Of Other Dreamlands: Vernacular Adaptation, Urban Exploration, and Alternative Spectacles in China's Abandoned Themed Spaces

Abstract

This article studies social meanings and practices emerging from two abandoned themed spaces in China: disused theme parks and mega-event sites. Theme parks first appeared in the late 1980s–early 1990s, in the emerging leisure economy and society. In the 1990s–early 2000s, mega-event urbanism became a driver of China's urban development and a strategy of national and international legitimacy. Since their abandonment and disuse by official owners, themed spaces have become ruinscapes where workers and visitors produce agency through rubble and ruination. These spaces constitute sites of vernacular occupation through farming, urban exploration, or wedding photography. Abandoned mega-event sites create alternative spectacles of dereliction forming a critique of the original spectacle. Based on urban exploration as an ethnographic method and on fieldwork in Chinese abandoned themed spaces between 2015 and 2019, this article analyses the spatial and social dimensions of abandoned themed spaces in their afterlives as ruins and rubble.