The popularity of miniature environments is growing. New York City boasts its own Gulliver’s Gate: several galleries with representations of various cities from around the world and their most famous icons, all in miniature. Brussels has its own Mini Europe, and Istanbul, Miniaturk. These are just some of the sites who use miniaturization as major attraction. In this paper I will examine the possibilities that miniaturization offers as well as the larger concerns with such representations. Of particular attention is how unification and diversity in cities is handled in the miniature versions as well as the narratives that miniature replicas environments spin about their larger real world environments.
About the presenterBlagovesta Momchedjikova
Dr. Blagovesta Momchedjikova, NYU, edited Captured by the City: Perspectives in Urban Culture Studies (2013) and Urban Feel (2010); and co-edited From Above: The Practice of Verticality (2019), The Panorama Handbook (2018), and Public Space: Between Spectacle and Resistance (2016). Her work appears in the International Panorama Council Journal, Streetnotes, The Everyday of Memory, Robert Moses and the Modern City, ISO Magazine, The Journal of American Culture, Tourist Studies, Genre: Imagined Cities, PIERS.