‘Meet me on main street’: Disneyland as place attachment for Southern Californians

Abstract

Disneyland is often cited by scholars as a pseudo-place, non-place and placeless, but the approximately one million annual passholders in Southern California hold a strong sense of place attachment to the first and only park built by Walt Disney. The particular environmental, cultural, business and personal factors behind Disneyland’s development and evolution have produced a special connection between locals and theme park. Manzo and Perkins’s (2006) three psychological processes of place attachment illustrate the affective, cognitive and behavioral dimensions of the Southern Californian bond to Disneyland’s social and physical features based on qualitative data from interviews with event and group organizers, and two months of participant observation fieldwork at Disneyland, in addition to quantitative data from an online survey of 637 Disneyland fans in Southern California. Without the prodding, involvement or permit of the Disney corporation, Southern Californians have organically created hundreds of their own events, meets and clubs in the park. Disneyland is not placeless as typically insinuated, but rather a meaningful place for many Southern Californians who perceive the park as their primary social hub to meet family, friends and strangers, a home away from home, an anchor to the region and a force for good in American society to be protected and cherished by assisting other visitors and cast members, picking up trash, reporting lost items and enjoying camaraderie with fellow Disney enthusiasts. Though pleasure gardens, mechanical amusement parks and theme parks have long been derided as vacuous, antisocial spaces of ephemeral engagement, Disneyland for Southern Californians demonstrates otherwise. The original Disneyland is perhaps a localized Southern California place phenomenon and not representative of other Disneylands and theme park milieus around the world, though further research is necessary.