Just for those who are wondering -- and although I think that it's been captured already in a few posts upthread: I keep getting the sense that "to Disneyfy" is being read as "to make it look like Disneyland", but that is not what we are trying to get at.
The concept comes from Baudrillard on the creation of suburbs and shopping districts that are deeply nostalgic for a version of "America" that exists only in our imaginations. A wish for the re-creation of a thing that never was... the same wish that motivates much MAGA desire (only its most powerfully exploited version now, but any political programme can exploit the impulse)... I am working from a nearly 30 year old memory now, but Baudrillard observed that in building Disneyland, the corporation created "Main Street America" mock-ups as they might on a movie set, but that those mock-ups were based on an idealized vision of a place that had never existed. But because viewers of films and visitors to theme parks had never occupied an earlier time (the logic of time being what it is), this version of the past began to be seen as more real than the actual world we live in. The "Little House on the Prairie" books that painted middle America as properly white and Christian, that did not mention that the Ingalls family lived sometimes without paying for it on land that belonged to the Sioux... that did not explain that "Almonzo" was so named because a Muslim family had helped his parent before his birth and so they had named their first son in honour of them in a version of "Al Mansour"... I grew up on Little House and had no way to know when I was a child that it was a Disneyfied version of the world. For it was presented as based on a true autobiography. How was I to know that Laura Ingalls was an unreliable narrator, and that Rose -- her daughter and editor of her papers -- became a committed white supremacist?
Many, many of us will never have access to clarifying information and will continue to seek the Disneyfied version of the past without awareness that the past is never singular.
Thus I can now visit my local giant grocery (as I had to yesterday in the middle of a through hike because it had the only open washroom), and the second level of offices that are cantilevered over the 25 checkout terminals are checkout out with facades meant to evoke a mid 19th C town in middle America (even though I am in Canada). Indeed, I live in a region that I have often characterized as having great aspirations to become Akron of the north. Nobody things the second level is "real" in the store, but they think it speaks to real relationships with farmers, and it obscures the mass-market problems of industrial food, of Cargill and Monsanto versions of food production.
At any rate, this nostalgic view of the world is what Baudrillard called the "simulacrum" -- basically a fantasy that we confuse with reality.
Certainly many many notions that pilgrims will bring to a first-time camino can fall into this category as they seek the original and authentic experience, but do not know exactly what they mean by that. I sometimes wonder if it isn't a little bit like the Disney log-ride, at least from Sarria... but I am not certain that those seekers of "the original experience" would want: highway robbery, bubonic plague, sentenced criminals, starvation and bar fights as constant companions. So what do we mean also when we encounter architecture and say that we are happy that it is in its original form (all the while unaware that the architecture has had its additions and modifications over many centuries and is nothing like its "original")? What of the layers and layers of excavated settlements under the great cities and towns? Why do we not decry that they were built over and buried over the course of the centuries? What shall we make of our happy occupation of a Roman sewer as the main entry chamber of the archeological museum in Astorga? of the morgue for supper at the SdC Parador? What shall we say about the buried hospital that sits atop the buried Roman household, both excavated from under the Île de la Cité in Paris? I love the concrete and steel envelopes we have built to enclose some of our oldest buildings near to where I live (BCE place in Toronto, the library in old Hespler, The CCA museum around the Shaughnessy house in Montreal, the Grange house at the Art Gallery of Ontario). I suppose that I prefer the honesty of the architectural declaration: I am a new component, designed and built to serve the era in which I was built.
At the same time, I prefer local materials and site specific integrations.... The Frank Ghery design for the new AGO in Toronto lacks the vantage point from any direction to show its profile as a great ship.
But if you are able to watch the Netflix series "World's Most Extraordinary Homes" and see the series on Spain and on Portugal you will see that the Iberians wish to be allowed to live in the contemporary, changing world, not held under glass forever.
What I adore about Europe is the constant capacity of its inhabitants and designers to continue to modify what is already there to function under new demands.
Sunday morning musings.