The Zwischenstadt is the dominant spatial urban form of this century (Sieverts, 2003) and, as such, the paradigm within which the majority of humanity produces and reproduces. The epistemology represented by the conceptualization of the
Zwischenstadt has both broad and deep implications for how we live our modern urban
lives, especially considering the strictures of the newly emerging ecological crisis. This chapter is an exploration of the relationships between the concepts of “mobility and moorings” (Hannam, Sheller, and Urry, 2006) in the neo-liberalized world of the
Zwischenstadt (in-between-city). It looks at how these concepts can be used to analyse
interactions of people and capital in a world of flows and throughputs and the scales at which these processes happen. By examining urban form as “Zwischenstadt,” we can explore the intersections and amplifications in meaning that are salient to discussions of rethinking sustainability. The development of the Zwischenstadt enables particular forms of mobility and represents the moorings of such mobility. Canada’s Wonderland, the largest private theme park in the country, performs its role in the Zwischenstadt and demonstrates these relationships. By utilizing the concepts underlying the “mobility turn,” this chapter will highlight some of the intersections between infrastructure and image production as moorings. Hopefully, by doing so, we can ask how uneven development and planning of the Zwischenstadt create possibilities of and, at the same time, undermine concepts of sustainability.
In 1994, while exploring the role of architecture in the creation of navigability and corporate recognition along the high-speed train corridors of Switzerland, Ute Lehrer (1994) noted the following:
Further research in an age of an increasingly globalized economy needs to be directed towards both a continuing effort at theorizing universal trends in urbanization and an epistemology that allows for differentiation and comparison of individual cases. (204)
This imperative has become ever more important as corporations dominate in the development of landscapes and infrastructures. It also becomes more challenging as we create new ways of understanding place, in particular if we see form itself as ephemeral, “insubstantial and immaterial, shimmering on the surface of a particular mass that is ever in circulation” (Adey, 2006, 82). Thus, we look to these areas of transience
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and ethereality for reified market expressions of urban form that both build from and create understandings of “place.”
I choose a small case study much in the same way that Tim Cresswell (2006) uses Amsterdam’s Schiphol airport to illustrate the multilayered construction of mobility, immobility, and issues of justice and exclusion. The case study area for this chapter is Canada’s Wonderland, a roller-coaster theme park located in Vaughan, Ontario.
Canada’s Wonderland is the “most popular seasonal park in North America” (Cedar Fair Entertainment Company, 2007) and is located on Jane Street in Vaughan, Ontario, Canada. It is located on 134 hectares about 30 kilometres north of downtown Toronto. In 2005, the attendance was 3.7 million, and in 2006 it had 3.2 million visits (Forbes Magazine Online, 2006). It is currently owned and operated by Cedar Fair Entertainment Company,
a publicly traded partnership that is listed for trading on The New York Stock Exchange under the symbol “FUN.” In addition to Canada’s Wonderland, Cedar Fair owns and operates eleven other amusement parks, five water parks, one indoor water park resort, and six hotels. (Cedar Fair Entertainment Company, 2008a)
As of 2009, it has the greatest variety of roller coasters in North America (although not the most—at 15) and Canada’s largest outdoor wave pool (Cedar Fair Entertainment Company, 2009).
In studies of the production of place, locales are often chosen for scholarly deconstruction. Working from this basis, I have chosen a locale to be studied, but as a cross-section of a variety of forces and flows of capital, resources, and bodies. Using Thomas Sieverts’s epistemology of the
Zwischenstadt, the “in-between city” (2003),
and the new “mobility turn” of geography, one can examine the image production and material infrastructures required to support such a vast undertaking as Canada’s Wonderland. In fact, the slogan of Canada’s Wonderland—“Where Else?” (renewed in the 2008 marketing campaign)—succinctly sums up for us that there is no other place that could bring together all the elements of
a successful theme park the way that Canada’s Wonderland has.
Sieverts (2003) describes the Zwischenstadt (the in-between city) as being “an ‘in between’ state, a state between place and world, space and time, city and country” (x). As such, the new form of the city, according to him, is not the Europeanized “urban” notion of old downtown cores but the spaces of housing developments, warehouse areas, industrial parks, and other more exclusive use areas of the traditional “suburb.” He makes the (pertinent) argument that this is the place where most urban inhabitants live their lives. In these nodal arrangements connected by highways and transit, not all built areas are typologically ideal or equal, and thus their constellations are not all parallel in form, appearance, or use (Sieverts, 2003, 27). Rather, when looking at a current city region (Sassen, forthcoming), one can see that the region no longer has one functional centre but rather “numerous functionally and symbolically diversified centres that mutually complement each other and, when taken together, make up the essence of the city” (Sieverts, 2003, 26). Thus, for there to be mobility in
Figure 1: Vaughan, Ontario (City of Vaughan, 2007)
Roller-Coasting in the Zwischenstadt 153
the Zwischenstadt, we need the “‘places of in-between-ness’ involved in being mobile but immobilized in lounges, waiting rooms, cafes, amusement parks, hotels, stations, motels, harbours—an immobile network so that others can be on the move” (Hannam, Sheller, and Urry, 2006, 6).
As a reflection of the neo-liberalized global market, this constellation of urbanity is both pervasive and persistent. Government has been complicit in encouraging this concrete expression of neo-liberalized mobility. In the macro sense, this mobility and urban form are predicated on private automobile use and pose significant challenges to sustainability.
This “unloved suburbia” (Sieverts, 2003, 17) is sometimes described as “fractured” (Barnett, 1996) or as “splintered … networked societies” (Graham and Marvin, 2001), implying an ontological “brokenness” of semantics that belies both the resiliency and fluidity of the form. Sieverts’s epistemology of “in-betweenness” gives us a different paradigm that recognizes both the ubiquity of the form and the massive investment in it that already exists. When we search for solutions to ecological crises, it is disingenuous to discount this urban form and to talk of “New Urbanist” tendencies towards “greenfield” pedestrian development as being a desirable or achievable solution for most places. The new LEED for Neighbourhood Development1
designations recognize this difficulty, but they do not go far enough to recognize, much less penalize, the market and cultural developments that support the current form in the face of ecological challenges.
These market and cultural developments are deeply embedded in the neo-liberal ideals of “free inward and outward flows” (Jessop, 2002, 114) that are represented not only by “footloose capital” (Harvey, 1985, 122) but also by the movements of bodies. This idealization of the autonomous and privatized movement of individuals is part of the ubiquity of the automobile, of private and mobile space. However, it is also epitomized and capitalized upon in the creation of entertainment, in particular, in the development of theme parks.
Figure 2: Development—namely subdivision—now surround the Park. These are typical of the single-family, low-density subdivisions found everywhere that Sieverts describes. Photo by author, 2008.
The space in motion
Canada’s Wonderland is predicated on mobility. It is not a “place” as much as an experience, and, like a dance, it is completely dependant on the choreography of multiple events at many scales to render the “thrill” experience of the ride to its patrons. It is a “space of flows” in the most literal of senses and, as such, a space that has been privatized and is a truly neo-liberal and marketized experience of mobility.
1 LEED ND (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design: Neighbourhood Designation) is
the newest designation by the U.S. Green Building Council to create a checklist evaluation and certification for environmentally sensitive and sustainable “neighbourhoods.” This designation is mainly about quantitative measures of energy expenditure and thus has a high priority for locational attributes.
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When one tries to understand Canada’s Wonderland, it is important to think about this space as a place of enablement—that it creates, captures, and produces value from flows of people, capital, goods, and ideas or images. This production of mobilities is a culturally constructed concept, one that builds on the idea of mobility as value-laden and embedded movement, as place is the value-laden construct of location (Cresswell, 2006, 3). As with other socially constructed concepts, Canada’s Wonderland must be looked at critically in terms of the ways that politics, markets, scale, and other cultural forces come together to inform various restrictions and permissions of mobility.
Mobility has become a fixture of modern society and, as such, has technological, theoretical, and infrastructural aspects that feed back into the creation of space and place for societies at large. As “there is not an innate or essentialist meaning to movement. Mobility instead gains meaning through its embeddedness within societies, culture, politics, histories” (Adey, 2006, 83). The simple fact of movement as a transit across space implies energy expenditure, and, as recent work in sustainability shows, there are both economic and ecological costs to creating the moorings of mobility and in its everyday practices. Not all people, or goods, in all times have the same permissions or abilities to move, and transit time and space—costs, borders, cultural permissions, religions, gender, and law—all restrict how and when things will move. Thus, there is a politics to movement, and movement is differentiated (Adey, 2006, 83).
That these movements occur at Canada’s Wonderland is an empirical fact: one can observe trucks, people, cars, and buses entering the “park,” as one can observe the movements of rides. One can measure the ticket sales, profits generated, and resources used, as one can measure the velocity of the “Bat,” “Top Gun,” or “Behemoth” roller coasters. These are not, in themselves, contentious, but what they mean in terms of mobility, the construction of culture, and image production to further reproduce itself in the minds of the people is something else. Thus, “spatial mobility is not an interstice or liaison between a point of departure and a destination. It is a structuring dimension of social life” (Kaufmann, Bergman, and Joye 2004, 754).
When one examines mobility, it is important to remember three main components of the movement for its construction as mobility. The first is access. Who has access and under what conditions? Not all things are allowed to move at all times: for example, if one cannot afford fuel, one cannot drive to the country. This is a literal barrier to movement. However, women in some countries are not permitted to drive; this is a cultural restriction. The second is competence. Who or what can be moved, and what restrictions occur due to ability (either physical or through licensing, permission, or technical skills)? The final component is appropriation. How do agents decide on which options to choose, and what motivates them to do so (Kaufmann Bergman, and Joye 2004, 750)? Further, because these components are not apolitical or value free, the study of mobility as the culturally constructed, value–laden face of movement is entirely appropriate. And Canada’s Wonderland is a place about movement as entertainment. However, even movement as entertainment has a massive underlying support structure of moorings, “the necessary spatial, infrastructural and institutional moorings that configure and enable mobilities—creating what Harvey (1989) called the ‘spatial fix’” (Hannam, Sheller, and Urry, 2006, 3). These moorings can be the actual physical infrastructure of the cars on the rails of the roller coaster, the rails themselves, the electrical lines and generators that allow rides to run, and the computer programmes that monitor safety and govern the velocities and maintenance. The roller coasters
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represent a massive capital investment with the total cost of $21 million dollars2 for the
new “Behemoth” at Canada’s Wonderland. It is the “largest investment in the history of Canada’s Wonderland” (Cedar Fair Entertainment Company, 2008b, 3) and reinforces the fluidity and malleability of the Zwischenstadt. As the annual report continues, “Behemoth will forever change the skyline of the park,” and we can recognize that this landscape is constantly in transition, insubstantial yet obdurate. There are a variety of other types of mooring required for a ride to be offered. Moorings are also pathways between the rides, the roads to the park, the sewers and water mains that service it, the food services buildings, the buses that bring in workers or underage patrons, and the ticket computers, as well as the “soft moorings”: the ticket takers, security personnel, caretakers and maintenance experts, food services people, managers, accountants, marketers, event coordinators, and even the people who drive their children to the park for summer jobs. These are just a sample of the variety of infrastructures that this experience of a “ride” relies on for it to be offered.
The development of the park: Challenges to sustainability
In 1972, the Taft Corporation received the report it had commissioned regarding the viability of the market for a major theme park development (Cameron, 1981, 28). Citing a portion of this report—“You’ve got the population, the money and the highway access…. the Maple site is ideal” (Taft, quoted in Cameron, 1981, 24)—the American corporation began to pursue an active agenda for development in the area, buying options on the land in 1973.3 Although the Provincial government tried to
steer the project elsewhere,4 Taft was insistent that the Maple location, just north of the
major highway, the 401, and adjacent to another major highway, the 400, was the only suitable one (Cameron, 1981, 28). Despite local opposition, the company won approvals through local council, the Province of Ontario, and the Ontario Municipal Board, with the Region of York agreeing to finance the “major water, sewage and road facilities” for the development (Cameron, 1981, 35).
It is important to remember that this was a time of capitalist economic crisis; the Canadian dollar was high, oil was expensive, and the recession was in full force, and thus Taft’s reminders of the “necessity of economic growth and job creation” coupled with the promise of 250 permanent jobs and 2000 temporary ones held special allure for elected officials (Cameron, 1981, 5, 46). Furthermore, the building of the infrastructure for the development would provide for high-quality construction jobs in a time of recession, providing a Fordist compromise and fulfilling Harvey’s spatial fix, in removing crisis-causing capital into slow-return investment for the state in the form of infrastructure (Harvey, 1985). It follows that the creation of infrastructure that enables both the movement of resources, like water, through this system and the flows of people that will be the mode of capturing economic values for the economy fulfills a range of economic purposes.
Furthermore, it is not just the movement of people that is important. Although the clientele and personnel “in their everyday lives are, therefore, bound up within a coded
2 The annual report lists the cost of Behemoth’s construction at $21 million, but the website of
Canada’s Wonderland lists it at $26 million. This inconsistency could be either a cost overrun in the construction or a difference in currencies, as the annual report refers to American dollars.
3 The former Town of Maple is now part of the City of Vaughan, which, in turn, is a lower-tier
municipality in the Regional Municipality of York. The different tiers of government have separate and joint infrastructure development priorities, funding arrangements, and permissions.
4 This was “Class 1 Agricultural Land”—provincially designated as permanently agricultural
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infrastructure of, ‘networks of mobilities, interactions, and transactions that bind them together across scales’” (Dodge and Kitchen, 2005, quoted in Adey, 2006, 79), the movement of goods is also an important element of this place. The mobility of consumables and resources is also worth examining. The megawatts of power used to run the rides, the volumes of heated water for the water park, the petroleum products for the vehicles of the visitors (I cannot imagine going there now by bicycle or as a pedestrian),5 and the quantities of sugar6 imported and consumed by those there record
their own ecological footprints, mobilities, and moorings. These are neither insubstantial nor inconsequential, as “Food, merchandise and games” revenue underwent a 36.5 per cent increase in profit for 2007 across all of Cedar Fair’s properties, representing revenue of $360 USD million for all the parks. The “combined in-park guest per capita spending” was $40.60 USD (Cedar Fair Entertainment Company, 2008b, 11), a 5 per cent increase over the 2006 amount. In terms of raw inputs, this is a space that challenges the traditional conception of sustainability.
Through maintenance and operations (Adey, 2006, 80), as well as the constant flow of goods, the amusement park is both fixed and becoming, constantly being built, rebuilt, renewed, and refreshed. As such, it is a highly networked and coordinated space. Operating costs and expenses are in the millions, which means, overall, a sizable loss to the corporation (as the company accounts for it in the annual report), but these expenses are still lower than the costs from the previous year (Cedar Fair Entertainment Company, 2008b, 13). This circumstance represents an opportunity, as the corporation has a deep and abiding interest in maximizing profit through decreasing costs. While some cost reduction has been achieved in the past through governments providing infrastructure, such as the water and sewer mains, the future may hold some incentives to reduce resource inputs as energy becomes ever more expensive.
Mobile spaces: Permissions and access
Yet Canada’s Wonderland is also an exclusive space. Private entertainment happens here. It is a place of limited access, surrounded by high fences and highly secured against intruders. Even information on the park itself is limited and guarded, whether against industry competitors or curious researchers. Entrance is permitted through a limited number of gates, and the sale of wristbands and stamps are handed out at the gates to further demarcate permissions of access to specific rides. Some people, such as the elderly, small children, and pregnant women will also be excluded; thus,
competence is a barrier as well. Consequently, the ride itself becomes the fetishization of a
movement and is dependant, as is any luxury, on the “exclusion of others who are already positioned as not free in the same way” (Hannam, Sheller, and Urry, 2006, 3). Exclusion is generated through ticket pricing as well. In August 2007, general admission (ages 3–59) cost $51.40 CDN (Cedar Fair Entertainment Company, 2007), yet minimum wage was $9.50 CDN per hour, circumstances that erected a significant cost barrier for some. This is not an “everyday” entertainment experience for most.
This method of exclusion is particularly poignant because the majority of the workers at Canada’s Wonderland are seasonal—transient, migratory, and student
5 “The Park's parking lot is over 3 million square feet with 10,300 parking spaces. It would be
able to hold over 50 cruise ships”. See Cedar Fair Entertainment Company (2008). It is also important to note that employees receive free parking even when visiting the park as part of their contract. Parking is eight dollars a day. See Cedar Fair Entertainment Company (2008).
6 “Almost 200,000 Funnel Cakes are consumed every season … 50,000 pounds of bulk candy are
sold in a season. That’s the average size of 5 adult elephants” See Cedar Fair Entertainment Company (2008).