Fun City

Description

Once the blues guitarist B.B. King sang that when he "didn't wanna live no more", he would go shopping instead. Now, however, shopping has become a lifestyle essential to the functioning of consumerist societies. The city of today has become 'Disneyfied', a branded nexus of cultural commodities, an arena for the free play of commerce above all. Awkward elements are either marginalised and defined as inappropriate, old-fashioned or anti-social, or co-opted, appropriated and repackaged as wholesome and dynamic.

The aim of this book is to encircle and pin down the consquences of these developments, to elucidate the interplay between funscapes and fear culture, and to account for the meaning of new concepts and new phenomena such as 'event culture', 'urban scenography', 'experience economy', 'city branding' and 'cultural planning'. The book's points are illustrated by many examples from Denmark and beyond - the rebranding of Randers and gay Toronto (and the resistance to that process), shopping malls, urban festivals etc. A very interesting and sometimes provocative book.