Witness towns like Florida’s Celebration, where potential inhabitants were wooed by, not a copy of a real place, present or past, but the idea of a perfect postwar small town, as art-directed by Disney. The power of the idea is such that, in order to copy a thing, you don’t even need the original to be a thing in order to copy it. Even if it is a thing, a material thing, an inhabitable thing, a thing containing gardens in which the reenactor playing Bishop Berkeley could walk with Samuel Johnson, a garden containing rocks which the reenactor playing Samuel Johnson could kick with his material toe - even if it is all this and more, what is copied when a thing is copied is not the thing, it’s the idea. It is making itself over into an exact replica of a European village, but not just any village - it will be a replica of Hallstatt, an Austrian UNESCO site.ĭespite this being a copy of the thing, in bricks and mortar no less, what is copied when a thing is copied is not the thing. Recently it was reported by Der Spiegel that an area in the city of Huizhou, China (about 100 miles north of Hong Kong), perhaps cognizant of its location on suitably angled hillsides, had decided to update its look.
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