In this essay, I begin to analyze the strategic rendering of temporal distance and spatial organization employed by Walt Disney Company to fashion a commodified image of community. It is very much a work in progress. Your comments and suggestions are most appreciated.

Disney's Celebration is a bold and controversial experiment in community planning. Essentially, it is a small town covering 4,900 acres located about five miles south of Walt Disney World in Orlando, Florida. Yet, it is more than a town. Celebration represents an unfulfilled dream of Walt Disney who sought to harness the power of his 'imagineers' to fashion a futuristic city in which crime, pollution, and deviance would be replaced by community, cleanliness, and uniformity. Thirty years after his death, architects, planners, and real estate agents are poised to institute aspects of Disney's vision with several key differences. Instead of a bubble-enclosed 'futuropolis' with gleaming monorails and towering structures, Celebration is a contemporary example of commodified nostalgia -- "billed as a 19th-century town for the late 20th century, harking back to a time when lemonade stands, not crime, were on every corner" (Wilson, 1995, p. A1). The project has earned its share of critics; some suggesting that beneath the small-town facade lies a hidden mechanism of social control. However, press reports about the emergence of Celebration from the marshes and fields of Central Florida reveals unanimity on one point: if this Celebration succeeds, it will inaugurate an explosion of enthusiasm for so-called "new urban" planning (Blundo, 1996; Stark, 1995) and challenge contemporary assumptions about the value of suburban living.
This $350 million community demands scholarly attention because of its uniquely postmodern response to modern crises. In an era of corporate downsizing, economic uncertainty and threatening violence, millions of Americans find themselves caught along the intersections of several social divides -- searching for a simpler time and place. For those who can afford it, Celebration promises to enact memories that most Americans have never experienced, but desperately desire. However, celebration might be viewed as a commodified blurring of past and future whose meaning is discovered in breach, rather than presence. The contradictions between these visions provides a vast field of study in which the commodification of place might be interrogated.

Forward to a simpler time

An intergral part of the commodification of nostalgia in a postmodern framework involves the maintanence of simultaneous timelessness and timeliness. As consumers of place, those people who can affort access to planned communities demand that architectural symbols reflect simpler times, before the explosion of violent crime and economic instability. Of course, no such time has existed. In a relative sense, each age bemoans the clash between its reality and ideal state. As a result, the selling of a sense-of-place appeals to apparently deeper cycles of the human psyche -- the slow rhythms of family, the eternal truths of community. Yet even these representations are sexually, racially, economically, and culturally bound. This claim gains context in light of attempts in community planning to ensure the most modern amenities and state of the art technology. The result is a tension of ideals without center. No single vision -- apart from the shifting exigencies of profit -- shape the emergence of community.
Celebration's simultaneous enactment of past and future illustrates the depths of this tension. Its architecture and technology suggest clashing purposes reconciled through the public act of consumption. Housing plans were selected if they exuded a sense of temporal distance, of manufactured age. Dunlop (1996) provides some insight into this strategy with her quotation of a Celebration architect: "We predicated our design on the notion that American towns had a life before the 1940s, basically, up until World War II" (p. 67). The selection of architectural styles that predate the emergence of suburban sprawl and governmental housing projects defines in the built environment an attitude toward the modern concerns of crime and personal safety. Indeed, University of Cincinnati urban design expert Nan Ellin notes: "That kind of nostalgia for life the way it used to be is an expression of the pervasive sense of insecurity people feel today" (cited in Spaid, 1996, p. 11). An Economist article continues: "What people want in their homes, it seems, are all the conveniences and technology of modern life, but hidden in 'timeless' architecture. So Celebration's homes will be in styles that hark back to the past" (Staff, 1995, p. 27). This 'timeless past' is not representative of the recollections of Celebration residents, but a collection of memories from American culture for a past that never was.
The ironic distance of this past from experience is all the more intriguing given the selling of Celebration as a haven of instantaneous communication and high-bandwidth data transfer. Residents seeking to visit an age of organic ritual and cyclical return do so upon a foundation of buried technology. The state-of-the-art fibre optic network will supply residents with an almost staggering amount of online interactivity -- allowing them to experience a "feature-rich communications tapestry" (Sullivan, 1995, p. 136). The collapse of future and past is epitomized by a promotional sign that reads: "Imagine how great it would have been . . . to live fifty years ago with all the neat gear you have today" (Flower, 1996, p. 33). Ultimately, the time of Celebration is not marked by a date, but a state of child-like simplicity. A videotape playing at the Celebration Preview Center promises "[a] new American town of Fourth of July parades and school bake sales . . . spaghetti dinners and fireflies in a jar" (Williams, 1995, p. E7). Disney brochures define this community as "a hopscotch-and-tag neighborhood to be viewed from front-porch swings" (Staff, 1996, p. 60) -- "a special place for families" situated in a "time of innocence" (Lawson, 1995, p. C1). This innocent time can not be revisited -- it is discovered in the process of playing in a technologically sophisticated future.

Building on social terrain

In a similar manner to the shifting axes of past and future, postmodern planned communities play with space in a way that suggests a sense of de-centeredness. It is possible to examine an overhead view of the built environment and select a focus of organization. Yet, the arrangement of space and place rests upon a more fundamental blurring of meaning. The modern assumption that 'well planned communities ensures well planned lives,' has been replaced with a multi-centric matrix of structures and intentions. A single vision of layout and design gives way to multiple references in which, Picasso-like, there is no single point of view. This functional ambiguity matters because of its sophisticated naturalization of hidden dominance. There is no single machine against one can project rage; only a collection of well manicured gardens. This tension between the apparently democratic dis-organization of space and its disciplined attempts to create community constitues a necessary focus of analysis.
The layout of space in Celebration, with its attempt to foster a sense of community provides an exemplar of this tension. At the Celebration Preview Center, a sign reads: "Charming 3 BDR, 2 BA Victorian with FPL, LR, DR, walk-in closet and a neighbor who'll bring a casserole over when you move in" (Stark, 1995, p. D5). Wide sidewalks, close proximity, and front porches are designed to prompt the inhabitants of each home into interaction with neighbors. Homes will not be segregated according to price as is the norm in typical suburban settings. Instead, houses of differing value will be stacked along side one another. "It's all an attempt to build a place where people interact, rely less on cars, and gather in enjoyable public spaces and don't segregate themselves by income group" (Blundo, 1996, p. K1). The sense of community is mirrored in its plans to create a model school system. Natale (1995) adds that even the schools of Celebration will not be organized by classroom, but by 'neighborhood -- and that "[e]ach neighborhood will feature a 'hearth zone,' a central area where all children in that neighborhood, or team, can gather for common activities" (p. 30). In Celebration, the manipulation of the built environment accompanies language of neighborhood designed to generate a sense of community among the inhabitants.
The foundation of this neighborhood structure, however, does not rest upon any one set of cultural signs. This assertion is best illustrated by the cobbling together of various architectural styles. Dillon (1995) notes that residents can choose from six housing designs -- Victorian, Classical, Colonial Revival, Mediterranean, French, and Coastal. These designs constitute no consistent architectural vision of the community. Dunlap (1996) claims that "they are cloaked in a hybrid American style that conjures up lots of non-specific memories" (p. 67). The ephemeral nature of Celebration's built environment emerges most clearly in the act of visiting the Preview Center:

[P]roposed houses in the new town [have been] enlarged to full scale and mounted on billboards. Prospective home buyers enter through real porches, built onto the front of the billboards, to reach the rear sales office, with its 'blueprint' flooring and its renderings and models of the new town. (Robinson, 1995, p. 19)

What emerges from Celebration's organization of space is a set for playing in a model community. The houses are (literally, in the case of the Preview Center) props for the enactment of community [here's a photograph]. However, the props have been selected from different dramas. The result appears to be a place in which multiple, clashing, and overlapping spaces will intersect in only the most absurd ways.

Conclusion

This paper has offered an analysis of a planned community which provides time and space to dislocate from the alienation of contemporary society. This process rests upon the assertion that Disney's experiment with social engineering has value in a wider context than its attempt to commodify nostalgia for simpler times and safer places. As Adler (1995) notes: "Celebration will either validate the new urbanism with the imprimatur of Disney -- 'safe for middle-class consumption' -- or prove the point of its critics, that it's a plot to lure unwitting citizens into living in theme parks" (p. 44). Here, it must be emphasized that the ironic play of meaning is more than simple play, of course. As noted above, Celebration is a postmodern response to modern exigencies. Vanderbilt (1995) is correct in arguing that "ultimately, it is "'community' for sale, a carefully marketed, private version of the small-town" (p. 197). The question remains as to who really can participate in that community. Addressing this question provides an open field of possibility for students of rhetoric.
Future directions for the study of Celebration require that careful attention be paid to the subtle barriers created by this collision of structure and symbolism. To be sure, bare issues of cost are relevant in a community in which "Disney is charging $90 to $100 a square foot, roughly 30% more than homes command in surrounding communities" (DeGeorge, 1995, p. 57). However, an examination of access, with concern for race and ethnicity provides useful focus to the question: what kind of community does Disney intend to build? Recollections that the overwhelming majority of people planning to buy lots were European-American suggest an urgency to this question. Issues of gender remain to be explored as well. How might the organization of the built environment in Celebration naturalize gendered conceptions of power? For many would-be consumers of Disney's vision of community, traditional structure offers little of the kind of liberation promised in the community's advertisements. Perhaps most importantly, the question of precisely who's sense of nostalgia is being sold demand critical response. These sorts of questions constitute a fertile field of endeavor for extended exploration of Florida's postmodern utopia.

References

The works cited in this essay may be found at the Celebration offline resources section.

Your comments and suggestions are appreciated.

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