Re: Theme Park Social Enginnering
I'd like to believe this kind of stuff is the fundamental basis of all park design, but I fear that examples show that it's not.
There's a few problems...
The most obvious being that it's rare for an entire park to be designed from scratch. Most were once some other site, or have been a theme park so long that when they were designed ideas of social environment design were very different to today. And as they add new rides, they have "ruined" the plan they started with and are unable to adhere to a contemporary plan because they already have things to work with.
There's also planning restrictions. It may be perfect for you to put your largest ride at the back of the park as a backdrop, but that doesn't mean you can do it.
The other glaring problem is the day to day running of a park rarely matches the designers intention. Bins get moved by cleaners and guests alike, and stray further and further from the ideal location. If that location was ever set to begin with, and I think it's rare that it is. This is, I think, the main problem and people don't seem to realise what a difference it actually makes. Anyone who's worked at a park and had to clean up after guests knows how important bin placement really, really is. It's further important to make those bins easy to open and clean, so guests don't see the state of it and just put the litter beside it. But up-keeping just isn't important for most parks. Effects stop working and are never fixed.
I think the reality is that not enough parks employ enough psychology and philosophy into the design and especially the running of the spaces.
Disney is, of course, the exception. But I think that's part of what makes Disney boring to talk about. It's the one company/parks that you will be able to find academic information about this subject on if you're interested, however, but I found it to be a world away from the way in wich pretty much all other parks are designed and run. It tells you nothing of even the copy cats, because the copy cats copy the end product with little comprehension of the way in which it was developed.
I'd argue it's not prolific enough, and where it does exist it's not being taken seriously by park managements. We could talk all day about the Merlin parks and how they are in a perpetual downward spiral of disregarding this kind of stuff. But they are doing well... So how much does it matter, and how much would it improve their profit if they were to do it? I'm not sure, and that's the problem, and that's why parks don't care. "Disney does it" is a poor argument, because Disney has branding weight behind it which makes it a completely different animal.
For anyone who cares, there's a book called Total Landscape which is very much about all this stuff and strays outside of Disney.
http://books.google.co.uk/books/about/T ... edir_esc=y
