies, a consummate, three-dimensional work of populist art entertainment for the masses
In contrast to real cities, Disneyland (as supposed to Los Angeles) and Winterland (as supposed to Maastricht), are simulated urban spaces, myths of small-town America, the “happiest place on Earth", places "devoid of the many pathologies common to actually existing cities in our society” (Gottdiener, p. 103). These make-believe cities are different from actually existing cities by nine codes of signification: transportation, food, fashion, architecture, entertainment, social control, economics, politics, family (Gottdiener, p. 104).
Space of Places versus Space of Flows
According to the Sociologist Manuel Castells, the author of the Network Society, Maastricht, and especially the Vrijthof, can be considered a space of places, an actual physical historical place. The Winterland can be considered a space of flows, transcending the space of places, which attain their identity by the network which they are part of. The flows can be in the form of capital, information, technology, organizational interaction, images, sounds or symbols, which flow from one place to another (Castells, p. 412). The space of flows, together with timeless time, which substitutes normal clock time, produce the culture of the real virtuality, which is a system which is "fully immersed in a virtual image setting, in the world of make belief, in which appearances are not just on the screen through which experience is communicated, but they become the experience” (Castells, p. 373).
The winterland, the space of flows, thus becomes immersed in this virtual image setting, the make belief commercial Christmas world. Gradually this space of flows will take over the space of places, Maastricht, and together with timeless time produce real virtuality. However, these spaces still exist side by side at the moment, and it is possible to take a walk from one form of space into the other, and this contradiction creates the contrast.
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Gottdiener, M.
(1995). Postmodern Semiotics. Oxford: Blackwell.
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Castells, M.
(2000). The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture. Volume I: The Rise of the Network Society. Oxford: Blackwell.