POPULAR CULTURAL PRACTICES IN THE “POSTMODERN CITY”

Contemporary interpretations of the city decry what Fredric Jameson calls "a mutation in built space itself," a postmodern urban fabric in which the traditional economic and political foundations of city life are overwhelmed by the cultural, and the city is reduced to a gigantic shopping mall or theme park, its residents powerless to do anything but consume. The focus on cultural processes as fundamental to the character of today's cities leads to an intriguing point of intersection between urban and cultural geography; it also calls into question the soundness of formulations of cultural practice that underlie many "postmodern" interpretations. This paper argues that recent work in cultural geography, with both its rich engagement with culture theory and its enthusiasm for empirical study of everyday life, can shed new light on our understanding of the city. A brief tour of the quintessential expression of the "postmodern" city, Disneyland, demonstrates that contemporary urban landscapes are complicated and contradictory sites that hegemonically embed both dominant cultural and economic relations and creative resistance to them.