Type of Document	Master's Thesis
Author	Matassa, Elizabeth Healy
Author's Email Address	ematas1@lsu.edu
URN	etd-03132006-171644
Title	Whaddya Want? It's Coney Island!: Tourism, Play and Memory in the Illegible City
Degree	Master of Arts (M.A.)
Department	Geography & Anthropology
Advisory Committee	Advisor Name Title Miles Richardson Committee Chair Helen Regis Committee Member Kent Mathewson Committee Member
Keywords	New York City urban studies cultural geography
Date of Defense	2006-03-02
Availability	unrestricted
Abstract In the post-industrial American city, the question of what urban space means seems far less important then how it is lived through the dynamic struggles of city dwellers to claim these spaces as their own. These struggles to define urban space are not always overtly political and thus must be examined through the more everyday, sometimes unconscious practices of city dwellers. This thesis attempts to valorize the emotional work of cities through an ethnographic study of Coney Island, Brooklyn. Coney Island is examined first as an urban space which allows tourists to move beyond traditional practices of visual consumption, then as a unique public space of playful bodies and finally, as a space of remembering where absence in the built landscape allows visitors to insert their own imaginings. Through a proliferation of everyday practices and imaginings in less regulated city spaces like Coney Island, established meanings of the city are challenged and reconstructed. City dwellers subvert the aesthetic rationality of the planned city through their sensory experience. Thus, the textual city becomes illegible.
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