Total Landscape, Theme Parks, Public Space

Increasingly, many of the public spaces we experience as models of democracy have been brought about as a result of totalizing and non-democratic policies aimed at disciplining and controlling the social body and maintaining order. This book argues that an in-depth investigation into the production of privately-owned, public-access spaces is seriously needed in order to understand how public space and the associated public policy can be designed not to protect basic civil rights and to take into account the essential interest to the private owners of these spaces. Taking the theme park as a type of privately-owned, public-access space where such conditions are brought to the extreme, this book uses the theme park as a 'laboratory environment' to identify, dissect and describe the properties of new, hybrid forms of public spaces emerging in urban environments worldwide. "The Total Landscape" places theme parks from the United States, Europe and Asia in a comparative multidisciplinary framework, and employs Huis Ten Bosch (HTB), the Japanese theme-park-town as the main case study. HTB is an environment modeled upon Holland that was designed for 30,000 inhabitants and 5 million visitors a year. Thus HTB allows for an examination of the 'theme park' as a totalizing landscape, while at the same time expanding the argument out of the boundaries of the fantastic and into functioning 'real' towns. By illuminating the relationship between theme parks and public space, the book offers a unique insight into the ethos, criteria for design and expectations of the public space in the twenty-first century.