Landscapes of Power: From Detroit to Disney World

Landscapes of Power: From Detroit to Disney World
By Sharon Zukin, 1991

Synopsis: In exploring the interrelationship between market and place, Zukin examines five twentieth-century landscapes to investigate "the spectrum of change between deindustrialization and the shift to a postindustrial or service economy" (23). Landscape is an expression of cultural value (and we thus appear to value capitalism). She argues that the "dominant source of social meaning [has moved] from production to consumption" (57), and this is reflected in the landscape. She discusses steel towns and their paternalistic vibe; Westchester County as a recently suburbanized office park zone after many companies relocated there (shows development of an upwardly-mobile class of consumption post-deindustrialization); L.A. and Miami, though landscapes "explicitly produced for visual consumption" (219), are in fact real cities, though "built on the power of dreamscape, collective fantasy, and facade" (219); Disney World hotels as focused sites of consumption. Bottom line seems to be that consumption rather than production is the dominant force now, and we need to start talking about citizenship instead of just consumerism.

Interesting Specifics:

Culled together from a few different people, Zukin says: "Taking 'ordinary landscape' to be the 'continuous surface all around us,' cultural geographers 'regard all landscapes as symbolic, as expressions of cultural values, social behavior, and individual actions worked upon particular localities over a span of time,'" (18).

"But in the struggle for expansion in the built environment, and control over the uses of space, economic power predominates over both the state and vernacular culture. 'Capital creates and destroys its own landscape'" (19).

Says gentrification is about the search for the "authentic," an attempt "to recapture the value of place" (192) by viewing urban centers/decay in the way people had viewed landscape.

Gentrification creates " 'islands of renewal in seas of decay'" (188).

L.A. and Miami are what we think the future will look like (220).

"The organization of consumption is a powerful means of carrying out creative destruction in the economy" (259).

"Because landscape is the most important product of both power and imagination, it is the major cultural product of our time" (268).