In the growing global urban environment, home is no longer where the heart is. With the proliferation of urban homogeneity, home has become everywhere. Familiar sights, sounds, smells, anything that reaches back into your brain and reminds you of that somewhere else you call home can be found in the urban landscape. Call it Disneyfication or perhaps the Hard Rock Effect, but the point is that I can get very much the same hamburger in Times Square as I could in downtown Dubai. I could buy the same poster off a street vendor down the block from where I work as I could in the piazza in front of Il Duomo in Florence.

So what prompts this growing urban homogeneity? Why has it become so prolific in the past decade or so? Part of the trend comes from simple, practical reasons such as availability of material, architectural and cultural movements, and other large-scale forces, but the change exists on a very small, individual scale as well. The individual in the urban complexity wants to be increasingly safe though the global world shrinks with each new deal on airfare. People want to feel at home no matter where they are.

These new world travelers are not looking to truly explore the places they are visiting. While walking across 44th street toward 8th Avenue the other day, I overheard an older tourist group discussing where to eat. One woman said to another, “That woman back there said there was a McDonald’s just up here somewhere.” The drawl leaked from her gill-like neck. I wanted to grab her, smack her around a little, and promptly drag her into John’s Pizza (which just opened a branch on 44th street in a beautiful old cathedral) and force her to eat some real, New York style brick oven pizza. If you’re going to take the time to travel to a historic urban center, why not fully experience it? Why not envelope all your senses? I can guarantee the McDonald’s burger tastes the same in New York as Savannah and Winston Salem and Richmond and Dallas and Little Rock and Los Angeles and all the way through China, Japan, Russia, the eastern block, and Europe. Only the ketchup will really differ. These people are traveling the world in order to experience what they already know in a different setting. It’s like when The Simpsons go to Japan and constantly eat in “America Town.” It makes no sense to limit oneself like that when a genuine urban experience waits right across the street.

This trend does not end with food though. The entire urban aesthetic is moving towards uniformity. To clarify, I don’t mean the entirety of urban cultural diversity is disappearing (gentrification is a topic for another article), but instead that the image of each major urban center, the attractions, the places we go are all becoming the same. The landmarks themselves may be different, but the areas around them are all slowly but surely beginning to look the same. All the shops are selling the same generic merchandise only the city names and landmarks change. It’s easy to track this change along with the change in the Hard Rock Café restaurant chain.

Originally, the Hard Rock in New York City contained unique rock and roll memorabilia and had a car running through the second story of the building that house it (a nod to Ant Farm’s Dropped City in Arizona). Now, the restaurant resides in Times Square and displays it’s generic t-shirts and marquee rather than a unique, New York rock and roll spirit. Instead, it is a misplaced illusion to, a duplicate of that spirit. This change coincided, no doubt, with Hard Rock’s new global market. Hard Rock Cafes are now everywhere, evidenced by the masses of t-shirts you see; all the same except for the city name underneath the Hard Rock logo. And that right there is the new symbol of the urban tourist: a t-shirt that could be bought at home except for the fact that it has a different city’s name underneath the logo.

Our great urban cultural capitals are traveling down the same road as the Hard Rock Café. The city names and landmarks become the only unique thing people experience about the city. The small side street restaurants, the fringe cultural and historical landmarks, and all the other peripheral urban experiences move closer and closer to the edge of oblivion, remembered only by die-hard urbanites or neighborhood dwellers.

Where does this homogenization end? The worrisome reality is that we already have faux cities popping up in Las Vegas casinos. Even our urban landmarks seem to be starting on the slippery slope towards mass production. Soon the pyramids will be in the Arizona desert, the Sears tower will spring up behind the Taj Mahal, the Eifel Tower will look out over Tokyo, and St. Petersburg Cathedral will rub its walls against Vatican City. They may be illusions or similes like the Empire State Building in the Vegas desert, but there’s an old postmodern saying that every copy takes a little bit of meaning away from the original. Our cities are becoming masses of urban illusions and duplications.

AT&T’s advertising campaign for their global phone that was recently Times Square’s subway station is telling. They list multiple city names into one like “stockholmoscow” or “viennaucklandenver” and that is exactly how our urban landscape is progressing. All our cities are combining and soon they may become so intertwined that they become even more indistinguishable. The names would change to “stocaireno,” “anchoslasienice.” As time goes on, the cities lose more and more of their individual meaning and fall into the urban illusory confusion similar to that of Las Vegas only without the understood trickery involved in the desert play land.

The biggest problem is that most urban tourists don’t recognize the decay of meaning they bring with them when they perpetuate the illusion of sameness they deem necessary to travel. They don’t realize that these cities existed in very different, unique lights in a time before McDonald’s, Hard Rock Café, and Disney created their own urban empires. The travelers, more than the architects or urban planners, are where I place the blame. Architects and planners are mainly civil servants reacting to present urban trends in order to create what they imagine to be the future. If the current urban traveler demands safety and sameness, then the future will be imagined to be just as dull; a continuation of the trend of faceless glass facades and fast food. If the urban tourist begins to appreciate the unique historical and cultural landmarks of a city, then the urban architect and urban planner will adjust to accommodate the traveler and hopefully attempt to maintain the urban identity of the city.

This responsibility does not just fall on the traveler but also the resident. The inhabitants of the city must demand that new structures don’t disrupt the meaning of neighborhoods. Just because progress must be made – and I agree that it must – does not mean that the past cannot be maintained and even referenced in the new structures. Unless we want to completely lose the unique urban meanings of our great cities, we need to reinvent the new to incorporate the old. And this movement, as with most movements, begins with the individual and their willingness to move outside of what they know and experience something different.