And this is urban historical geography???

Since exiting grad school, I’ve been lucky enough to teach on a yearly basis a course in my specialty field: urban historical geography. At first, the content of my syllabus reflected the objectivist ways in which historical geographers tended to view the world in the 1980s. Thus I taught about the changing physical morphology, economic functions, social ecology, and spatial politics of cities as they transitioned through ancient, feudal, mercantile, industrial, and post-industrial forms—using James Vance’s The Continuing City as the principle text. As human geography took its subjectivist turn, however, my course followed suit. Urban historical geography began to mimic the more literal meanings of its constituent parts; it became an exploration of the ways in which the subject views, perceives, and writes about (or otherwise represents) cities of, and in, the past. During this transition, I used David Ward’s Poverty, Ethnicity and the American City, then Josef Konvitz’ The Urban Millenium, and then Christine Boyer’s The City of Collective Memory before giving up on a single text altogether and adopting a reader-driven format.



By 2003, I had completely abandoned a chronologic approach to urban historical geography for a systematic/topical one that revolved around the idea of the “city as palimpsest.” As I put it:

“The dictionary defines a palimpsest as a parchment, written upon several times, where the earlier writing has been completely or partially erased to make room for new writing. Such erasures and additions can utterly change the meaning of the text that has been encoded. Cities are similar in that after they are built, bits and pieces of them get: 1) modified through functional and interpretational changes, 2) razed because they are deemed outmoded, 3) preserved or frozen in place because their forms and/or functions are thought to be of some lasting value, 4) resurrected either physically or conceptually after having been destroyed and 5) forgotten about or overlooked entirely. As these sorts of changes occur, so too do changes occur in how we look at these urban elements, how we invest in them financially and emotionally, and how we depict them—in literature, art, newspapers, maps, etc. Our goals are to : a) understand the urban palimpsest by identifying its constituent elements and b) understand the dynamics, trends and histories behind the creation, re-creation, and representation of those elements.”

I started this course by making a contrast between linear narratives of urban evolution—the kind espoused by John Borchert and John Adams—and non-linear, pixellated narratives as best exemplified by Michael Dear and Stephen Flusty’s model of urban keno capitalism. From there, we explored the different urban conditions that the palimpsest metaphor suggests: de novo (built from scratch) urban landscapes and cities, and aging landscapes and cities that included ones that had been lost, petrified, resurrected, or intentionally ignored. In each of these categories we went deep historically but we also spent quite a bit of time engaging urban representations of the more recent past—through feature-length films, television programs, and music video.



Although I had never been happier leading a course built in this way, some students (particularly undergraduate non-geography majors) did not like the palimpsest metaphor at all. History is supposed to be about chronology, they felt, and I had failed to teach that. I was not, however, going to be forced by their evaluations back into a straight-jacket of chronology, and into the privileging of temporality over spatiality just because their consumer expectations were not satisfied. Tenure does have some privileges.



So I took a year off from teaching Urban Historical Geography to re-think.

In the meantime . . . my personal life intruded into the professional in a rather unexpected way.



Our home in upstate New York is set in a glorious location from May through November; from December to April, it is transformed by lake effect snow into tundra-like conditions by 150+ inches of snow. To cope, our neighbors usually take advantage of two week-long K-12 school breaks (one in February, another in April) and head south, often to the Carolinas, Florida, the Caribbean or Mexico. In 2006, our children were 8 and 6 years old. They griped continually that they were the only ones in their classes not to have been to Walt Disney World in Orlando. After some debate over whether or not we could live with ourselves for having supported capitalist cultural hegemony, those sweet, loving, “pretty please” faces won out and we decided to make the trip. Besides, we already owned at least $500-worth of Disney merchandise in the form of videos and DVDs. We might as well throw another $1K at The Mouse. After three nights scouring the web for tips on the best way to plan this adventure, we ultimately concluded that it might just be easier and more cost effective to buy an all-inclusive package offered by AAA that would have us stay ‘on property’ in a Disney resort hotel. Easier, hah! Figuring out how to put our meal plan into action by making restaurant reservations so the kids could dine with Disney characters, and still allow time for the four parks in between had me nearly apoplectic up until three weeks before we made our way south.

I’ll skip the details of our arrival at the hotel and go straight to the Magic Kingdom—the oldest of the four parks at the WDW complex and the one that is closely patterned after Disneyland in Anaheim, CA. I should mention that growing up I had been to Disneyland twice: once when I was 10 (the year after my father died) and then again when I was 17 when a pen-friend visited from Germany and we decided to make her Disney Wish come true. I had a wonderful time on both of those trips. The first had been a momentary escape from the nightmare of grief that had engulfed my family after my dad’s death; Pirates of the Caribbean, It’s a Small World After All, and the GE Carousel of Progress whisked me away to other places and times and made me smile again. The second trip (the one with the German friend) had been something of a rite of passage, given that Marion and I stayed without adult supervision at the park from opening until closing for a couple of days. This should not have been a big deal, given that I already had a car and sometimes drove from my home in Lincoln, Nebraska to faraway places like Omaha, Kansas City, and Grand Island without parental detection. But California was a really, really long way from Nebraska—it had taken us more than a week to get there. And the park was playing host not simply to families, but to EVERYONE . . . . including young men on the prowl. We were thin, cute, flirtatious, and quickly learned how to scam the boys for their A-ride tickets and then abandon them in the crowded craziness of the after-ride packing-up routine. We saw Tavares ("Heaven Must be Missing an Angel") and Elvin Bishop ("Fooled Around and Fell in Love") at the evening concerts in front of the castle. It was a blast.

In being so worried about the details of the 2006 trip, I had forgotten all about Disneyland 1969 and 1976. That is, until we walked out from under the Magic Kingdom Railway overpass and into the humid Florida sunshine and the Town Square. While the scale at which the buildings are constructed is slightly larger than the 5/8ths of Disneyland, and the architectural flourishes differ somewhat (more gingerbreading in FL), there was in Orlando more-than-enough of the McKinley Era design that Walt and his Imagineers had concocted for Anaheim for me to recognize the similarities and to be, in the bat of eye, transported back to my childhood. And in an emotional rush that I could never have predicted, in front of Tony’s Restaurante, I stood weeping—my husband baffled and my children completely distraught over Mommy’s reaction to the Happiest Place on Earth.



“Yes, yes! I’m okay! It’s just . . . . I was here when I was a little girl.”

“Anne, this place didn’t exist when you were a little girl.”

“Yes it did. In California. I went here in California.”

Carl looked at me strangely--like I had lost my mind.



And I started to laugh. The academic geographer in me heard what I had just said and what his look had just underscored, bolded, italicized in 56 point font.


I went here in California.

‘Wow. David Harvey. Space-Time Compression. California = Florida? That Walt Disney Guy . . . Effing Genius!’

And from that minute onward, I went through the rest of our WDW sojourn experiencing it as a mommy, a spouse, and . . . as really conflicted critical geographer. While we stood in those seemingly endless medusa lines (for Splash Mountain and Buzz Lightyear . . . again . . . and again . . . and again . . . . ), I found myself lecturing—sometimes aloud, sometimes in my head—about the relationship between EPCOT and world’s fairs, about the design psychology of casinos/’on property’ and the retention of the captive audience, about Guy de Bord and urban spectacles, and about Disney signs and ‘real life’ referents. I also found myself struggling with my complicit support of something that I had heard routinely exploited labor and that had behaved over the years as a powerful instrument in the spread of American cultural hegemonies and urban imaginaries.



After a particularly long soliloquy about all this 'goo', my husband turned to me and said, “You ought to lead a seminar on this stuff.” To which I think I said, “Wow. The Magic Kingdom as the Organizing Framework to Geography 564.”

The resulting course, as it was taught in 2007:


(Taken from the 2007 syllabus)



Geography 564: Urban Historical Geography
“Disney and the City”
(readings have been removed from this rendition)

Walt Disney’s films, Disneyland and its sibling theme parks, the new town of Celebration, Florida, and even the revitalized Times Square in New York City, all reflect in some way Disney’s utopian vision for American society. We will discover that this vision was quite complex, underpinned by a number of seemingly incongruent dimensions. Disney, for example, wanted to foster playful, carefree, and high-quality imaginary worlds—both physical and cinematic—to which humanity could escape. He found, however, that the creation and maintenance of such worlds required not only a great deal of planning and infrastructural development, but over time increasingly elaborate means of social control. Thus his vision never quite lived up to his expectations, due to financial constraints and his inability to keep the tawdriness of the ‘real world’ away—from his studio, from the presentation of his works to the public, and from the parks he and his successors would create.

This course takes a critical look at both the cinematic and landscape expressions of a specific component of Disney’s utopian vision which pertain to the urban form. We will examine Disney’s life, work, and Disney corporate history and will touch upon various theories and methodologies that might help us understand better the urban landscapes from which Disney took inspiration and tried to recast according to his vision (including medieval, colonial, Southern, Midwestern, and Western towns and cities). Organized as a virtual fieldtrip around the various Disneyland and Walt Disney World realms (e.g. Main Street USA, Frontierland, Tomorrowland, etc.), the course also looks at the urban form that Disney worked to avoid through strict centralized control over landscape design, infrastructure planning and maintenance, labor relations, and crowd dynamics: the modern industrial city (New York City and Chicago, Illinois serving as archetypes.) While so much of Disney’s work reflects a decidedly anti-urban bias, we will discover that the utopian vision he developed could never truly break free of the rather traditional urban settlement forms that he otherwise reviled.

Some of the filmed material that we will be viewing:

“Lady and the Tramp” (excerpts)
“Traffic Trouble” (entirety)
“The Country Mouse” (entirety)
“Pinocchio” (excerpts)
“Disneyland USA” (one episode)
“Cars” (excerpts)
“Ken Burns’ ‘New York: Power and the People, 1898-1918’” (entirety)
“Great Old Amusement Parks” (entirety)
“Ken Burns’ ‘New York: City of Tomorrow, 1929-1941”’ (entirety)
“Beauty and the Beast” (excerpts)
“Ken Burns’ ‘New York: The Country and the City, 1609-1825’” (entirety)
“Charlie Rose Interview with Michael Eisner” (entirety)
“Toy Story II” (excerpts)
“Monsters, Inc.” (excerpts)


SCHEDULE

January 22 Disney and the Cinematic and Imagineered Landscape
Hour 1: Introduction to the Course
Hour 2: “Cinematic and Imagineered Landscapes” (Lecture) (Viewing excerpts from “Lady and the Tramp”)
Hour 3: “Disney’s Cinematic Urban Landscapes” (Discussion of Assignment #1—Due in class February 12th)

January 29 Constructing and Deconstructing Disney’s Cinematic Urban Landscape
Hour 1: Viewing and discussing “Traffic Trouble”
Hour 2: Viewing and discussing “The Country Cousin” (1936)
Hour 3: Viewing and discussing “Pinocchio” excerpts


February 5 Constructing and Deconstructing the Imagineered Landscape
Hour 1: Viewing “Disneyland, USA”
Hour 2: Discussion of “Disneyland USA”
Hour 3: Disneyland as an Absolute Space, a Representational Space, and a Space of Representation (LECTURE)


February 12 Archetype: Marceline and Main Street USA
Hour 1: “Progressive Historical Geographies of the American City” (LECTURE)
Hour 2: “Main Street Ascendance, Demise and Revival”/Viewing excerpts from “Cars” (LECTURE)
Hour 3: Discussion about the Term Paper Assignment


February 19 Arch-archetypes: New York City and Chicago
Hour 1: “Asa Brigg’s ‘Shock Cities’” (LECTURE)
Hour 2: Viewing: “New York: Power and the People, 1898-1918”
Hour 3: Discussion of Reading and “New York”

February 26 Mass Amusement in the City
Hour 1: Viewing “Great Old Amusement Parks”
Hour 2: Discussion of “Inside the Mouse”
Hour 3: “The Rise and Implications of Urban Planning” (LECTURE)


March 5 Ordering the Disorderly Metropolis
Hour 1: Viewing “New York: City of Tomorrow, 1929-1941”
Hour 2: Discussion of reading and “New York”
Hour 3: Writing the Midterm Exam


March 19 EXAM/Fantasy Land as Medieval Castle Town
Hour 1: Exam
Hour 2: “The Medieval Walled City: Function and Form”/excerpts from “Beauty and the Beast” (LECTURE)
Hour 3: Discussion of Assignment #2: “Imagineered Landscapes”


March 26 Colonialism in Adventureland/Adventurism in Colonialland
Hour 1: The Colonial Other at Disneyparks (group work) [please bring your wireless laptop to class if you have one!]
Hour 2: Discussion of group work discoveries
Hour 3: “Othered landscapes . . . Métropole et outre-mer—Paris, Indo-China, Morroco, and Madagascar” (LECTURE)


April 2 Liberty and New Orleans Squares—Mercantile Urbanism
Hour 1: Discussion of Vance’s “Prince’s Capital and the Merchant’s Town”/excerpts from “Pocahontas II
Hour 2: Viewing “New York: The Country and the City, 1609-1825”
Hour 3: Discussion of “New York”


April 9 Frontierland: Frontier Urbanism
Hour 1: “The Implications of the Turner Thesis for Urban Studies” (LECTURE)
Hour 2: Disney’s American West Abroad (group work) [please bring your wireless laptop to class if you have one]
Hour 3: Discussion of group work discoveries


April 16 Tomorrowland: Modernist Renditions of the Future City
Hour 1: “Cities of Tomorrow and Disney’s Utopian Vision” (LECTURE)
Hour 2: “EPCOT” (LECTURE)
Hour 3: Writing the Second Exam


April 23 EXAM/Neo-liberal Disney I: D’eisner World
Hour 1: EXAM
Hour 2: Viewing “Charlie Rose Interview with Michael Eisner”
Hour 3: Discussion of Neo-liberalism and the Interview


April 30 PARTY/Neo-liberal Disney II: Pixar Urbanism
Hour 1: Viewing “Toy Story II” and “Monster, Inc.” excerpts
Hour 2: Pixar Urbanism (lecture/discussion)
Hour 3: Course Conclusion


END OF SYLLABUS

_________________________________________________________

So today . . . I’m faced with thinking through this syllabus so I can reissue in time for pre-registration for Spring 2010. Do I want to do 'Disney and the City' again?

Moreover, there is this matter of a special session at the AAG about filmic urban landscapes. I want to discuss “Cars” and the imaginary of creative destruction as a narrative trope within neoliberal capitalism. That’s what I want to talk about at the AAG.

And yes, it IS urban historical geography.