« What all these contract law enforcement talks have me reading | Main | Leadership:Some cities get it, and some just get staff (Rancho) »
May 25, 2005
Manufacturing a sense of community?
The Manchurian Main Street | Metropolis Magazine
The Manchurian Main Street
Are shopping districts inspired by New Urbanism a form of cultural brainwashing?
By Karrie Jacobs
Posted May 16, 2005
Metropolis Magazine
Victoria Gardens, a new mall in Rancho Cucamonga, California, is laid out like a traditional town, with narrow streets and metered parking. All I knew about Mashpee Commons, a shopping center on the western end of Cape Cod, was that it had a funny name. And one evening last August the only screening of The Manchurian Candidate I could reasonably catch was playing at the multiplex there. I drove as fast as I could, grabbed a parking space, found the theater, and didn't bother to check out my surroundings until after the show.read on @ Metropolis MagazineThe movie was Jonathan Demme's 2004 remake of John Frankenheimer's 1962 classic. It involves a rising political star whose wartime heroism turns out to be a fabrication--a carefully crafted faux history implanted in his brain and those of his colleagues by evil conspirators. The film was two hours of sustained paranoia, so as I walked out of the theater I was already feeling uneasy--then I noticed that I was not in a normal mall. Rather I was in a fake downtown, an overtly cheerful place with individual brick and clapboard storefronts lined up along something a lot like actual streets. I was in a fabrication--a carefully crafted faux history implanted in the suburban landscape.
I didn't consciously draw the parallel between the movie and the mall at that moment, but taken together the two things unnerved me. I was hungry but couldn't bring myself to eat at any of Mashpee Commons' friendly sidewalk cafés. Not that there was anything bad about them. There was, rationally speaking, nothing wrong at all. But I felt as if I was still in the grip of the movie's dark conspiracy and had to get out.
This was yet another episode in my ambivalent relationship with New Urbanism. Honestly the New Urbanists--the Duanys, the Plater-Zyberks, the Calthorpes--make good places. I can't fault their planning skills, but there is something about their need to use the past as a sort of architectural tranquilizer that gives me the willies. I see it as a form of cultural brainwashing, a strategy that doesn't solve the problems we've created so much as teaches us to forget them.
Posted by cystdog at May 25, 2005 07:32 AM
Trackback Pings
For trackbacks, please use this URL:
http://www.scupper.net/cgi-bin/mt-tb.cgi/189
