For more than a decade, architects, geographers, and cultural criticshave explored the privatization of public space, describing a specula-

tive and spectacular postmodern city built on foundations of grindinginequality. This is, in Michael Sorkin’s phrase, the city as theme park,where corporately built public spaces have helped kill the street and cashout democracy (Sorkin, 1991; see also Schiller, 1989: especially 89-110).

The notion of the city as theme park makes rough metaphorical sense ofscores of urban transformations and suburban projects, but in this discus-sion an important question has been overlooked. The urban reshapers areincreasingly, and literally, the theme park builders, the conglomerate mediacorporations that now lead the international economy (Herman andMcChesney, 1997). The Walt Disney Company’s central role at “groundzero” of the redevelopment of 42nd Street and Broadway in Manhattan isthe obvious example, but Time-Warner, Viacom, Seagram’s UniversalStudios, and Sony are also commissioning, designing, and financing mas-sive real estate projects. So the neglected question: Why are these megamedia conglomerates moving beyond the construction of literal themeparks and helping to rebuild city centres, reshaping shopping malls and

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◆ Susan G. Davis

SPACE JAMMedia ConglomeratesBuild the Entertainment City

NOTE: From European Journal of Communication, Vol. 14, No. 4, 1999.Copyright © 1999. Reprinted with permission of Sage Publications Ltd.

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suburbs, and even designing residential andwork communities? The same media behe-moths that have brought the world a revolu-tionary and supposedly placeless electronictransnational culture are demonstrating apowerful interest in the problem of spaceand place. But why, and with what implica-tions for collective and cultural life? . . .

In the first half of the 20th century, theentertainment conglomerates were centralin creating a nearly all-penetrating nationaland international mass culture, first throughfilm and later through animation, popularmusic, and televised sports. In the secondhalf of the century, they have brought thislargely American mass culture thoroughlyand extensively into the home, to hundredsof millions of people. At the cusp of the21st century, they are poised to weave theprivate realm together with the collectivethrough the creation of dramatic andfocused media-filled spaces. In the process,as they further displace smaller businessesand older, heterogeneous uses of the streets,the media conglomerates are changing therelationships between public and privateexperience. They are in the process of creat-ing public spaces defined by marketing cri-teria and shaped to the most profitableaudiences. These spaces will be devoted tothe circulation of well-tested and “safe”media content and will exclude experimen-tal imagery or oppositional ideas. Privatelyproduced collective spaces based on andfilled with familiar mass media content cancreate a kind of seamless world, one inwhich the home—currently devoted toextensive consumption of conglomerateculture—is tightly knit to and continuouswith the outside. The city (or at least certaindistricts of the city), seen as dangerous in itsdiverse unpredictability, is being made safeimagistically as well as physically.

◆ The Scale of the Boom

“Entertainment is the hottest topic in realestate circles,” as many economic analysts

have noted, but the reverse is just as true:real estate is now indispensable to an enter-tainment company’s portfolio, its growth,and promotional strategies (Phillips, 1995;The Economist, 1994; Hartnett, 1993).While they worry about how the Internetwill change their fundamental businesses,the media conglomerates are elevating theircorporate vice presidents for real estate anddevelopment. These strategists are less visi-ble publicly than executives in charge offilm, television, and multimedia, but theyare charged with doing more than buildingoffices. They speak of the old-fashionedideas of place and community as growthopportunities for their companies.1

No recent statistics are able to summa-rize the extent of location-based entertain-ment projects, but they are ubiquitous (see,for example, Hannigan, 1998). In today’srebuilt city centres, they are important con-ceptual, architectural, and speculative inter-ventions. In Philadelphia, Denver, Baltimore,Atlanta, New Orleans, Cleveland, SanFrancisco, and Washington, D.C., thesenew projects have been born out of thepolitical clout of the developers using stateand federal redevelopment funds, the skillsof prestigious architects, and tourism pro-motion policies (Boyer, 1991; on Atlantasee Rutheiser, 1996; Levine, 1997; Smith,1996). At their core are buildings that inte-grate product, most predominantly mediaproduct, into space more fully than everbefore, using architecture to synthesize mar-keting goals with the creation of awe andpersonal identification.

As usual, Manhattan provides strikingexamples. On the East Side, within the fewblocks between East 57th and 55th Streetsis a cluster of entertainment retail projects.The Warner Bros. Store features 75,000square feet of licensed merchandise, 24video screens, “a giant zoetrope in a mov-ing picture cafe” (Gragg, 1997: 84), andhands-on interactive animation stations.Nearby, NikeTown features a museum ofOlympic medals and trophies; films of U.S.hockey, World Cup soccer, Michigan foot-ball; and a three-storey screen that descends

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from the ceiling every 30 minutes to showan inspirational sports film. NikeTownalone claims 10,000 visitors daily, evenlysplit between tri-state residents and tourists.A Disney Store is just a few blocks south on55th Street, again filled with giant video,interactive toys, merchandise, and a traveland ticket agency to help customers connectwith other Disney products, such as themeparks, cruises, and Broadway shows (TheArchitectural Review, 1997; Gragg, 1997).At Times Square the Disney Companyhas anchored the area’s “rebirth” as a film,theatre, and “interactive entertainment”district. Forty-Second Street is now a show-case for Disney’s endless array of family-friendly products, and the New AmsterdamTheatre is not only the stage for Disney’snew live theatrical enterprises but also acelebration of the company’s vast interna-tional cultural power (Pulley, 1995; Romanand Evans, 1996; Berman, 1995). . . .

The same phenomenon of the interjec-tion of media content into shared socialspace can be seen repeated in many placeson a smaller scale. Immediate causes andparticular corporate actors may vary,particular projects succeed or fail, but thepenetration of public space by media con-tent is decisive. For example, shopping andregional speciality malls around the UnitedStates are clustering new media venues andmini theatres near the familiar multiplex totry to create life, light, and a kind of busy,heterogeneous street of activity (Phillips,1995; Hartnett, 1993). “We are trying totake the best attractions out of the themepark and put them in the cities,” says VitoSanzone, the chief executive of Iwerks, thespecialty theatre and film company. . . .

Sega, the mammoth video game com-pany, is engaged in very diverse large- andsmall-scale location-based projects. Itsinteractive sites in Yokohama and Osakaare small theme parks that try to “make fulluse of [Sega’s] newest and most advancedtechnology” (O’Brien, 1996b), that is, theytake the Sega game out of the home andtransform it into pay-to-enter urbanrecreation (O’Brien, 1994b; Katayama,

1994). In 1994, after launching a 90,000-square-foot flagship game park in Tokyo,Sega announced that it would build 50more virtual-reality and video-game parksacross Japan. A huge SegaWorld unveiledat Piccadilly Circus in London accommo-dates thousands of simultaneous, inter-active players. Described as “a hybridbetween a giant video arcade and a smalltheme park,” SegaWorld arranges the latestproprietary high-tech rides and gamesacross themed zones spread over sevenfloors in four buildings (O’Brien, 1996b).

Sega is firing up Gameworks, an interna-tional software ride-game development in acollaboration with the media theme parkconglomerate Universal/Seagram andStephen Spielberg’s Dreamworks SKGstudio. Starting in Seattle, Las Vegas, andsouthern California, Gameworks plans tobuild a string of as many as one hundredplay sites in the United States and to teamup with the Toronto-based Playdium Enter-tainment to build 40 Sega Cities acrossCanada. The first Sega City, outsideOntario, is a Can$17 million sports andfilm-themed entertainment complex with“more than 180 video simulators and inter-active games” (Zoltak, 1996c: 31-2). Onanother track, Gameworks is at work withCineplex Odeon on a project calledCinescape, which will combine Sega gamecentres with movie theatres and restau-rants, again in major retail outlets (WallStreet Journal, 1996; Zoltak, 1996a). . . .

At the lower end of the retail market, themedia penetration of shared space is just asadvanced, though it looks different. Forexample, Advertising Age reports that“marketers increasingly are realizing thepotential of in-store entertainment fixtures,such as walls of TV screens, scattered TVmonitors, or audio systems” (Cuneo,1997). Polaroid, for example, recentlyscreened a commercial inside almost 2,000mass merchandise malls around the UnitedStates. In autumn 1998, country singerGarth Brooks debuted a new album via alive concert broadcast exclusively into hun-dreds of American Wal-Marts. Retailers

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have discovered that they can sell video oraudio time in their own stores, and nationalmall management chains are currentlynegotiating similar deals with television net-works, as well as local television and radiostations. For example, Wells Park Group, anational mall manager, will offer “mediapartner[s] space in common areas or instores in exchange for on-air promotions”(Cuneo, 1997). In such common commer-cial space, parents and children will takea shopping break to watch commercialtelevision.

Also at the less affluent end of the spec-trum are examples of the emerging patternof turning local public services over toentertainment companies under the guiseof partnered community development. Tothe extent that it is successfully promotedas providing social amelioration—jobs,education, community centres, ways to keepchildren off the streets—the entertainment-media-retail model of the city is reworkingthe fragments of an older public sphere.2 In1996, Austin, Texas, became the firstmunicipality in the United States to builda publicly owned Family EntertainmentCenter, “to aid the [largely Chicano EastAustin] community in its search to giveyouth a safe place to hang out” (Waddell,1996: 24). With city-purchased land, and afederal Department of Housing and UrbanDevelopment loan, the facility was con-structed by the city but planned and runfor a fee and incentives by a major leisuremanagement company. Instead of an old-fashioned public recreation centre, theCentral City Entertainment Center is “allentertainment” for a profit, geared to gener-ate the maximum amount of revenue for theconcessionaires and the managing company.

Similarly, the Battle Creek, Michigan,Parks and Recreation Department spon-sored the Full Tilt Entertainment Mall aspart of a city centre revitalization project.With a single admission price, Full Tiltcontains a small water park, a video arcade,a food court, a gym franchise, a lasertag arena, and a teenage club, amongother attractions. Described by its general

manager as a “very aggressive privateenterprise sort of thing,” Full Tilt willoperate on its own without city funding(O’Brien, 1997b). A scheme called tax-increment financing, widely used to supportprivate interests in urban redevelopmentaround the United States, means that taxeson Full Tilt’s revenues do not return to thecity’s general fund for education andservices. Revenues are funnelled into aspecial district account to help expandsimilar redevelopment projects.

Both the Austin and Battle Creek pro-jects aim to attract and serve young peopleand families by modelling themselves on thecorporately produced theme park, includ-ing its concessionaires, leases, and, perhapslater, its pricing structures and promotionaland sponsorship arrangements. The maindifference is that each has been built almostentirely with public money, rather than bythe usual public-private financing blend.Nonetheless, the main effect is to privilegeprivate profit-making.

The Rationale for the ◆

Entertainment-RetailBoom

There are several powerful and intersectingreasons for the entertainment-retail build-ing boom. Real estate developers are part-nering with entertainment corporations inpart because retail and office space wereoverbuilt in the 1980s and remain so todayas speculation runs far ahead of demand.Traditional shopping centres and malls,and even Jon Jerde’s elaborate pseudo-cities, are facing tremendous competitivepressure as American incomes “remain flatand retail space per capita increases”(Phillips, 1995; see also Pacelle, 1997). Inaddition to retail saturation, the develop-ment of new shopping media and ways ofselling to people in the home via catalogues,cable, infomercials, and Internet shoppingis also forcing traditional retailers to be ever

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more inventive to reach the older, affluentthough slower consuming segment of thepopulation. At the same time, these con-sumers are better understood than everbefore—they have been subject to morethan a generation of traditional and nowcomputerized electronic and video informa-tion gathering. Market researchers nowspeak of knowing most of the consumingpopulation as niches, each with its particu-lar tastes, habits, and preferences (Gladwell,1996).

Entertainment retail is a strategy to getpeople out of the house. From the point ofview of landlords, retailers, and especiallythe vast coalitions of institutional real estatespeculators called REITs (real estate invest-ment trusts, essentially mutual funds spe-cializing in real estate), the injection ofentertainment content into commercialspaces is a coordinated way to differentiateone retail space from another, to bring peo-ple out to shop, and, in metropolitan loca-tions, to capture the important tourists. Inthis effort, media conglomerates like Dis-ney, Sony, MCA, and Time-Warner—which own the widely familiar film,television, and sports imagery—have a longhead start. In the risky and overbuilt retailsector, the already tested media contentbolsters investor confidence as do Holly-wood’s corporate deep pockets. Here Poca-hontas, Daffy Duck, and the TasmanianDevil provide a kind of insurance that thecustomers will keep coming. Indeed, theyprovide sure ways to locate and appeal toimportant groups within the broad popula-tion of customers. . . .

Like developers, media conglomeratesand theatre chains have a range of goodreasons to support entertainment retailexperiments. Theatrical film exhibitors feelpressure to get people out of the house, tobreak down the cocoon of television, cable,home video, computer and video games,and the Internet. The video-game industrysees the problem similarly. One manager ofa Seattle virtual-reality centre put it thisway: “What we’re doing, and what every-one else is experimenting with, is ‘What

does it take to get people out of the houseto spend time with other people?’ What isthe right mix? In a sense this is an R&Dproject” (quoted in Goldberg, 1997).

New technologies are an important dif-ferentiating draw for the game arcades andspecialty theatres. The special-format filmproducers, for example, speak in terms ofincreasing the difference between theirproducts and both movie going and stayinghome with a video by intensifying the filmexperience through technology. As anumber of film critics have noticed, the pro-moters of IMAX and the new mini-ridetheatres are trying to recreate filmed enter-tainment as a kinetic, sensory, aural, andeven olfactory experience, and so they areresurrecting the claim to “total cinema,”the cinema of advanced and perfected per-ception, engaging all the senses with com-plete realism (Arthur, 1996). Special-formatfilm’s promoters speak of “total immer-sion.” According to Iwerks’s Vito Sanzone:“The core attraction [of the big screensimulator theatre] is that it’s a totallyimmersive, visual and audio experience. . . .You’re battered and flabbergasted for fiveminutes,” in a way that breaks through the“inundation” of the rest of everyday life(quoted in Johnson, 1995). So too do thenew video and virtual-reality products fromSega and Gameworks claim to offer moreintense experiences based on technologiesthat engulf the player’s body and immersehim or her in a whole environment. Herethe inundation of everyday life, which mustbe shattered, means not only the routinesof suburb, freeway, and workplace, butalso the rest of the media world: video, tele-vision, advertising, radio, and print.

Yet, from the media conglomerates’ per-spective it is not just a question of breakingthrough the “cocoon” of home entertain-ment. Oddly—or perhaps not—what isbeing used to get people out of the house isthe material that has been invading it for40 years. The largest media conglomerateshave realized that they need what Disneychief executive Michael Eisner has called an“inside/outside” strategy, encompassing

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both the inside (media consumption inprivate and domestic spaces) and the out-side (traditional and new forms of mediaconsumption in public). The two spheresmust work together and be mutually sup-portive. Eisner “wants to keep luring peopleout of their homes to see Disney’s moviesand visit its theme parks, while giving theman increasing number of products to enter-tain and inform themselves [with] whenthey do stay home.”3 But now the insideand outside of entertainment culture areinterdependent, as, for example, when asuccessful film’s box office drives homevideo sales, or ABC sports enhances interestin the ESPN Zone restaurants. These com-panies not only can work on both the insideand the outside; they must. Finding newways to occupy space gives the conglomer-ates a new grounding for their mobilecultural products.

◆ Aesthetic Strategies

From an aesthetic point of view, location-based entertainment projects face a centraland perhaps paradoxical problem. Insertedinto standardized and relentlessly exploitedcommercial spaces, they must create—outof thin air—a sense of place. Place is theproduct on offer, built up out of the designstrategies learned in the theme park indus-try. The key theme park lessons applied toretail-entertainment are, first, shape andmanage spaces to appeal to the most eco-nomically desirable customers, making sureto exclude the undesirables through price,marketing, or explicit policy. Because somuch retail-entertainment space is entirelyprivately owned, in shopping malls andtheme parks, screening of visitors can besubtle but intense. Most retail-entertainmentspaces have developed careful entrance andexit control; set back from the street, they areeffectively gated, since visitors enter througha hotel, from a freeway off-ramp or fromhuge parking garages (for commentary onthis see Straight, 1997). They have also

developed architectural and securitytechniques to discourage undesirables—thehomeless, who may beg, or teenagers, whowill spend little money, for example (Goss,1993). At the same time, surprisinglydetailed information gathered by covertsurveillance cameras is fed back into thepool of retail and market research data, tohelp further refine the design and control ofspace.4

The same spatial control can be accom-plished and supported by “themeing,”which when successful, applies strongnarratives to spaces while eliminating unde-sirable or conflicting images, ideas, or expe-riences. Themes themselves—preexistingand well-understood narratives—can helpcontrol these spaces by drawing in and con-firming the identities of the desired cus-tomers. Themed space carefully coordinatesdesign elements, from the shape of openareas and the forms of buildings, to paint,lighting, sound, signs, and sometimes cos-tume, all referring to a cultural story. Inaddition to creating an attraction, the pointof themeing is to achieve as much experien-tial coherence as possible, even if the themeitself is one of heterogeneity, carnival, oreven chaos. So Universal CityWalk’s themeis “city,” a collage and repackaging ofpieces of Los Angeles’s mass cultural image,occasionally even including references togrit and danger. This compressed, selectedHollywood gives eating, shopping, andpeople-watching a charge; they become the-atrical experiences, performances in them-selves (Goss, 1996; cf. Gottdeiner, 1997).Again, media companies have a long head-start in building themed space; they havespent decades specializing in narratives andthe icons that compress narratives. Indeed,they own outright huge banks of theseimages and stories.

At the heart of the location-based enter-tainment projects is this paradox: withinthe context of themed space, they aim toreproduce a sense of authentic space, andthis means evoking the diversity and unpre-dictability of the older city using carefullycalibrated recipes. The projects aim to

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reproduce a life and liveliness that lookslike the older commercial town centre, butin order to do this profitably, in order toturn out the right sort of crowd, they mustcontrol mixing and reduce real unpre-dictability. The appeal of Gameworks,Disney Stores, Rain-forest Cafes, and ESPNZones for mall developers is not just theincreased rents and sales per square foot. Itis that, when successful, these venues createvisible sociability—noise, movement, andthe dense presence of people—inside andoutside their doors. Whether they areinstalled in regional specialty malls, shoe-horned into redeveloped town centres, oradded to the mix of mega-destinations, likeOrlando and Las Vegas, developers andinvestors hope that by combining uphols-tered lounges, Internet cafes, movietheatres, and restaurants with interactivemedia content, location-based entertain-ment can pull in the “destination audi-ence.” These are people, 25 years and older,especially couples, “looking for an eveningthat will combine food, going to a VirtualWorld, a nightclub, a movie” (Zoltak,1996a). Destination audiences can be per-suaded to open their wallets at more thanone attraction, and crowds, the sense of themixed and heterogeneous city, are part ofthe attraction. Heavy mall traffic itself, likethe crowd at the county fair or theme park,can loosen restraints on spending and over-come the sameness of the suburbs and thedispersal of the automotive city. The reciperesults in small and large spaces that areclose relatives of the theme park’s ideal city,a closed city free from the uncertainty,poverty, and potential crime of the realstreets (Goss, 1996). . . .

◆ Materializing Media

The most important example of themeing is,of course, the focus on media product as thecentral story of the retail space. Like the useof high-impact film and game technologies,the integration of Hollywood and television

narratives aims to push new energy into afamiliar experience and to bring people out.By all accounts the Walt Disney Companyhas been most far-sighted and aggressive infinding endless three-dimensional and spa-tial forms for its media products. As is wellknown, Disney was the first to really under-take (and understand the possibilities of) themeshing of mass media content, merchan-dising, and promotion in his 1950s themepark. At Disneyland, films and animatedcartoons became three-dimensional in thelandscape. Robots and rides were mediaimages that customers could touch, just asthe park’s live performances, parades, andtheatre could touch customers. . . .

Making media content three-dimen-sional and locating it in space has a varietyof uses for the entertainment conglomer-ates. Entertainment merchandise stores—Disney has 700 worldwide and more than450 in the United States—have becomewidely familiar in the last decade. They sup-plement the all-important licensed mer-chandise sales tied to box office hits (White,1997).5 In these stores, media content in theform of merchandise is a profit stream in itsown right, contributing enormously to thebottom lines of the licensing and “creativecontent” divisions, which, in the case ofDisney, has contributed more than a thirdof annual gross revenue in recent years. Justas important, themed merchandise in theform of clothing, books, toys, and col-lectible knick-knacks gives an added pro-motional boost to the latest film, televisionshow, or video game. . . .

The stores offer visitors a kind of jour-ney through its world of brand-name con-cepts; the very concept of Disney (and thepower of conglomerate media ownership) iscelebrated through products and producthistories. These spaces are dedicated tocorporate identification. As one Warner’sexecutive put it, the stores create “a pres-ence in the community”—and by this hemeant a marketing presence—the moreeffective because it is so much fun.6

Location-based entertainment projectshave multiple and overlapping uses for

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media conglomerates: they help cross-promote media content, intensifying profitsand adding new profit streams, even if thesestreams may also flood the market. They“bomb the brand” and act as walk-throughpublic relations; they provide a place to testnew products and gather information aboutthe customers. But beyond this, material-ized mass media content paradoxicallycreates a sense of the local. As the mostfamiliar cultural material of all, transna-tional media content (originating largely inthe United States) not only serves to givespaces stories, it adds in a powerful sense ofhistory, a sense of a shared past that linksthe family past to the shared social past.And its ability to pull familiar media con-tent into collective space helps spaces com-municate authenticity—an all too fragilecommodity in standardized, controlled, andcentrally designed spaces.

Media content in collective space is alsohelping to create new commodities. Thefeeling of the authentic, the connected, andthe local is extraordinarily useful in leadingthe way into underexplored markets. TheWalt Disney Company’s new chain ofbranded children’s centres, Club Disney, pro-vides an excellent example of how the mar-keter’s exploration of the social importanceof space can help uncover a new set of profitnodes. The Club Disney chain represents theabsorption of an older world of children’scheap amusements into a standardized con-glomerate project, and its adaptation tobroad, unmet social needs. On the onehand, Club Disney is a small-scale spin-offof the theme park concept, marketed to con-sumers who might not be able to afford thetime and money for an Orlando or Anaheimholiday. On the other, Club Disney is acanny assessment of the shortage, indeed,the crisis of safe recreational space andactivities for American children.

The old kiddy land and its successor, thefamily entertainment centre, were oftenmodest family businesses or small fran-chises, featuring a mix of miniature golfcourses, games arcades and redemptiongames, a playground, a snack bar, a go-karttrack, and perhaps some small carnival

rides. In the last decade, fun parks havebeen absorbed into national companies;more recently they are being pulled into (ordisplaced by) much more elaborate chainsof pay-to-enter indoor playgrounds.7 TheDiscovery Zone franchise, which aims atfamilies with small children in a residentmarket, is the best-known intermediatedevelopment. Founded in 1989 by aMissouri gymnastics coach “who figuredharried parents—particularly on rainydays—would happily pay for a clean, safe,indoor play area filled with games, mazes,and climbing areas” (Gubernick, 1996: 66;Miller, 1993), Discovery Zone sells safetyand insulation from tough playgrounds anddangerous streets, a real appeal in manyplaces. “We offer a safe secure environ-ment,” said Chuck Gelman, vice presidentof marketing for Discovery Zone. “Let’sface it, you can’t go to an outdoor play-ground in a lot of areas. It’s a treat for thekids, and it’s a hell of a value. Think aboutthe price of mom taking her three kids tothe movie” (quoted in Miller, 1993: 19).Discovery Zone admissions are aboutUS$6-7 per child, and adults go free.

In the late 1990s, Discovery Zone and itscompetitors [branched] out, seeking sitesnear anchor stores in regional malls, forexample, and offering a new product. Thepay-to-play-grounds are doubling as com-mercial baby-sitting centres for parents inneed of time to shop. There is some massmedia content in these zones. Movies,videos, computers, and computer games areavailable to divert the children, and Discov-ery Zone claims it is looking ahead to offereducational and social services as “music,dance, and computer classes at the centres;hosting parties for Christmas, Halloween,and other holidays; even sponsoring parentgroups” (Davids, 1996: 20-1). Tests areunder way to see if older children and pre-teens will use Discovery Zone centres atweekends. “We see ourselves in the futureas a paid for community center,” saysDonna Moore, the company’s presidentand chief executive (Davids, 1996). Again,these location-based products are designedto draw the right customers. Retail

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developers consider playgrounds, familyentertainment centres, drop-off baby-sitting,and chain day care centres “desirablebecause they attract a coveted market,”help these customers stay longer at theshopping centre, and can occupy large, dif-ficult to lease spaces, such as former super-markets (Phillips, 1995). Many of thesechains are providing personal services onceperformed in the home, usually by women.These include help with homework, hair-cuts for children, frozen dinner selections,birthday cake ordering, dry-cleaning drop-off and pick-up, chauffeuring, and loans ofcar seats and pagers (Caminiti, 1993;Advertising Age, 1992).8 Clearly, DiscoveryZone and its competitors are showing thatthe potential for businesses to fill in thegaps in the sagging familial and social sup-port systems is enormous, although theirfocus is on upper-income groups.

Discovery Zone had a partnership withBlockbuster Video in the early 1990s, andalthough this venture fell apart, it suggestedthe potential of tying in neighbourhood-level commercial space for children withbranded mass media content. The WaltDisney Company, always alert to makeconnections between families, media, andmerchandising, apparently watched Dis-covery Zone carefully. In 1997, Disneyentered the children’s recreation arena withits own ambitious prototype. Its first24,500-square-foot Club Disney premieredin Thousand Oaks, California, in the springof 1997 (O’Brien, 1996c; Martin, 1996).The Club contains “more than a dozen playareas in four intensively themed sectionsbased on Disney characters.” It is gearedfor “parental interaction with childrenranging in age from infants to 10-year-olds,” around such features as a mirrormaze filled with stuffed Dalmatians, a“Goofy golf” course, gear to climb thewalls, painting, and costumed play acting(Martin, 1996). The Club has differentlygauged activity areas, ranging from activeplay, to creative play, to interactive play.

With its nearly universal namerecognition and its middle-class, family-oriented brand identity, Disney profits

wildly from parental anxieties about sexand violence in mass media content. WithClub Disney, the company will also profitfrom parents’ fear about public space. Fear,rather than real danger, is the emphasishere: so far, the Clubs are being built onlyin affluent suburbs. As usual, Disney is alsooffering added value, incorporating self-improvement, education, and new techno-logy into its safe media spaces. Disneyunderstands that parents can be efficientlyreached if their children’s recreation isthemed “educational” and its clubs arethemed to look much more rational thanthe traditional video arcade or go-kart parkcould ever hope to appear. Its centres willoffer “multimedia and science workshopsand parent-child art classes” (Rasulo,quoted in O’Brien, 1996c: 19).9 The Clubsalso feature “banks of computers for Inter-net surfing and CD-ROM game playing”connected to (and, doubtless, testing) Dis-ney’s growing multimedia and cyberspaceproducts.

In addition to being educational, ClubDisney is cast as therapeutic. Disneyspokespersons assert that “Club Disney willset a new standard for family entertain-ment” (Rasulo, quoted in Martin, 1996: 2)as its interactive structure goes beyond par-ents watching kids jump in rooms full ofplastic balls to “nurture the bond withinfamilies.” Indeed, “children will learn andthe bonding within family elements will berewarding for all” (Rasulo, quoted inO’Brien, 1996c: 19). This mawkish publicrelations talk signals that the Disney touchadds value to time spent with the children,thus producing that much sought-afterAmerican commodity, quality time. . . .

Conclusions ◆

We have seen how energetically the enter-tainment space designers are movingbeyond architecture and decoration todiscover ways that desirable persons can beencouraged to enter and participate in prod-ucts, undesirables kept out, and, generally,

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how every niche of space can be turned topromotional or marketing purposes. . . .The explosion of experimentation with thebuilt environment is evidence that the massmedia corporations are joining the suburbbuilders, urban redevelopers, and shoppingmall magnates in sculpting the physicalworld we move about in and the socialspace we share with neighbours and fellowcitizens.

If entertainment-retail projects were onlymonumental, like CityWalk, NikeTown, or42nd Street, these reconstructions of spacewould still be evidence of a deep, continualreworking of experience. After all, in thepast, monumental architecture has cele-brated national identity, historical events,memories of suffering, narratives of loyalty,and sacrifice. Now the most striking archi-tectural points of pilgrimage cultivate awefor the brand and the magic of belongingthrough the corporation. Like the old-fashioned monuments and memorials, theyare sites where people connect with corecultural ideas and stories. But in these newspaces, the core cultural ideas are not onlyembodied by products, they are products.Citizens are collapsed into consumers, andloyalty is a technique that expands the bottom line. . . .

◆ Notes

1. Strategic thinking about the location ofentertainment is nothing new, as the history of42nd Street illustrates. There, between the end ofthe 19th century and the Great Depression,entertainment entrepreneurs helped create anextraordinary district that embodied Americancommercial culture’s world dominance. Broad-way was a space that promoted, tied in, andcross-promoted the plays, musicals, sheet music,celebrities, and films of the entertainmentindustries; it also was shaped into an extraordi-narily liberated space for sexual minorities andsex workers of all kinds, and so both movedand marked the boundaries of respectability(see Agnew, 1991). On real estate forcescreating Times Square, see Blackmar (1991) and

Hammack (1991); on sexuality and space, seeChauncey (1991) and Senelick (1991).

2. The developers and promoters of theentertainment-retail projects rely heavily onfinancial and political help from state and localgovernments. As is well known, city govern-ments, redevelopment authorities, planning commissions, state and local tax codes, taxabatements, and zoning ordinances all play animportant role in smoothing the way for large-scale commercial real estate projects, and so theyactively promote the high-consumption, andnow retail-entertainment, redefinition of socialspace, as they have for less flamboyant real estatedevelopers for decades. In California, currentstate law makes it much easier to issue publicdebt to build a shopping centre than to build anew school, a massive privileging of the interestsof private speculation over the provision of pub-lic education, goods, and services (Lipsitz, 1998).As Thomas Hanchett (1966) has shown, sincethe late 1950s, vast tracts of today’s hyper-consumption landscape have been built in partwith public financing and public subsidies in theform of tax subsidies, and often at the expense ofprojects that would meet basic housing, school-ing, and open space needs for a broad public.

3. For Disney, Internet-based cyber-entertainment will shortly join the ESPNs andDisney channels, increasing its in-home presence(Orwall, 1998).

4. Paco Underhill’s research firm,Envirosell, has pioneered the research usesof video cameras in stores (Gladwell, 1996;Underhill, 1994).

5. Licensed merchandise sales now accountfor more of the profits from a blockbuster filmthan do box office ticket sales.

6. Similarly, NikeTown on 57th St.,New York, was designed to be a “brand bomb,”“the face of the brand,” “to educate consumersabout product design, research and sports in gen-eral,” by “exploding Nike’s image in the hottestretail district in the world” (Gragg, 1997: 84).

7. Family entertainment centres aredivided into product for several different nichesor special markets. They are hard to count,since their overlap with other amusementindustries (like game arcades) is extensive, butthey number in the thousands nationwide(O’Brien, 1997a).

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8. On the commercialization of formerlydomestic functions, cf. Hochschild (1997).

9. Jay Rasulo is vice president of DisneyRegional Entertainment.

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