Rise of the Spectacular

<p>In this prequel to <i>Fantasy City: Pleasure and Profit in the Postmodern Metropolis</i> (1998) his acclaimed book about the post-industrial city as a site of theming branding and simulated spaces sociologist John Hannigan travels back in time to the 1950s. Unfairly stereotyped as ‘the tranquillized decade’ America at mid-century hosted an escalating proliferation and conjunction of ‘spectacular’ events spaces and technologies.</p><p>Spectacularization was collectively defined by five features. It reflected and legitimated a dramatic increase in scale from the local/regional to the national. It was mediated by the increasingly popular medium of television. It exploited middle-class tension between comfortable conformity and desire for safe adventure. It celebrated technological progress boosterism and military power. It was orchestrated and marketed by a constellation sometimes a coalition of entrepreneurs and dream merchants most prominently Walt Disney. In this wide-ranging odyssey across mid-century America Hannigan visits leisure parks (Cypress Gardens) parades (Tournament of Roses) mega-events (Squaw Valley Olympics Century 21 Exposition) architectural styles (desert modernism) innovations (underwater photography circular film projection) and everyday wonders (chemistry sets). Collectively these fashioned the ‘spectacular gaze’ a prism through which Americans in the 1950s were acculturated to and conscripted into a vision of a progressive technology-based future.</p><p>Rise of the Spectacular will appeal to architects landscape designers geographers sociologists historians and leisure/tourism researchers as well as non-academic readers who are by a fascinating era in history.</p>