If the term Disneyfication is not familiar to you, you should know that it has been in the social and urban debates that are trying to understand what is happening to cities for a few years. Disneyfication is used to describe the social and cultural influence of corporate America. Two of the first cases in the world have been that of Las Vegas, oriented towards gambling, and Venice, which, year following year, has undergone a change that has expelled its citizens to transform the urban fabric into a group of hotels, apartments, for rent, shops souvenirs, theme shops, restaurants and bars for tourists. Does it sound familiar to you? Well, it is happening in the largest cities in the world with a drastic post-pandemic acceleration in which large investment groups are massively purchasing buildings, premises and other spaces to cannibalize citizen centers and transform them into amusement parks.
Paris, London, Milan, Lisbon, are already at an advanced stage where rents have skyrocketed, helping to expel citizens so that only the wealthiest people can have access to housing. In fact, it is a movement that began in the second half of the 20th century and is now at its peak. All of us who live in a city have been participants in this flow that is now digivolving until you reach extremes that we have only seen in cities like New York, where the average rent for an apartment is around $3,500.
Dario Bonifacio tells it very well in Disneyfication. Dimensions and registers of a universal language, a book published last year regarding the effects of Disney pop culture and its influence on transforming the essence of cities. In Italy there are places where clothes are being hung once more outside the windows and between buildings as if it were a set, because in the collective imagination, the Beautiful country, has that configuration as if it were Luca, the latest film by the American colossus. Attracting the passer-by through the topic, manipulating aesthetics to promote a collective idea that is not always truthful. It is now being taken to unparalleled levels. A terrifying idea that is gradually destroying the real essence of urban spaces, reaching amazing extremes like that of Venice, where there are turnstiles to access the city just like those at Disneyland Paris or a festival. Barcelona had warned us with its Mexican hats in the shops. souvenirs to please gringo tourists.
Disney has a dangerous power in its hands, which is to crystallize an idea so that it becomes The Idea, a unique vision, a story without other alternatives, a good-natured stereotype. This is how in Paris the idea of the city of love is extreme, in New York everything seems to be related to a movie, and in Cancun we have a vision of Mexico with a bracelet that mightn’t be more gringa. We are facing the American vision of places where everything has to breathe a coherence of perfect idealization of a space. It’s so terrifying that even more anarchist cities like Naples are succumbing to that pressure, returning figures like the thrower, a typical character of the culture of Parthenopean magical realism of the 20th century, completely disappeared and who has now returned to wander the streets giving the evil eye in exchange for a tip. A grotesque similarity to the extras in the most famous parks in the world who stand with visitors to enrich the imagination of photos and images of something perfect.
The gladiators appear in Rome in front of the Colosseum, a new vermouth shop in Barcelona on Las Ramblas that imitates an old one that closed. The signs are new, but printed with dirt to make them look good. Contemporary barbershops return to luminous, slowly rotating white, red and blue. The tuk tuks invade Lisbon in the busiest areas and fight to have the space they deserve at the cost of running over a passer-by. The Elevador da Gloria competes with tuk tuks to transport more tourists in a peerless fight to prove itself the original. Every city center is invaded by incredible pizzas, perfect rose-shaped artisanal ice creams, bakeries who make the best croissant of the world. It is a tripod of special effects, striking services that mix traditional with a sophistication that not even in El Bulli. The first to fall are the old towns that have been adapted to historical recreation to awaken emotions linked to a distorted idea of what they were.
We have gone from theme parks to theme cities. Will we soon move on to thematic states?
Meanwhile, the bars, clubs and traditional places go out of business, giving way to this glamorous and kitsch in the perfect Disneyland style, because everything has to be instagrammable, tiktokeable to the nth degree. If you don’t put it in your posts, that site doesn’t exist. Oh my God! Don’t feel out of breath just thinking regarding it! Not even Pinocchio and Asparagus in Toyland ever saw so much treachery, so much saturation of commercial desires that wink at you as you walk along the avenues. A garment for only 2.99 euros? A spin on the Ferris wheel? The Ferris wheel, that most typical emblem of the city of attractions. And at night, sleep in an Airbnb or in your hotel room, remembering the feeling of feeling part of a city you don’t know.
Don’t think that if you live in a town you are safe from this phenomenon of cannibalizing identities. Because in Spain municipalities with few inhabitants have fallen into the temptation of large multinationals, as happened with Júzcar who, for the launch of the Sony Pictures Smurfs movie, was transformed from one day to the next into the Blue Town with all the houses painted Smurf blue and large statues of the little characters from the eighties populating the alleys of the Malaga village. Yes, the economy has improved because the town has gone from being anonymous to having a debatable appeal, but the identity of the cartoons has eaten into that of the town, turning it into a barracks phenomenon.
Behind the papier-mâché facades hides a tremendous danger. Leisure is no longer free. You travel, you stay, you consume. Don’t even think regarding stopping in a square or a garden without consuming. You have to spend money, even if it were the last thing in your life. Do you want a photo hanging from a balcony? It is the last thing if you visit an old house, because it is the attraction of the fair.
It’s all part of a plan made of different ingredients, such as tours private restaurants, tuk tuks, neotaverns, gastrobars, huge lines to go anywhere as well as to get on a roller coaster. It is the creation of the city stereotype. That single idea that excludes all kinds of nuances.
Disneyfication is the purest representation of ultracapitalism, influencing urban planning aesthetically and commercially to generate degenerative processes that modify the essence of a city without other forces being able to do so. It is a massification that destroys urban wealth and variety, to standardize it into a consumable product, alien to reality.
After dormitory cities, we are living in the era of amusement park cities
Italo Calvino has been a visionary in this, in his book The invisible cities I played at imagining surreal, almost impossible places that were structured around an idea. Like Sofronia, the fourth city in the group of subtle cities, a center formed by two halves, that of the circus, the trapeze and the roller coaster, and that of the marbles, cement, factories and palaces. One half remains fixed and the other is dismantled to be transported to the side of another half of the city. As strange as it may seem, the half of the city that remains fixed is that of attractions, while that of marbles and palaces is the itinerant one.
Just as in Calvino’s book, we are dismantling the cities of buildings, banks, gardens, companies and schools, and we are leaving the cities of roller coasters, tents and mountebanks fixed.
If I think regarding it, it seems like a process of contemporary colonization, waiting for old Walt to be defrosted from his criotumba and return as supreme emperor of the circus cities. It is likely that we are experiencing the first step of an evolution of society that will lead us to have thematic nations governed by the An acting man. Not even in the worst premonitions of A happy world by Aldous Huxley.
Or maybe it’s just a nightmare, and tomorrow, when we wake up, every city will be exactly the same as we were living before dear old Walt changed them forever. After all, even Cinderella’s carriage stops being such and becomes a pumpkin.
*Francesco Maria Furno, is founder of the Relajaelcoco design studio. He is also a professor at the Instituto de Empresa in Madrid and in Segovia. He deals with brand design and strategy and is fascinated by cooking as a social act..
