Dreamlands at Centre Pompidou: Disneyfication of Urbanism

The Centre Pompidou in Paris presented "Dreamlands" from May 5 to August 9, 2010, an exhibition curated by Didier Ottinger and Quentin Bajac. It explored how the model of amusement parks like Dreamland (opened 1904 on Coney Island) and world fairs inspired urban planning from 1960s-70s Las Vegas to contemporary Dubai and Shanghai. The show featured 350 works including archival documents and artistic interventions, organized into sections such as "Fantasmagories" and "Copier-coller." It examined the shift from innocent fairground dreams to a strategic embrace of kitsch, pastiche, and storytelling in architecture, as theorized by Robert Venturi in "Learning from Las Vegas." The exhibition traced this phenomenon through projects like Walt Disney's EPCOT, Cedric Price's Fun Palace, and Rem Koolhaas's visionary Manhattan schemes, culminating in the artificial landscapes of Dubai. It ended with Mike Kelley's reconstruction of Kandor, the capital of Superman's Krypton—a city that remains imaginary. The critic Paul Ardenne noted that the exhibition comes as a memorial, signaling the end of this era, with environmental constraints now pointing toward hypertechnological zero-carbon cities like Masdar City by Norman Foster in Abu Dhabi. Miguel Egaña's work "Balaiffel" (2010), a broom shaped like the Eiffel Tower sweeping dozens of miniature Eiffel Towers, underscored the critique.