The Spectacle City: Consumption and Exclusion per Debord and Zukin

The spectacle city is one built and governed to be seen: mega-events, iconic buildings, themed districts and image campaigns that attract tourists, investors and cameras while the daily life of residents falls outside the frame. The concept comes from The Society of the Spectacle (1967), in which the Situationist Guy Debord argued that in advanced capitalism social relations are mediated by images and life becomes representation. The sociologist Sharon Zukin applied that idea to the city in The Cultures of Cities (1995), showing how culture and image have become the main urban symbolic economy and an instrument for deciding who belongs in each place.

Guy Debord: the spectacle as a social relation mediated by images

Debord was writing against functionalist planning and the consumer city of the 1960s, and the Situationists proposed practices to reclaim it: the dérive, walking without aim to rediscover the city beyond its commercial circuits, and the creation of situations that would break the spectator's passivity. Their diagnosis was that the spectacle is not a set of images but a social relation between people mediated by images, and that the spectacular city turns its inhabitants into the audience of their own lives. That intuition has gained force with social media, where every square and façade is produced to be photographed.

Sharon Zukin: symbolic economy and pacification by cappuccino

Zukin described the economic mechanism. After deindustrialisation, cities competed for capital and visitors with museums, festivals, cultural districts and carefully designed landscapes, and that symbolic economy produced safe, clean, consumable spaces through what she called pacification by cappuccino: the replacement of conflictual public life with a stage for consumption, policed and managed, from which those who do not fit the image are excluded. David Harvey had identified in 1989 the same turn toward entrepreneurial urbanism, in which the urban spectacle serves to attract investment and conceal inequality.

Olympics, stadiums and showcases: the cost of the mega-event

Mega-events are the clearest example. The Barcelona Olympics of 1992 are cited as a regeneration success, but they also inaugurated a model of the city for the visitor that its residents now contest. The Rio de Janeiro Games of 2016 displaced tens of thousands of people and left abandoned venues. World fairs, publicly funded stadiums, shopping malls turned into squares and waterfronts redesigned as showcases follow the same logic: an enormous investment to produce an image that benefits developers, brands and tourism while the cost is shared by all.

Exclusion and alternatives: reclaiming the city of use

Exclusion is the other face. The spectacle city needs a clean stage, and so it expels those who spoil it: homeless people, street vendors, young people gathering without consuming, demonstrations. It does so through design, benches that prevent lying down, squares without shade, through private management of public spaces and through surveillance. Zukin shows that this cleaning destroys precisely the diversity that made the place interesting, and Debord anticipated that a space made to be contemplated ceases to be habitable. The urban spectacle produces, in time, stage sets without neighbours.

The alternatives start from reclaiming the city as a place of use rather than display. The Situationists proposed the dérive and appropriation; Zukin, protecting local shops, affordable housing and neighbourhood cultural practices against their conversion into brand. The question both leave for any urban project is simple: for whom is the image built, who consumes it and who is left outside the frame. A city that can only answer with tourists and investors has stopped being a city and become its own spectacle.