To quickly grasp the essence of this back-to-the-future new town with the annoyingly cheerful name, walk down postcard-perfect Market Street, past the grocery store where the sign in the window advertises sundries and sushi, past the pastel-orange clock tower that owes a debt to Lake Forest’s posh Market Square shopping center, and into the bakery where you will find one Sarah Muncy.
You ask this young woman what kind of comments visitors make about Celebration, which is being developed by that singular purveyor of fantasy, the Walt Disney Co., and which sits just a few miles southeast of Walt Disney World, where there is a parade on mythical Main Street, USA, just about every day.
And this is what she reports about the reaction to Celebration: “People ask me, `When’s the parade? When does Mickey Mouse come? My son has been waiting all afternoon.’
“The tension between what is real and what is fake matters at Celebration because it is much more than a typical real estate development.
It is the largest and most high-profile attempt yet to use the tools of architecture and urban planning to create a sense of community, something for which Americans seem to yearn passionately–at least to judge by the rhetoric of their politicians. “To prepare America for the 21st Century, we must build stronger communities,” President Clinton said in last month’s State of the Union address, conjuring a vision of a nation where neighbor knows neighbor, and where social bonds and collective identity are forged on front stoops as well as in back yards.
Yet in the very same speech, the president touted a seemingly contradictory ideal–not a chicken in every pot, but a computer in every home. The Internet, he said, is fast becoming “our new town square” and all Americans must have access to it, not pausing to note that the chat rooms of cyberspace are draining vitality from the roomlike public spaces– downtown plazas, courthouse squares and the like–in which Americans have traditionally met face to face.
All this raises a very difficult question: Just what is community?
Must it be that hallowed Norman Rockwell image of small-town America, a place whose residents are defined by their allegiance to a specific locality? Or is community actually based on shared interests rather than common physical space–the chat room on the Internet where people from disparate locales gab about everything from the stock market to sex?
Answers to these questions are unfolding across America in places that, if nothing else, are notable for their extremes of wealth and poverty.
The very same urban planning principles shaping Celebration, where the most expensive homes sell for $1 million, also are at work in the remaking of Chicago’s Cabrini-Green public housing development, where the vast majority of families have an average annual income of just $4,000. Those ideas also are being put to use on the metropolitan fringe, in fast-growing “edge-city” suburbs such as Schaumburg, which has concluded that it needs to develop a pedestrian-friendly town center after decades of planning mostly for the car.
Indeed, it is these outer suburbs, which are largely inhabited by the middle class, that are the prime focus of the burgeoning planning movement known as the New Urbanism. From suburban Washington, D.C., to Sacramento, it has begun to implement its aim of substituting coherently designed communities for the formless sprawl that has come to characterize much of the nation’s suburbs.
These communities are supposed to provide a place where people can live and work, thus reducing traffic congestion and air pollution. They are meant to incorporate a mix of homes, shops and other uses, all within walking distance, so parents need not be perpetual chauffeurs for their children. They also seek to build a sense of community, through such devices as front porches that enable residents to strike up a conversation with passersby.
That brings up some more challenging questions: To what extent can the physical environment influence human behavior? Are architecture and urban planning of primary importance in building communities? Or do other factors matter as much, if not more?
Celebration is a good place to find out.
A half-hour’s drive from downtown Orlando, it has been planned to have 20,000 residents–four times the population projected for the New Urbanism town of Kentlands in Gaithersburg, Md., and twice the number foreseen for the movement’s Laguna West development near Sacramento.
The first residents moved in last year. About 700 people now live in the town, which is governed by a mix of local and county authorities. But to cite that small number is to underestimate the impact Celebration already is having for three reasons: the spillover of visitors from Disney World, the power of the Disney marketing machine and the spell that Walt Disney himself continues to cast on America’s Baby Boomers 30 years after his death in 1966.
`Mayberry of the ’90s’
You learn about Disney’s still-strong influence when you venture into Celebration’s Market Square, a tree-shaded downtown plaza with a gurgling fountain and green benches, and talk with young parents like Tom and Lisa Sublette, who live in a conventional cul-de-sac subdivision in nearby Venice, Fla., but who would rather live in Celebration because it seems safer and friendlier.
“It’s Mayberry of the ’90s,” Tom says, referring to the mythical small town of TV’s “The Andy Griffith Show,” which featured such regular guys as Goober, who worked at Mayberry’s filling station.
“I want a piece of the Disney dream for us too,” Lisa says.
It is often forgotten, however, that Walt Disney looked forward as well as backward–and that he once sought to project his vision for a city of the future at Walt Disney World. Though this city was never built, Disney’s futurism remains embedded in the name of Disney World’s EPCOT Center theme park, which stands for Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow. It’s also there in the sleek monorail that swooshes through Walt Disney World.
Like Celebration, Disney’s experimental city was to have had a population of 20,000. Other than that, the two could not be more different.
The unbuilt concept for EPCOT drew inspiration from the now-discredited school of modern architecture and urban planning, which rejected the tight-knit fabric of the traditional city in favor of high-rises surrounded by wide-open parks. In contrast, Celebration is unabashedly retro, based on town-planning models from the pre-World War II era, before huge swaths of American cities were given over to multi-lane highways and dehumanizing housing developments.
In the broadest sense, however, Celebration reaches back even further–to the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893, Daniel Burnham’s Beaux-Arts extravaganza by the lake.
Just as Celebration strives to show a better way for America’s suburbs, the fair sought to provide a model of orderly urban growth in contrast to the sooty, traffic-clogged city then rising in the Loop. And just as most of the fair’s buildings were designed by famous East Coast architects of a conservative aesthetic bent, so Celebration has been shaped by an architectural all-star team led by tradition-minded New Yorkers Robert A.M. Stern and Jaquelin Robertson.
In any event, you approach Celebration from a highway that does not represent the City Beautiful, but rather the Suburb Ugly–mile after mile of what seems like every franchise outlet and 99-cent store on the planet. And then, absolutely incongruously, white fences appear along the side of the road and it seems as if you have been transported to the Virginia hunt country.
You turn off the highway and head down a gently winding road called Celebration Avenue, over a bridge and into the town itself, where construction workers are putting up scores of homes in the six regional styles allowed in Celebration: Classical, Victorian, Colonial Revival, and Coastal and Mediterranean. Modernism is not allowed.
Then you reach the downtown, where there are about 20 shops and restaurants, and a preview center with a stair-wrapped tower. The center introduces prospective buyers to the key features of Celebration; they represent virtually all the buzzwords of the ’90s–education (an innovative school), health (a campus-like clinic that’s part gym, part hospital), and technology (an “Intranet” computer network that lets residents know about a variety of activities in the town). Diversity, economic and social, is conspicuously absent from the list.
The downtown features several buildings by noted American architects, few of which manage to be convincing. Just off Market Square, for example, there is the town hall by Philip Johnson, a brick box surrounded by a forest of skinny white columns. Where on Earth is its front door? Alongside is a Michael Graves post office. Its orange door-frame emerges from a pale-blue cylinder that strains to be monumental even though the post office is the smallest building in town. And so it goes, with the exception of Cesar Pelli’s cinema–a suavely rounded, two-towered cinema that is a fresh take on the old movie palace.
Designed for pedestrians
Actually, these and other landmark buildings are less important than the way Celebration has been laid out by Stern and Robertson with an eye toward improving the lot of the pedestrian and creating a sense of place. They clearly owe a debt to Seaside, the Florida panhandle resort by Miami architects Andres Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk that ignited interest in the New Urbanism after its mid-1980s debut.
In the typical postwar American suburb, the car is king and there is no identifiable center of activity or sense of interconnectedness between subdivisions. Not so in Celebration. This is a town designed first and foremost for people who walk.
Along the sparkling lake that is the downtown’s physical heart, Front Street twists and turns in order to slow down cars. Commercial buildings are pushed up to the outer edge of each block in order to frame the public space of the street. Parking lots are tucked away in the center of each block instead of ruining the view by being set out front.
Slicing north from the downtown is a boulevard with a lagoon that leads to the town’s golf clubhouse. In contrast to the typical golf course community, in which the course is a private amenity for homes that back up to it, Celebration’s course is designed as a public park. A sidewalk allows non-golfers to walk along the course and enjoy the view.
The neighborhoods have been laid out with similar intelligence. Indeed, they feel more like neighborhoods than subdivisions because they relate to public spaces instead of being organized as private enclaves, barricaded behind a gatehouse. At one of them, Veranda Place, two-story, white-columned houses with front porches face a grassy square that all but invites children to play. The porches are close enough to the sidewalk, and to each other, to enable people to carry on a conversation.
Things are working out exactly as intended, according to residents who live at Veranda Place. And there’s every reason to believe them. The porches are in effect outdoor rooms, furnished with everything from deck chairs to flowers to hammocks. That shows not only that they’re being used, but also that people feel safe enough to leave private possessions outside.
Here, design seems to have opened the door for different patterns of human behavior. And Veranda Place hardly appears to be an isolated case.
Other Celebration residents said that they allow their children to bike and walk around the town, which frees them from being chauffeurs and gives the kids a newfound sense of independence. Even the town’s “Intranet” seems to be encouraging a sense of community. One mother said she used it to track down a school classmate of her child and to arrange a playdate.
And if the story of Celebration stopped there, it would be a happy ending, which is precisely what you’d expect from Disney. But what one also expects–and what also, unfortunately, is present at Celebration–are two qualities that long made Disneyland and Disney World targets for criticism.
The first is cutesy, nostalgic architecture, found in many of the commercial buildings Stern and Robertson have designed for the downtown. Unlike the homes with front porches, which are handsomely straightforward, Stern and Robertson’s downtown commercial buildings alternate between dipped-in-sepia historicism and comic-book postmodernism.
One has a made-up history that was created to justify three different facade styles. Another is a scaled-down version of a classic New York apartment tower, recalling how buildings are miniaturized along Main Street, USA, in order to provide a sense of human scale.
Little wonder, then, that visitors come into the bakery and ask when the parade starts.
The second problem, far more troubling, also recalls Disney World, where a family of four can spend nearly $150 a day in ticket prices alone. These prices, of course, siphon out the poor, making it easy for the Magic Kingdom to present an idealized version of small-town American life.
And so it is at Celebration, where townhouses start at $145,000 and single-family homes begin at nearly $200,000. That compares to the $95,086 median home price for the area in which Celebration is located. Apartments are similarly priced–out of reach, in other words, for many of those who work in Celebration’s trendy stores.
So while Celebration is not a gated community, it clearly erects invisible barriers that define it as a community for the wealthy and the upper middle class. And these are not limited to home prices.
No roads run through Celebration connecting it to other towns, as is true even in the affluent towns of Chicago’s North Shore. Moreover, there are no plans to include businesses like Wal-Marts, superstores that sell TVs and radios, or gas stations, although a large grocery store is envisioned. Those types of stores will remain outside, in the flotsam-and-jetsam of suburbia.
In other words, while this may be the Mayberry of the ’90s, there’s no filing station, and Goober probably couldn’t afford to live there. Celebration’s amenities comfort the comfortable, those who need them least.
Does all that make Celebration a bad place? No. Does that make it more a refuge than a model for reforming the real world? Yes.
A press release faxed Friday by Duany and Plater-Zyberk, announcing that a big home builder has chosen them to design a New Urbanism town near Miami, pointedly says that the development “will have . . . price points that will be more affordable” than Seaside or Celebration.
The public realm spawned by the City Beautiful movement that began with the 1893 Chicago world’s fair is exemplified by the diversity of people who use Chicago’s shoreline; the city’s 20 miles of lakefront parks are open to everyone. But the public realm of Celebration, while accessible to visitors, is largely restricted to those who can afford it. Underscoring the air of unreality at Celebration, as reported by the Orlando Sentinel’s Mary Shanklin, consider how some children there know when it’s bedtime: The fireworks go off at Disney World.
Despite Disney’s powerful patronage, the New Urbanism still must demonstrate that it can create a sense of community for all Americans.
