Celebration Village Site Plan - Copyright The Walt Disney Company Celebration Overhead View, April 1999 - Copyright The Walt Disney Company Celebration Office Building - Copyright 1999 Andrew Wood

Celebration is an experiment in New Urbanism, an architectural movement seeking to design cities that are pedestrian friendly, coherently themed, and community centered. Generally, this form of architecture is designed to appeal to folks who are nostalgic for small town life Celebration is designed to resemble a "typical'' southern small town built of the 1930s, yet amenities include a fiber-optic network and intranet as well as a state-of-the-art hospital. 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." The ironic relationship 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." This site is an example of heterotopia - a space where opposing narratives co-exist to manage tension. To review, some characteristics of heterotopia are: Site is located away from dominant community - either in physical space or rhetorical narrative. Site is defined by more than one narrative or ideology - typically, contradictory ideas exist within this location Site allows people to engage in non-traditional or deviant behavior Site provides a means for social tension to be managed. Celebration meets the standards of heterotopia: it is separated from a nearby interstate highway with restaurants, tourist traps, and hotels by a "greenzone" of wetlands and a golf course. Reminding us of the Garden City vision of Ebenezer Howard, architect Philip Morris writes: "If man's sure hand is visible in the appealing order, nature's relief can be seen in the arc of open space parallel to the new highway and the bands of wetlands that bracket east and west approaches" (p. 40). Celebration reflects both a myth of the past and a promise of the future, simultaneously. Celebration invites its residents and visitors to sit, stroll, and day dream within an urban setting Celebration provides a therapeutic response to the McWorlding of human experience - the sense that people and places are interchangeable and irrelevant. The irony of Celebration is its attempt to meld rhetorics of past and future - to enact progress in both directions. It is vastly different than the future-oriented EPCOT Center imagined by Walt Disney in the last 1960s. Hellman (1970) describes the original plans for Disney World to resemble a chain of pearls connected by an electric monorail: an amusement park, a prototype community for tomorrow, an industrial park, an entrance complex, and a "jet airport of the future" (p. 122). With its vast dome, EPCOT would represent the rhetorical triumph of human technology over nature.

Celebration Theater - Copyright 1999 Andrew Wood

Moreover, as with Edge Cities imagined by Joel Garreau, Disney's future world would be more humane than traditional urban developments: "in an interesting inversion of the usual process, industry is following the people" (p. 126). [To learn more about EPCOT, visit this online handout created by Ramon Rodriguez.] Rejecting the unidimensional path toward progress epitomized by the 1960s plans for EPCOT, Disney intends for Celebration to represent a rhetoric of public life according to five cornerstones: community, education, place, health, and technology. Community represents a sense of shared obligation among individual homeowners who freely merge public and private roles. Education illustrates a dimension that inspires intellectual contemplation of the town's philosophy and institutionalizes process through which that vision is shared without outsiders and the young. Place is the rhetorical intersection of individual behavior, utterance, and attitudes with formal built structures, such as the Celebration school, hospital, and "town hall." As with community, discussions of place in Celebration are almost invariably preceded with the phrase, "a sense of." Health is a positive integration of physical, mental, and spiritual attitudes designed to enact a particular lifestyle. Like education, health a physical component of the construction of this new town and a way in which the town is rhetorically themed through a rhetoric of "wellness." Technology can be defined as the ability of humans to manipulate their environment through artificial means. In Celebration, technology speaks to a long-term vision of progress that is necessary to the maintenance of Celebration. An advertising booklet entitled, "Isn't This Reason Enough for Celebration?" (The Celebration Company, 1997) notes that, "[I]t's like having your business on a nice, quiet street right off the information superhighway" (n.p.).

Celebration Housing - Copyright 1999 Andrew Wood

Can Celebration work? I ask this question every time I discuss this community with students. Since my first visit in 1996, and my subsequent journeys to this new town, I've struggled with that question, too. One can't help but scoff at the notion of a corporation "building" public life as one might roll out a new brand of tennis shoes or an animated feature. Still, I cannot help but be intrigued by the powerful response to this query offered by Philip Morris: There are those skeptical about this revival of town planning. They say it is only superficial nostalgia. But the sophisticated planning and the passion of not a few people to see it through speak of something else. It is the deeper, abiding desire of a culture to create places that sustain a full range of human needs. Not just marketing or traffic movements or resale value, but value itself. In that respect, Celebration is both cutting edge and rooted in the deeper culture. (p. 43) Successful or not, Celebration represents an important trend in public life - the heterotopian desire to experience both/and rather than either/or. Fixed somewhere between the machine and the garden, technopolis and arcadia, Celebration says as much about contemporary society as it does about the ambitions of Disney. Would you like to learn more about this planned community? Visit my Celebration Resources page.

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