Street Views of Two Americas

Today I came across two contrasting Street View collections that provide an interesting contrast of different American urban environments.

Google Sightseeing has put together some interesting views of the Disney built Florida town of Celebration, in a post called The Town that Disney Built.



Disney's Celebration was built (I asssume) as a post-post-modern critique of Baudrillard's theories of hyperreality (although I might be wrong).

Whether you think Celebration is a Truman Show lite experiment or a successful re-imagining of American small-town values the Street Views on show in the Google Sightseeing post provide a stark contrast to the images in Doug Rickard's A New American Picture.



Rickard's collection of Google Maps Street View images presents a very different picture of American life. The collection presents an urban world of run-down infrastructure and deprivation.


Please submit your end of term papers - 'Street View and the Psychogeographer' before the end of December.