Brian Morris

Department of English with Cultural Studies
University of Melbourne
b.morris@english.unimelb.edu.au

 

John Hannigan, Fantasy City: Pleasure and Profit in the Postmodern Metropolis. London: Routledge, 1998.

 

Last year I found myself staggering down the very long sidewalk of the Las Vegas Strip in a somewhat disoriented state, an Antipodean on his first trip to the United States. There I was, during the middle of a scorching Las Vegas July afternoon, foolishly trying to walk from Circus Circus to the Luxor Hotel–a case of culture schlock perhaps? While this moment of pedestrian delusion was partially attributable to the intense desert heat, it was no doubt helped along by some of the “delirious” sights I passed on my foot journey. The structures facing on to the Strip, such as the extraordinary New York New York casino-hotel with its giant replicas of Manhattan buildings and associated landmarks (Statue of Liberty, the Brooklyn Bridge) neatly wrapped up in a rollercoaster ribbon, present themselves to the contemporary would-be flaneur like purpose-built entries in a giant VR encyclopedia devoted to the subject of the postindustrial/postmodern city. Celebrated urban critic Mike Davis recently described the city as “the brightest star in the firmament of postmodernism” (54),¹ and indeed Las Vegas has long provided theorist-tourists with a productive stomping ground for engaging with postmodern urban forms, experiences, and structures, which manifest themselves in this place with a peculiar luminosity and intensity.

 

Among the first to “discover” this exemplary postmodern landscape were the architects Venturi, Scott Brown, and Izenour, whose seminal manifesto Learning From Las Vegas (1972) provided the blueprint for a number of ongoing debates on postmodern aesthetics and the built environment. Almost three decades, however, have passed since that book was published, and Las Vegas itself now exudes quite a different kind of postmodernity. Regardless of whether you prefer the older and seedier Vegas or the more recent “Disneyfied” version, the city continues to exert a strong attraction with new residents, tourists, and cultural theorists (myself included in the latter of these two categories), who continue to travel there in ever increasing numbers. However, as Mike Davis has slyly noted, the philosophers who celebrate Las Vegas as a postmodern wonderland–presumably he is referring to Baudrillard?–don’t actually have to live there and deal with the city’s less appealing aspects. It’s an important critical point, yet as John Hannigan’s suggestive and welcome new book, Fantasy City: Pleasure and Profit in the Postmodern Metropolis, indicates, there is in fact no need for postmodern philosophers to live in Las Vegas because the chances are that many of the urban trends spectacularly visible there will be probably coming to a city near those philosophers soon (if they haven’t already done so). Centrally, Hannigan proposes that we are witnessing a new phase in the development of consumer societies: the introduction of an “infrastructure of casinos, megaplex cinemas, themed restaurants, simulation theaters, interactive theme rides and virtual reality arcades which collectively promise to change the face of leisure in the postmodern metropolis” (1). According to Hannigan, this development trend, which one finds in a heightened form in Las Vegas, will become a fully-fledged global phenomenon as we enter the new millennium. Certainly my own delirious pomo walk on the Las Vegas Strip was not framed just by an experience of the now “clichéd” tropes of simulation, hyperreality, and time-space compression, but also mediated by my own experience of a new casino-entertainment complex that had recently opened a hemisphere away in my home city of Melbourne.

 

Yet while Las Vegas may epitomize many of the elements of this new entertainment infrastructure in the city and is a regular reference point in Hannigan’s book (a pre-redevelopment image of downtown’s Fremont Street graces the cover), the neon capital is but just one stop on a much more ambitious urban tour which ranges across a large number of North American cities and also does a quick comparative circuit of select cities in the Asia-Pacific Rim. At its best, then, Hannigan’s book sketches out a complex differential history of a new kind of “uneven development” in which postindustrial cities are being both reconstructed and trying to differentiate themselves as centers or “hubs” of leisure and consumption.

 

In his introduction Hannigan defines “fantasy city” according to the following six features: it is organized around a marketable theme; it is aggressively branded; it operates day and night; it features what might be termed modular components; it is solipsistic in so far as it ignores surrounding neighborhoods; and it is postmodern. These features then prompt Hannigan to set up some central questions and problematics (some of which seem more useful than others):

 

Are fantasy cities the culmination of a long-term trend in which private space replaces public space? Do these new entertainment venues further entrench the gap between the haves and have-nots in the "dual city"? Are they the nuclei around which new downtown identities form or do they simply accelerate the destruction of local vernaculars and communities? And, finally, do they constitute thriving urban cauldrons out of which flows the elixir to reverse the decline of downtown areas or are they danger signs that the city itself is rapidly becoming transformed into a hyperreal consumer commodity? (7)

 

This last question is a pivotal one, for the author frames his overall inquiry within a general thesis (to which I shall return) that fantasy city is “the end-product of a long-standing cultural contradiction in American society between the middle-class desire for experience and their parallel reluctance to take risks, especially those which involve contact with the ‘lower orders’ in cities” (7).

 

As a means of plotting the trajectory behind contemporary manifestations of that “cultural contradiction,” Fantasy City strategically opens with a three-chapter section on the historical context of entertainment’s role in the development of the American city from the late nineteenth century to the present day, particularly as it manifests itself in spatial terms (downtown life versus that of the suburbs). Thus in his first chapter, Hannigan discusses the so-called “golden age” of urban entertainment that invigorated downtown city life in North America between the 1890s and 1920s and that provides a possible historical precedent for the contemporary emergence of “fantasy city.” Here the author traces the construction of the notion of a then new commercial leisure culture in the city that while representing itself as “public”–in the sense of it being democratic and affordable to all–still managed to maintain rigid socio-spatial barriers along class, race, and gender lines. This chapter seems especially important because it challenges nostalgic laments by those contemporary urban critics who yearn for an often idealized public realm. The second chapter in this section, entitled “Don’t go out tonight,” moves on to chart the slow and gradual decline of the popularity of central city entertainment precincts from the 1950s onwards, a decline connected to widespread suburbanization and the evacuation of downtown areas by the middle classes. Finally, in the third chapter, Hannigan charts a remarkable return of entertainment developments to the central city. This return begins in the 1970s with the building of downtown malls and festival markets and eventually consolidates and expands into “fantasy city” in the 1990s thanks to a proliferation of “new” forms and technologies such as themed restaurants, sports-entertainment complexes, I-Max theaters, and virtual reality arcades.

 

Having set up this useful historical context, Hannigan directs our attention to the attractions of contemporary Urban Entertainment Developments (UEDs) in a section on “Landscapes of Pleasure” which contains two chapters. In the first of these chapters Hannigan tries to outline the appeal of fantasy city to consumers and argues that this can be summarized in terms of four categories: “the siren song of seductive technology; a new source of ‘cultural capital’; a prime provider of experiences which satisfy our desire for ‘riskless risks’; and a form of ‘affective ambiance'” (10). The author also asks (in a rather insubstantial one and a half pages) how these new environments stack up as sites for the production of identities and lifestyles. The second chapter in this section takes a different tack by highlighting the vital “synergies” or convergences in fantasy city between previously segregated and distinct leisure/consumer practices such as shopping, entertainment, dining, and education.

 

This second section offers some tantalizing insights but is, I would suggest, a bit thinly spread in its coverage (relative to the other two sections of the book). While the material that Hannigan covers in this section is engaging, cogent, and relevant, it does seem to be somewhat uncertainly situated methodologically speaking. In particular, the structure of the book has much to indirectly say about the difficult interdisciplinary challenges faced by anyone writing in regard to the slippery signifier of “the postmodern city.” Studies of the city are going through a boom phase at the moment, riding high on a surge of interest in the problematics of space and place. That interest is spread across a diverse range of disciplines, a number of which feature in Routledge’s subject description on the back of Hannigan’s book: “Urban studies, Sociology, Urban geography, Cultural studies, Tourism.” Despite its invitation to interdisciplinarity, however, the style of the book will, I suspect, appeal more to those adhering to the traditions of the first two of those fields. In other words, while the subtitle of his book suggests an equal division of inquiry into “pleasure” and “profit” (which seems to be roughly analogous to saying “consumption” and “production”), Hannigan’s emphasis tends to fall rather too heavily on the production side of the equation. In this regard, then, Hannigan’s book seems to fit most into a tradition of urban analysis that is articulated in such classic works as David Harvey’s Postmodernism: An Enquiry into the Origin of Cultural Change (1990), itself a pivotal work much concerned with “the postmodern and the city,” and that while outlining a complex relationship between base and superstructure ultimately posits the latter as a reflection or symptom of the former.

 

Thus the final and lengthiest section, where Hannigan flexes his urban-sociological muscles to chart contemporary developments regarding entertainment and the city, stands out as the strongest and most coherent. Here the scope of the study and its considerable empirical evidence make the arguments particularly compelling. At the same time, in these latter chapters a potentially tedious reliance on a barrage of reports and statistics concerning the ownership of various developments, their building costs, and economic performance threatens to halt the momentum and flow of Hannigan’s argument. Fortunately, however, some relief is available in the form of an often illuminating series of mini-case studies of about one to three pages that are scattered throughout the book. For example, one such section discusses the failure of the Freedomland U.S.A. theme park in the 1960s, another charts the failure of a public-private partnership, while another considers the effect of the introduction of legalized gambling on the community of Gilpin County. These case studies engagingly ground some of the broader issues and trends with which Hannigan grapples.

 

In this third and final section of Fantasy City, Hannigan opens with a chapter outlining some the key corporate and entrepreneurial players (including the coalition of entertainment conglomerates and real-estate developers) in the leisure development game. This discussion dovetails smoothly with the following chapter, which addresses the increasing importance of private-public partnerships and focuses in particular on sports complexes. In the opening of this chapter, the author quotes the famous invitation from the baseball film Field of Dreams (1989): “If you build it, they will come.” While for my taste Hannigan may have not have explained this enough in terms of why consumers take up such an invitation, and the different kinds of value they might produce or experience in relation to these sites, he certainly offers a compelling and informative analysis of why city authorities find themselves under increasing pressure to “join forces with a corporate savior” in order to build projects that will hopefully “constitute an economic miracle”(129). How often, asks Hannigan, do taxpayers really get a reasonable return for their subsidies or regulatory concessions, what are the risks, and who is really “calling the shots” in this sort of urban development?

 

Hannigan then turns to Las Vegas and its transformation from a seedy mixture “of neon, glitter, blackjack and organized crime… [to a] booming entertainment center” (10). Here, he helpfully contrasts Vegas’s economic miracle with other more troubled gambling developments and teases out the implications and consequences of the recognition of gambling as the entertainment equivalent of a cash crop for economically struggling cities. Following this, in a chapter on the leisure revolution taking place “off-shore,” Hannigan takes us on a quick tour around a number of cities in the Asia-Pacific Rim. While his attempt to move beyond a North American focus is admirable, it is undermined by its whistle-stop nature and can’t really do justice to the specific entertainment histories of the countries. Chief among those differences is the spatialization of cities along class lines. Hannigan acknowledges this when he notes that unlike the American case, “the Asian middle class don’t regard a trip into the central city as a safari into a zone of crime and danger” (185). To his credit, this leads him to conclude that despite “the considerable American content of these new urban entertainment destinations… they are by no means carbon copies” (186).

 

Finally, in his concluding chapter on the future of fantasy city, Hannigan argues that the civic worth of urban entertainment developments hinges upon the ability of urban policy makers to be “proactive rather than reactive” participants in costly projects. In this same chapter Hannigan also reiterates his central argument that driving the production of fantasy city is the American middle-class desire “for predictability and security [that] has for a long time spilled over into the domain of leisure and entertainment” (190). I wonder, though, whether this is the most interesting conclusion to be drawn from the diverse range of case studies that the author presents to the reader. It appears to me that this component of Hannigan’s argument is an unnecessary generalization–must these new urban entertainment developments be grouped together as one coherent form that is constituted in relation to the motives of such a specific “public”? Perhaps it would be equally productive to explore how specific sites constitute themselves in order to attract “mixed” markets–and how and why, do different socially marked groups decide a certain site is worth patronizing (something that Hannigan’s studies admittedly attempt to do). In Melbourne, where I live, for example, one of the most interesting things about the new central city Crown Casino Entertainment Complex (the largest structure of its kind in the southern hemisphere) is precisely the way it tries to negotiate interactions between a necessarily diverse customer base. For example, while the “high rollers” and “whales” as they are known in gambling parlance may remain invisible thanks to private gaming rooms and private elevators, there is still a significant blend of middle-class, professional-managerial-class, and working class patrons in the “public” part of the casino. In terms of American developments, and particularly that of Las Vegas, Hannigan’s work encourages me to wonder about the distinctions that mark the different Vegas casino venues, and the question of who goes there versus say the more “low-rent” gambling town of nearby Laughlin on the Colorado River. Put another way, how do the operators of “fantasy city” attempt to manage the social production of difference at these sites and how do consumers negotiate those management strategies? “Build it and they will come” intones the mantra, but as a cultural theorist with an interest in the productivity of consumption I wanted to know more; specifically, who will come, why do they come, and how do you keep them coming back once they have already visited the place? These reservations aside, John Hannigan’s book is to be heartily welcomed as an excellent starting point–setting up as it does a stimulating range of questions–for the investigation of a topic that deserves to be foregrounded in studies of the city, entertainment, postmodernism, and urban culture.

 

Note

 

1. In this same chapter Davis argues that Las Vegas is in fact just an exaggerated version of Los Angeles.

Works Cited

 

• Davis, Mike. “Las Vegas Versus Nature.” Reopening the American West. Ed. Hal K. Rothman. Tuscon: U of Arizona P, 1998. 53-73.
• Harvey, David. The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change. Oxford: Blackwell, 1990.
• Izenour, Steven, Denise Scott Brown, and Robert Venturi. Learning From Las Vegas: The Forgotten Symbolism of Architectural Form. Cambridge, MA: MIT P, 1972.