Total Landscape, Theme Parks, Public Space (Design and the Built Environment) [Illustrated] [Hardcover]

Illusion, entertainment and control have been key ingredients in some of the most celebrated manmade environments throughout history. Miodrag Mitrasinovic's "Total Landscape" is much more than an analysis of theme parks on several continents. The author places the modern commercial amusement parks in the context of a broad history of pleasure spaces for the public with a private component. Mitrasinovic examines the purpose, method and effect of examples ranging from the Roman era through medieval country fairs, pleasure gardens, reform parks, gated communities, shopping malls, and mega-resorts to New York's "New" 42nd street and programmed atriums in office towers. Like Bryant Park. hybrid public spaces in international cities have increasingly acquired private funding and behavior control.

Many of the themed landscapes represent models of an ideal world or organized flora elements in sequential settings with framed or forced vistas to architectural elements that delight and beguile walkers as they circle a manmade lake, fountains or try to find their way through a maze--a perfect metaphor for total landscapes that control and entertain crowds of people.

Some amusements were constructed at the outer ends of trams or horse car routes to encourage weekend fares and keep transit running all week, producing income for the street railways when they weren't carrying commuting workers.

The seventeenth century Vauxhall Gardens combined real landscape and lanes with faux structures suggesting faraway places or historical eras. A Chinese Pagoda fashioned out of lath, canvas and plaster stood in front of a panorama painting of a Chinese landscape with Chinese plants and artifacts placed in the foreground to complete the illusion. These constructed environments were temporary and easily changed to a new concept when the admission receipts dropped off, indicating the saturation level of a particular theme.

Mitrasinovic's methods of analysis include recorded observations via video, photographs, archival document searches and interviews with a range of participants.

There is no dialogue between the designers of theme parks and those who visit them except the market study and the ultimate cash receipts after the design phase is over. The artificial universe that theme parks create entertains visitors who know they are unreal but remain fascinated by the illusion. One can label these environments fake or faux or, less politely, fascist. Theme parks control every aspect to a single effect and the population that inhabits them cannot modify, improve or act on the environment. Visitors are only permitted to look, move through and then depart. They leave no footprints, no evidence they were ever in the theme park, except for the currency they left behind.

Increasingly, we spend free time away from home in spaces that attract crowds but are not public in the traditional sense of open and free to all, a part of the common and shared environment belonging equally to all citizens. This book provides a thorough understanding of themed public spaces.