ABSTRACT
The idea of reinvention, while glamorous, is not necessarily the most racy these days. What is racy instead is mega-reinvention. It is one thing to reinvent a lifestyle or identity, but to reinvent a whole city is undeniably to shift things up a gear. Megareinvention is today the clarion call of transnational corporations and speculative global investment, with its unleashing of the cult of architectural monumentality, fortresses of extravagance and infinite consumption excess. Mega-malls, mega-resorts, mega-hotels, mega-airports, mega-metropolises: today’s reinvention of places is offered up in the name of gigantism, in a culture obsessed with having the biggest, best, largest, shiniest and newest of everything. This shifting of the cultural terrain from reinvention to mega-reinvention is especially ironic. In an historic unleashing of the technological powers of advanced globalization, mega-reinvention represents not only a new global narrative of capitalism but also an inexhaustible narcissism, one which rides roughshod over nature. Nothing appears to stand in the way of the cultural desire for mega-reinvention and its
unflagging energy which, in an era of global warming and climate change, is suggestive of hubris on the grandest of scales. Even so, mega-reinvention is everywhere and has helped
to advance the dynamism of the global electronic economy in dramatic ways. Consider, for example, the European destination city of leisure, Gran Scala, a €17 billion entertainment project that comprises 32 casinos, 232 restaurants, 70 hotels, five theme parks, a race track and a bullring. Located in the Spanish desert where water and oil are scarce, Gran Scala is symptomatic of present-day reinvention excess: an ambitionless, all-consuming place of transformation which is impervious to any ecological reality. Other mega-paradises of reinvention are also worth noting. In Singapore, Marina Bay Sands, which opened in 2010, is the world’s most expensive casino resort, boasting a 2561 room hotel, a 1,300,000 ft2 convention centre, a mega-mall, a museum, two floating Crystal Pavilions and an ice skating rink. In the USA, American Dream Meadowlands, scheduled to open in 2013, is the second largest combined shopping, entertainment and sports complex in the country, and its five storey structure consists of, among others, a skidome, an indoor ice rink, a waterpark, a theme park and a skydiving simulator. In this chapter, I shall turn to consider this broadening of
the cultural logics of reinvention to that of places and spaces. Drawing on a wide range of studies, and using contemporary illustrations from popular culture and consumerism, I shall argue that the rise of the reinvention of places is inextricably intertwined with consumption excess.
