ancient cities

that owns and operates them (e.g., Guinness
Corporation, Scottish and Newcastle) and the
nation (Ireland, Australia) itself. These themed
pubs and bars are decorated with kitsch that
evokes national stereotypes, most of which no longer
accurately describe the contemporary situation.
For example, some Aussie pubs play up the
crocodile theme, which is also aggressively promoted
in national branding campaigns that feature
such iconic characters, real and fictional, as the
cinema’s Crocodile Dundee and crocodile hunter
Steve Irwin (and, since his death, his young daughter
Bindi Sue).
One recent trend has been the use of themed
environments to enhance urban brands and facilitate
place marketing. As David Grazian shows in
his ethnography, Blue Chicago, that city’s invented
status as the blues capital of the world was the
result of promotional strategies employed by governments,
newspapers, downtown hotels, club
owners, and other local city boosters, designed to
transform the Chicago blues experience into a
commercialized tourist attraction. Official initiatives
here include promotional brochures, free
concerts at the Chicago Cultural Center, guided
half-day bus excursions from downtown to the
Bronzeville neighborhood, and, especially, the
Chicago Blues Festival, which Grazian calls
the Disneyland of the blues. In addition to the
main bandshell, the festival features three smaller
stages, each of which is designed visually and
musically according to a specific theme or image
associated with American blues music.
Theming and Authenticity
One of the dimensions of themed environments
that have occasioned a great deal of comment is
that of authenticity. Authenticity, Grazian tells us,
has two separate but related attributes: the ability
to conform to an idealized set of expectations and
the ability to seem natural and effortless, rather
than deliberately manufactured. Once considered
an objective category, authenticity is now generally
acknowledged to be a product of social construction.
Typically, discussions of theming and
authenticity begin with seminal observations on
the nature of American society by the Italian semiologist
Umberto Eco and the French sociologist
Jean Baudrillard. With the Disney theme parks in
Themed Environments
807
mind, Eco and Baudrillard both depict America as
a hyper-real realm in which the simulacra or “real
fake” predominates. One striking manifestation of
this is the theme town. In one memorable empirical
case study, Stephen Frenkel and Judy Walton
apply this to the recent history of Leavenworth,
Washington, a Pacific Northwestern community in
economic decline that successfully reinvented itself
in the 1960s as an authentic Bavarian town. As the
authors point out, achieving an authentic look here
extends beyond building design to the creation of a
full sensory experience that includes a dress code
and Bavarian music. In the early 1990s, a committee
of the City Planning Commission announced
that the majority of Leavenworth’s commercial
buildings did not embody a genuine Bavarian-
Alpine style; subsequently, stricter requirements
were put in place. Leavenworth and Walton note
how ironic this is, given that Leavenworth is an
authentic Bavarian village only insofar as it constitutes
“an authentic fake.”
Another striking example of this is Tiki, a faux,
themed Polynesian subculture that enjoyed a
period of popularity in the 1950s and 1960s, especially
in southern California. Tiki boasted an
impressive menu of artifacts, design elements, and
leisure activities: themed bars and restaurants,
backyard luau parties festooned with torches,
exotica music, South Seas–inspired vernacular
architecture (motels, apartment buildings, bowling
alleys, roadside stands), invented tropical rum
drinks, amusement parks, and a long shopping list
of Tiki artifacts—mugs, souvenir menus, matchbooks,
swizzle sticks, postcards, and carved idols.
Even as Tiki incorporated such modernist elements
as A-frame architecture and cool jazz, it offered up
an invented and largely fictional religious mythology
featuring primitive deities and rituals associated
with Tiki idols.
For the most part, academic commentators have
decried the artificial or inauthentic nature of
themed environments. In particular, Disneyland
and Disney World have been summarily dismissed
on the grounds that they are contrived, utopian,
and fake, offering up a distorted and ideologically
conservative view of history. The Disney imagineers
(designers) are criticized for parsing out
anything that even hints at inequality, dissent, or
conflict. Other national cultures are reduced to
stereotypes and constitute little more than theme