Riviera, Literature and Cities

It is the defunctionalization of older port areas that strikes me as an urban development trend that key terms of port transformation plans, such as imitating the success of the French Riviera, point to the global trends at work in the background of otherwise local efforts at urban renewal. Starting from a startling discovery that while being a generic topographical term, riviera primarily means the French Riviera, as far as the Wikipedia coverage as a social popularity index is concerned, with only Australian and American geographical counterpart coming anywhere close to the depth and density of its narrative description. It is still the contact with the European original that, it seems, has continued to lend a sheen of an out of the ordinary leisure experience that these locations, inclusive of the French Riviera itself, have come to offer since the end of WWI with their marquee clientèle being replaced first by wealthy tourists and then by well-to-do Europeans with discount transportation and hotels making them into mass destinations, especially with brand-name imitations starting out with mega-hotels, endless beaches and entertainment facilities for young and old alike.

It remains to be seen, however, whether the stylized interiors and vintage objects that signature hotels and institutions invariably feature in cities vying for global visibility are just serving as points of interest for local and foreign visitors. Condensing whole social histories, art deco lamps and vaguely colonial attires reconstructed or reproduced in hotel lobbies hark back to times when travel was a prerogative of the none at all numerous Grand-Tour-faring public. It is not just that leisure industries and districts become affordable luxuries planned to exploit the economies of tourist or urban scale from the outset. It is more the Deleuzian terms of repetition and difference that strike me as cogent instruments for thinking of following the traces of the repressed and alienated histories of societies formerly divided by class, rank and culture. Nineteenth and twentieth centuries have singularly provided world stages and operation theaters for what in retrospect appears to be a first wave of globalization as the bourgeois age, with fits and starts, setbacks and temporary reversals, becoming eventually a generic condition, was slowly coming into its own.

Cinematic, literary and theatrical re-enactions of these days when a sanatorium in Davos was depicted in Thomas Mann's Magic Mountain open a representative window onto a very particular social milieu. A counterpoint to his Death in Venice, Mann's novel ties into one distinction, distance and geography, since there are few novels winning a Nobel prize that take place in such locations of subsequent tourist interest, that continue to maintain an aura of their social and cultural inaccessibility, vis-a-vis Davos Economic Forum and Venice Biennales for Art and Film, and that correspond very neatly to a place dedicated to leisure activities that these novels follow in literary detail. Foreignness of place and literary reference must add volumes to the popular pull of these sites that on the wave of the second, post-1989 globalization period become important parts of international appeal, whether to investors, tourists or media. In the frame of urban history, post-industrial conversion, and spectacular architecture, waterfronts have become a generic point of urban reference whenever a city seeks to reinvent itself. A roster of events to match the programming of cultural policy-making, usual in such cases, does not wait for itself to materialize, as art exhibitions, film festivals and music concerts saturate global maps.