ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses ethnographic work on the ongoing transformation of London’s South Bank to explore an example of the realisation of a utopian urban vision. The Southbank Centre is Europe’s largest arts complex. The chapter explores recourse to ethnographic fieldwork on the transformation of London’s Southbank Centre, the tension between pejorative accounts of the ‘Disneyfication’ of the urban public realm and Henri Lefebvre’s assertion in The Right to the City that la fete must be revitalised. As a productive force, Lefebvre’s argues that play has been marginalised in urban development. It has only survived, as he puts it, ‘in the holes of a serious society which perceives itself as structured and systematical and which claims to be technical’. The optimistic edge to Lefebvre’s work, and his willingness to consider the value of transgressive spatiotemporal moments in urban development, invites us to think again critically about urban spaces characterised by tropes of theme park design.
