Some obvious, if geographically limited, examples of virtual reality environments are Disneyland and Walt Disney World. We go there specifically to escape from literal reality, and to temporarily inhabit a world that otherwise exists only in our collective commercialized imagination. We enjoy seeing Pinnochio and Goofy strolling around among us; we want to wander through Cinderella’s dream castle and clamber aboard Captain Hook’s pirate ship.
There are also many larger places where Disneyesque virtual reality is intertwined with the more literal kind. I discovered a striking admixture of this type during a visit to New Orleans. For tourists like myself, the action centered around Bourbon Street and the restored French Quarter, where the New Orleans I experienced conformed to what I had been conditioned to expect: a charming and attractive city focused on something beyond commerce and profit, savoring its emphasis on music and food and the other finer things in life.
But as I explored more of the city at large, driving and walking and taking a bus tour, what I saw was distinctive more for its drabness and lack of regard for its heritage. For example, little was left of historic Basin Street but an expanse of concrete, a legacy only of heedless street and traffic flow "improvements." And throughout the city, older buildings with character were either allowed to deteriorate into bleak decrepitude, or knocked down to make way for featureless stucco shoeboxes (which were then also quickly allowed to deteriorate into bleak decrepitude).
It eventually became evident that lovingly restored and maintained Bourbon Street and the French Quarter were really just an adult theme park, set up to extract money from outside visitors in essentially the same manner as Disneyland. And it became a bit eerie to realize that for the large numbers of people who stayed in and around the French Quarter and did not venture elsewhere, the virtual reality of the adult theme park was their entire "experience" of New Orleans.
The visit to New Orleans opened my eyes to the existence of virtual-reality zones in other cities as well. In California, for example, Old Sacramento is so theatrically and uniformly restored, in the just-painted-yesterday manner of Disneyland, and is so physically isolated from the city proper, and so devoid of normal workaday occupants or live-in residents, that it is hard to categorize it as anything but another adult theme park.
How about the numberless other Old Towns of America’s cities? Perhaps what saves many of these from being primarily virtual-reality enclaves is just some minimal presence of true residents and non tourist-oriented businesses—i.e., of something indigenous that is alive and grows.
