Postmodern Cultural Complexities: The Two Worlds on Cuba Street

This paper presents a Design Research project investigating the cultural worlds found on Cuba Street in Wellington, New Zealand. The work demonstrates that the known culture of Cuba in the geographic location of the Gulf of Mexico has been adopted, adapted and essentially, hijacked by Wellingtonians and is therefore argued as a postmodern spectacle. To begin, a brief discussion is presented on the culture of Cuba where the cultural essence of this geographic location is argued as pre-modern (Sutherland and Denny 2005). From there, in seeking to demonstrate the hijack of Cuban culture in Wellington’s Cuba Street, postmodern theory is applied as an analytical framework. In contrast to the pre-modern cultural essence of Cuba, the culture of Cuba Street located in Wellington New Zealand is shown to hold the cultural essence of postmodernism.