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Book Review
| Theme Park Landscapes: Antecedents and Variations. Edited by Terence Young and Robert Riley. Washington, D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, 2002. 300 pp. Illustrations, notes, list of contributors, index. $28.00.
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| Theme Park Landscapes, the product of a 1996 symposium, has twelve integrated essays, two overviews followed by cross-cultural studies of historic and contemporary theme park landscapes. With the proliferation of theme parks and the theming of other landscapes, including, perhaps, the theming of life, this volume is timely. The overall context for the discussions, no matter the country in which the theme park landscapes exist, is the rise of national tourism and the production of national identity. |
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Working within the cultural history of theme park landscapes, Terence Young distinguishes between places that intend to theme history or culture and those that acquire "theming" as part of their message or operation. Historically theme parks derive from European gardens that incorporated symbolic references to their visitors' cultural backgrounds and employed nostalgic interpretations of the past. Such gardens included opportunities for performance and pilgrimage, recognition of changes in commerce and technology, and the production of authenticity and nationalism. David Lowenthal states theme parks "came into being and thrive only by opposing the chaos or ruin of the untamed and untidy mess beyond" (p.11). They vacate the present and turn to historical subjects where the past "is a triumphal realm of faith not of fact," and "plausibility is as good as truth" (p. 20). Theme parks rely on conflating various times and conjoining places in the interest of living history and commemoration. Both authors recognize appeals to nature tourism, which, according to Lowenthal, are based in rebellion against "the sordid reality of our environmental history," wherein "images of morally superior pristine nature ever replace degraded scenes of culture" (p. 22). |
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The remaining essays include three historical studies of garden types—Richard Quaintance and Edward Harwood on eighteenth century English gardens and their relationship to modern theme parks—and Heath Schenker on nineteenth century pleasure gardens. These are followed by Michel Conan on the invention of Skansen, the nationalist folk park in Stockholm, Sweden; Edward Chappell's review of the historical transformation of Williamsburg, Virginia, into a "themed" and "imagineered" museum; Terence Young's discussion of the National Park Service's conversion of Cades Cove, a village in Great Smoky Mountains National Park, into a virtuous and ironic landscape; and Carla Corbin's study of the American Agricultural Fair as both an old and new themed environment whose purpose continues to evolve. |
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Lastly, there are essays by Marc Treib on Huis Ten Bosch, a Hollander Village near Nagasaki, Japan, which exploits the historic trading agreements between Holland and Japan to create a complex landscape in which "the experience of the theme park can provide the basis for themed living" (p. 216), Nick Stanley's overview of recent "culture theme parks" built in China to promote national identity, and Brenda Brown's essay on theme park rides, which cuts across time and place to capture the meaning of the landscape of motion. |
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Together, these good essays comprise a cultural context for environmental change, where time and natural processes are suspended or adulterated for popular intents, and they are evidence of the extent to which societies mask environmental history through the cultural mechanism of theming. |
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Herbert Gottfried is professor of landscape architecture at Cornell University, where he studies the cultural and environmental history of the American landscape. His latest project is a cultural landscape study of a line of latitude across the state of Massachusetts. |
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