ABSTRACT
The Disneyland park map is designed as an island — with blue and limitless boundaries that blend into an outside world that is at a remote distance. This has become the paradigm for the theme park map in which the theme park site becomes a utopic island, a world in itself. In its mapping, landscaping and in its naming, the theme park offers itself as a boundless world: Disneyland, Disney World. In Britain, Chessington offers a World of Adventures, while Thorpe Park invites the visitor to: ‘Cross … into another world of fun and fantasy, where everything and everyone is larger than life. It's big, it's giant, it's humungous.’ (Great Thorpe Park map 1998). The ‘theming’ of a theme park is what renders this strangeness domesticated. It is the employment of well-loved and recognised tales that makes the ‘empty space’ and alien territory of the theme park pleasurable and familiar. The knowledges that are brought to the theme park extend beyond the geographical: they involve sets of cultural knowledges drawn from both popular culture and from ‘high’ art.
