Item – Theses Canada

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OCLC number
52409850
Author
Wall, Karen L.(Karen Linda),1955-
Title
Fort Edmonton Mall : heritage, community and commerce.
Degree
Ph. D. -- University of Alberta, 1998
Publisher
Ottawa : National Library of Canada = Bibliothèque nationale du Canada, [1999]
Description
2 microfiches.
Notes
Includes bibliographical references.
Abstract
Critiques of heritage production typically concern current practices of representing or reconstructing the past. As a point of departure, this study examines the socio-cultural context of heritage construction in twentieth-century Canada and Alberta. Case studies are drawn from constructed spaces, in the city of Edmonton which raise questions of the discourses and historical contexts of local heritage development. As reconstructed history, geographically isolated and grounded in principles of traditional museology, Fort Edmonton Park represents a didactic cultural emphasis which has been consistently accompanied by the discourse of tourism and marketing. The Old Strathcona Heritage Conservation District is a dramatized space, an economic revitalization project which began as an episode of community resistance to urban development. The West Edmonton Mall study extends themes of enclosure, civic identity, commerce and aesthetics into an examination of the nature of urban consumer space in the present era. These spaces are approached, first, in terms of their various claim to represent local cultural identity in successive contexts of community and urban growth. Cultural ideologies intersect with social, political and economic agendas in the selective construction of time (past and present) and space (urban streetscapes and heritage zones.) Overall, this study concerns ways in which forms, of public space take on social force and legitimacy in an cases, questions arise of the extent and implications of the privatisation of public space. While the common focus of analysis is the contemporary social construction of meaning and of corresponding public space the central point of reference remains the theory and practice of mediating the past (and thus the present) sense of place and time. The conclusion suggests that in the context of a heritage of commerce, consumerism and retail culture, the present identity of the city as a node in a global market of consumption and tourism may be represented as well by shopping malls as by period reconstructions of commercial districts.
ISBN
0612348539
9780612348530