Page - 164 - in Siting Futurity - The “Feel Good” Tactical Radicalism of Contemporary Culture in and around Vienna

164 siting futurity cal English town with mock-Tudors, pubs, a statue of Winston Churchill, and a copy of Christ Church in Bristol that is a very popular spot for Chinese wedding photos (Medina 2013); and Oriental Windsor County in Taizhou with a bar called Treasure Island and “[b]right, red, London style phone booths […] scat- tered around the complex—apparently so the army of security guards that patrolled the place 24/7 could have a place to take shelter in the cold and rain” (Shepard 2012a). In contrast, it was not merely elements of Hallstatt that were reproduced in China. Rather, its entire core was replicated, making it not a “copy” but a “clone” town.2 While there have been claims that it is the only such place to have received such treatment, that “Never before in known human history has one country built a full-scale copy of a place in another country. Hallstatt, China is the mother of all knock-offs” (Shepard 2012b), one can also point to “Shang- hai’s Holland Village [… which] replicated, whole cloth, the ur- ban plan for Kattenbroek, a section in the city of Amersfoort in the Dutch province of Utrecht” and even used the same ar- chitect, Ashok Bhalotra, of the firm KuiperCompagnons (KCAP) (Bosker 2013, 43). Nevertheless, Hallstatt is special. As Markus Reisenleitner has pointed out, “Chinese property developers did not just stumble over a random little village in Upper Austria, and Hall- statt is not just another interchangeable tourist spot available to be transplanted as an image of ‘Olde Europe’” (Reisenleitner 2017, 205).3 Rather, Hallstatt is the core of the Kulturlandschaft Hallstatt–Dachstein/Salzkammergut [Hallstatt-Dachstein/Salz- 2 See, for example, Wittek’s ma thesis, Hallstatt Made in China — An Aus- trian Village Cloned (Wittek 2015). 3 He further notes that “The spectacularization of Hallstatt as a New Urban- ist theme park all but obliterates the dark sides of a historical trajectory in which capitalism was built, among other things, on environmental damage (still somewhat visible in the mines) and on the social control of an absolutist Baroque theocracy and its fear-mongering mobilization of re- ligious orthodoxy (still manifest in the ossuaries and frescoes of Hallstatt’s churches), a violent trajectory that escalated during the past century in a fascist state whose memories are now buried in a deep lake and are only occasionally resurrected in popular culture” (Reisenleitner 2017, 215–16).