Marketing y ventas (M)

Jon Goss might now disagree with my interpretation of his research on malls. In a more recent article, Goss (1996) has focused on "festival marketplaces," those his- torically-themed shopping districts that have become increasingly important parts of the redevelopment schemes of cities throughout the USA, Canada, and Europe. He argues that while much of the scholarly critique of these commodified spaces is correct, it is also too one-sided, because it does not pay enough attention to how these spaces are itsofby those who frequent them. He cites his Own epiphany in this regard: he was at~tfie newly opened Aloha Towers Marketplace in Honolulu one day and happened across a gay couple holding hands and watching the sunset. The open expression of homosexuality is certainly not a sanctioned behavior in most public spaces of society (see chapter 7 below), yet here it seemed unremarkable. Goss thus wonders whether the cynicism of academic critics of privatized public spaces like malls and marketplaces is warranted. As spaces open to the public, festival market- places are given all manner of readings by their users. And as spaces of sociability such landscapes allow for the staging of all kinds of activities, many of which find

9 The shirt is an advertisement for an LA rock band that preaches anarchy by cutting records for the Sony-owned Associated label. As Harvey (1989) noted (see chapter 3), oppositional culture, these days, is fully imbricated in systems of commodification.

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expression in a way that has nothing to do with the dictates of the commodity or of consumption.

Or do they? Landscapes ar^always a site of struggle, a place for resistance, and a concretization of contest. That is true. But it is also true, as we have already seen, that the whole reason for making a place into a landscape, that is, for attempting to emplace the landscape ideal, is precisely to staunch that struggle and to make social relationsappear^fnlly natural anH t i m e l y Indeed, we can almost say that to tTTe degree a landscape is 'contested, it stops being a landscape and becomes something else - a contested space:

To understand this point, it is useful to examine in a bit more detail two contested

ideals - two ideologies, in fact - that I think are mutually opposed to each other.

These ideals, of course, are never fully achieved in practice - the fact that they are continually contested by those holding different ideas assures that. The important issue is thus how the ideals help direct social action and the social production of public space. The first ideal is "landscape" itself, and the important point to think about here is thepnvaUzedj^ms_oT\mdsc&^ that has marked the ideal right from the beginning (as we have seen). The second is "public snace." an ideal just as complex and contradictory as landscape. But here the thing to keep in mind is that the ideal of public space is i n r l n s i y c p e s s ^ n H n n m e r l i a t e r l i n t ^ r f l r t i n n (figure 5 . 6 ) . The

landscape (in this sense) is commodified through and through - that is part of its ideal structure. Public space rejects commodification - that too is part of its ideal structure. Landscape is where one recreates - it is literally a resort - and where one basks in the leisure of a well-ordered scene. Public space is a space of conflict, of political tussle, of sociaTrelations stripped to their barest essentials. A place cannot be both a public space and a landscape, at least not at the same time (even it landscapes urt! always

Figure 5.6 A political public space: Argyll Street, Glasgow. A main shopping street in Glasgow, Argyll Street is an important site for petitioning, leafleting, and soap-box speeches. Photograph by D. Mitchell.

sights of and for politics, and public spaces are often sights of and for pleasurable recreation).10

As Goss (1996) admits, malls and festival marketplaces rarely live up to their billing as public spaces, creating instead a highly controlled environment which functions, as Darrell Crilley (1993: 153) has put it, like a "theater in which a pacified public basks in the grandeur of a carefully orchestrated corporate spectacle." In such landscapes, the intrusion of undesirables - the homeless, the unemployed, or the otherwise threatening - seems to imperil die carefully constructed suspension of disbelief on the part of the "audience" that all theatrical performances (and hence all landscapes) demand.11 Or perhaps it is a double suspension of disbelief that is at work:

The power of a landscape does not derive from the fact that it offers itself as a spectacle, but rather from the fact that, as mirror and mirage, it presents any susceptible viewer with an image at once true and false of a creative capacity which the subject (or Ego) is able, during a moment of marvelous self-deception, to claim as his own. A landscape also has the seductive power of all pictures, and this is especially true of an urban landscape - Venice, for example - that can impose itself immediately as a work. Whence the arche- typal touristic delusion of being a participant in such a work, and of understanding it completely, even though the tourist merely passes through a country or countryside and absorbs its image in a quite passive way. The work in its concrete reality, its products, and the productive activity involved are all thus obscured and indeed consigned to oblivion. (Lefebvre 1991: 189)

Creating a city - or a part of the city, such as a mall or festival marketplace - as landscape is therefore important because it restores to the viewer (the tourist, the suburban visitor, or even the city resident) an essential sense of control within a .built environment which is instead "controlled." as Johnstown shows so clearly, through the creative, seemingly anarchic destruction of an economy over which they may in fact have very little control. Or more precisely, it provides an illusion of control in a space so highly designed, so carefully composed, so exquisitely "set" by the owners and developers of that space that a visitdr's control can only ever be an illusion.

Put another way, the built environment "must be seen as simultaneously dependent and conditioning, outcome and mechanism of the dynamics of investment, pro- duction and consumption" (Knox 1993a: 3). Yet, at this moment in time, such dynamics of investment, production and consumption must be seen in the context of a "socio-cultural environment in which the emphasis is not on ownership and consumption per se but on the possession of particular combinations of things and the

style of consumption" (1993a: 18). That is, the landscape n.uu>l land does) function as

a vast system of signs, signs that "advertise" meanings to their consumers - and to those watfh'ng thpin The recreation of the city as landscape works to order all the multitudinous spaces produced through myriad investment, production, and

10 There has been an explosion of geographical research on public space since the mid-1990s. The ideal of public space is explored in Mitchell (1995a). Two recent collections give a good sense of geographical scholarship: "Public Space and The City," Urban Geography 17 (1996), nos. 1 and 2; and Light and Smith (1998). Feminist geographical work on public space has been particularly insightful; see Staeheli (1994. 1996); Domosh (1998).

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consumption decisions, into., an undersiandahk. whole. "Although urban space is proHuced and sold in discrete parcels," as Paul Knox (1993a: 28) puts it, "it is

marketed in large packages" (see also Mair 1986). Public spaces ar^ transformed

into "mere" signs, symbols of something else, rather than valued in their own right. A second distinction that sets landscape apart from and against public space is that landscapes, in all their seductiveness, imply another illusion: that which Richard Sennett (1994) identifies as a lack of resistance to our own "lived relations," and to our own will. In fact, more and more, our own will, as well as our own sense of well- being and comfort, seems to depend on a certain "freedom from resistance." As Sennett (1994: 310) explains, "the ability to move anywhere, to move without obstruction, to circulate freely, a freedom greatest in an empty volume" has come to be defined as freedom itself in "Western civilization."

The mechanics of movement has invaded a wide swath of modern experience - experi- ence which treats social, environmental, or personal resistance, with its concomitant frustrations, as somehow unfair and unjust. Ease, comfort, "user-friendliness" in human relations come to appear as guarantees of individual freedom of action.

This ideology of comfort and individual movement as freedom reinforces an "impres- sion of transparency" that works to make the urban landscape knowable by erasing its "products and productive activity," "[Resistance is a fundamental and necessary experience- for-the- human -body," Sennett (1994: 310) concludes: "through feeling resistance, the body is roused to take note of the world in which it lives. This is the secular version of the lesson of exile from the Garden. The body comes to life when cnpjng with jjifficiilty " The irony, of course is that in the hyper-planned urban public spaces of the postmodern city, as in the spaces of the mall, the "impression of transparency" and the ability to move without resistance is made possible only by planning for the careful overall orchestration of individuals' movement. Freedom from resistance in built space seems only possible if control over movement is ceded to the planners of malls and public spaces. People become comfortable by giving up their active political involvement in space and acquiescing instead in becoming spec-

tators of the urban "scene."

This is not a completely new development, however. Sennett (1994: 347) argues that a "public realm filled with moving and spectating individuals [that] no longer repre- sented a political domain" can be traced at least to the city of the nineteenth-century

flaneur (a sort of traveling spectator - usually male - always viewing and observing,

out rarely actively participating in and shaping the urban scene), and probably a lot earlier. It is the curious condition of the modern city, a condition only heightened in the postmodern city, that "one was and is surrounded by life, even if detached from it." And in places like contemporary Greenwich Village (where Sennett lives), "ours is a purely visible agora" (that is, a landscape) where "political occasions do not translate into everyday practice on the streets; they do little, moreover, to compound the multiple cultures of the city into common purposes" (1994: 358). In this regard, the landscape-as-leisure returns with a vengeance, creating a sort of citizenship, according to Sennett, that is predicated on the externalization of those deemed "undesirable." Whether this is accomplished through design or through law - both of which are as important to the landscape of the mall and festival marketplace as

they are to the city street - is less important than the fact that such exclusions are seen as a wholly desirable aspect of citizenship (see chapter 10). Through landscape, politics is fully aestheticized.12

The Circulation of Meaning: Landscape as a System of