Making Belief: Tastemaking, the Public Imagination, and the Spaces of Everyday Life

Popular taste-makers have long exerted a profound influence on the practice of everyday life and on the built environment, and many landscapes we now see as particularly vernacular or local are actually the result of recent or contemporary media influence. Tastemaking events, home shows, for example, have had a powerful impact which lingered on in the public memory much longer than the products featured in them might have survived in people's homes. The influence of such personalities and events is usually concerned primarily in a strictly domestic sphere, proscribed by the limits of the kitchen, home, and garden. Cumulatively and collectively considered, however, the manipulation of popular tastes that may have been intended to sell products or improve domestic life has just as effectively determined the built form of neighbourhoods and cities. Further, urban form is shaped by the actions, tactics, and associations of everyday life as modified by shifts in taste and public belief. Collectively held ideals - in part beliefs constructed by tastemaking - facilitated by technological innovations can, in a contemporary environment, redefine how designers and communities work together to create built form. This paper will evaluate the place of make-believe and future landscape imaginaries in the creation and adaptation of suburbia.