Page - 178 - in Siting Futurity - The “Feel Good” Tactical Radicalism of Contemporary Culture in and around Vienna

178 siting futurity piness. It is also being sustained thanks to the image-making of tourists and the meaning of weddings among the growing Chi- nese middle class. What Ackbar Abbas wrote about Asian cit- ies in “Faking Globalization” — that they are where “the urban experiments of the 21st century will take place” because Asian cities “make it clear that the city exists as not just a physical, political and economic entity that can be documented, but also a cluster of images, a series of discourses, an experience of space and place, and a set of practices that need to be interpreted” (Ab- bas 2008, 244; italics added) — is true not only of Hallstatt See but of both Hallstatts. That is what the Austrian “BfH — Bürger für Hallstatt” [Citizens for Hallstatt] mobilized against in their 2015 local election. Of the opinion that bus tourism was hurt- ing both the quality of life of many Hallstätter as well as the holiday experience of those guests staying on for longer than a few hours, they formed an association to push for action, such as raising the parking fees for buses.14 What the Hallstätter were noticing is that mass tourism was hollowing out their village, robbing it of its heart and turning into a soulless place subject to the “tourist gaze” (Urry and Larsen 2011). In other words, their village was becoming increasingly not just like its Chinese clone but also like “the standard narrative of the clone” as Mitchell outlines it: a “headless, mindless, soulless creature, the exem- plification of the human organism reduced to ‘bare life’ […], the reduction of the human organism to a purely instrumental and commodified condition” (Mitchell 2011, 37). Cities, we are reminded, are living organisms that can sleep and be in need of resuscitation. The Chinese cloning of them encourages us to see them as living images and to probe their, which is to say our, futurity in the final section, by revisiting the Jurassic universe. 14 Statistics bear them out. The mayor reported at the beginning of 2019: “2014 hatten wir 7917 Reisebusse, 2018 waren es 19.344” [“In 2014 we had 7914 coaches; in 2018 it was 19,344”] (“Hallstatt will Touristenmassen besser lenken” 2019).