Celebration: A Lesson in Faux Authenticity

In truth, I struggled with the subtitle of this section, torn between the one used above and “Celebration: A Modern Company Town.” I rejected the later because the one used is a far more accurate description of the reality of Celebration. Those who claim to be in the know may see Celebration as a gift to the brave New Urbanism world from our good and trusted friend, Walt Disney. But a more critical view is that Celebration is a failed experiment that creates an artificial, dangerous, and inauthentic mutation of an idea with merit, neo-traditional communities. For the record, as you have already seen from the title above, my opinion falls decidedly on the side of the more jaundiced observers.

The Disney people, under the guise of The Celebration Company (TCC), tore a page from their theme park book and tried to convince the world that as imagineers and marketeers they could do urban development better. Maybe not cheaper but certainly better. Disney has pushed and shoved Celebration down its alimentary canal as a demonstration that town planning and development can be enlightened. Wow! Now there’s an earth shattering surprise. I can see the cheerleaders exhorting the crowd. Can Disney save an America that now flounders lost and lonely in sterile suburbia? Yes, the crowd screams in Mouseketeer ecstasy. Can Disney create a genuine sense of community that is the antithesis of the lifeless and dangerous suburbs? Yes, Yes, YES! the crowd wildly screams their Mouseketeer orgasms. Right. All you have to do is visit Celebration and buy a house that is anywhere from 25 percent to 40 percent above the surrounding area’s market rate and see for yourself.

Okay, it should be obvious where my head is. I'm not now nor ever have been an enthusiastic fan of Disney's sanitized, plasticized, and historical revisionist worldview or of Celebration. I’m not into escapism, unless I'm on the beach staring at a beautiful young thing wearing not much more than an enigmatic smile. There it is, my personal predilection. But, because Disney chose to disguise Celebration as a New Urbanist community with the help of many willing and well-known architects and planners, including Robert A.M. Stern Architects and Cooper, Robertson & Partners, I’d like to provide a close look, despite my underwhelming response. And thereby give everyone a chance to make up her own mind. After all, Disney is a mighty pop-cultural force to be reckoned with. So, first we'll look at the physical reality of Celebration and then we'll critically examine the Disney rationale that created and sustains it.

Without question, Celebration is Disney's attempt to create a community based on the principles of New Urbanism. Celebration pushes that envelope hard. It is a totally planned community built from the ground up to Disney’s exacting standards. Okay, a good place to start our examination is with the official Disney Company line. “We looked at what made communities great in our past, added what we've learned from the best practices today, and combined that with a vision and hope for strong communities in the future,” said Michael Eisner, then Disney’s reigning monomaniacal chair and CEO. “We believe the result will be a very special community.” Special indeed. Again, no disagreement.

For the record, the 4,900-acre Celebration property is located in Osceola County, south of US 192, with its northwest side bordered by Interstate 4. It's 30 short minutes from downtown Orlando and only 20 minutes plus or minus from the Orlando International Airport, depending on time of day and traffic. So it's easy to find even if you’re location-challenged and the thought of reading a map makes your stomach roll over. But just the act of driving into Celebration is either a wake-up call or a rude slap in the face. Route 192, the major thoroughfare from which Celebration Avenue branches, is a celebration in itself of the typically mind-less and taste-less tourist trap development for which the State is justly famous. The area, with its miles of multiple traffic lanes choked with vehicles from throughout the United States filled with screaming, narcissistic brats and hyper-ventilating, self-absorbed parents, panders to the lowest possible taste.

The roadside’s edge is choked with the ubiquitous peach and turquoise stuccoed, red tile-roofed motels and retail strip centers. Even more insipid are the themed restaurants, some even shaped like giant oranges, which have proliferated in much of the hinterland surrounding the Magic Kingdom like the parasites they are. Their sole purpose in life is to siphon off some small measure of the disposable income scattered about by dazed and bewildered visitors too impecunious to stay at the real thing: Disney World. Seeing that nauseating crudscape certainly makes Walt's motivations for extending the boundaries of his kingdom as far out from the center of Disney World as possible understandable.

As an aside, the Reedy Creek Improvement District is Disney Corporation’s governing arm that oversees about 35 square miles in Orlando. In 1967, the State allowed Disney to set up Reedy Creek as its own private government that could regulate land use, provide firefighting services, build roads, and license alcohol sales; in other words, a government in and of itself that does not have to comply with State zoning and land use laws and is not responsive to voters.

           

The transition from urban chaos to the peaceful enclave of Celebration is completed in the blink of an eye. It’s almost like being beamed aboard the Starship Enterprise. Immediately after turning off of Route 192, you find yourself on a wide, grassy boulevard, lined with trees and a white split-rail fence (plastic). The message is clear: you’ve reached a safe haven. Home, sweet home. You can take a deep breath and finally let yourself relax. An old-fashioned water tower, emblazoned with both Celebration’s name and, of course, an advertisement for the AMC cinema, is the first thing that you see. Followed by a sign in pseudo-childlike handwriting that cautions drivers to be aware of children at play. Cute touch. Nauseating but cute. Then you're treated to a collection of architectural eye candy totally disassociated from the work of the less than creative hacks who are responsible for the visual dreck on Route 192.

           
The 109-acre Celebration Place office park is a cluster of very engaging office buildings designed by a highly skilled architect, the internationally famous Aldo Rossi. Unfortunately, no one seems to have clued Mr. Rossi in to the fact that his design was supposed to have a New Urbanism focus because his office park is nicely designed but fairly standard single-use fare. The office park has an ambitious but probably do-able proposed build-out of one million square feet. Which is a sizable chunk of office space for what is greenfield, suburban central Florida that was not too long ago a wetland. To your right as you drive in is the spacious Celebration Health Campus—designed by none other than Robert A.M. Stern—which is owned and operated by the enormous Florida Hospital system and offers comprehensive healthcare, advanced diagnostics, and a fitness/wellness center. The whole enchilada has about 284,000 square feet.

           
Water Tower Place, an 18.5-acre commercial shopping center, was built in 2004 and is located at the entrance of Celebration on U.S. 192. The development was anchored by Gooding’s Supermarket but that location closed in 2005. The center has 72 percent occupancy and has struggled ever since opening. In April 2010 General Electric was awarded a final judgment of foreclosure and took title to the property. Other tenants when I was last there included Barber & Beauty Emporium, Carpet One, Celebration Florist, Chick-Fil-A, Cold Stone Creamery, Joe's Crab Shack, Planet Smoothie, Quiznos Subs, The UPS Store, and AmSouth Bank. But no mixed use of any sort. Although well designed, it’s just another strip center.

           

Once more, to me and to any urban planner/designer worth her salt, no New Urbanism concepts whatsoever were expressed in the design of the business campus, the health center, or Water Tower Place, especially since those commercial functions are located nowhere near the Town Center, thus losing all that potential opportunity for socioeconomic interaction. So, despite Michael Eisner's comments, Celebration gets off to a dyslexic start. Because, starting at the main access road, it simply doesn't read right as a New Urbanist community.

The initial impression a first-time Celebration visitor has is a typical Disney World experience: the overwhelming sense of cleanliness and order bordering, in my mind, on sterility. Everything has its place and is in it, like its sister Disney creations, the theme parks, Celebration is nothing but spotless. Not only are overgrown lawns or litter on the sidewalks or in the gutters absent, but even the trash and recycling containers have been hidden in service alleys that run behind individual houses. Hopefully for utility’s sake but also so that they cannot be seen from the road. Remember, for many unthinking and unquestioning people, appearance is reality. Indeed.

As is indicated above, much of the non-residential architecture in Celebration is nothing short of fantastic. Some of the biggest, glitziest names in architecture have designed the structures, ranging from marvelous to merely interesting, in the Town Center and along the periphery of the development. The list reads like a who’s who in modern architecture. Michael Graves (Post Office). Philip Johnson (Town Hall). Charles Moore (the church-like Preview Center, the last design before his death). Cesar Pelli (Celebration AMC Theater). Venturi, Scott Brown (Celebration Bank). Robert Stern (Celebration Health). Graham Gund (Celebration Hotel). And Aldo Rossi (Celebration Place) among others.

Hey, Disney's big fees attract the big name designers. Most of their designs are terrific, no doubt whatsoever. But don’t confuse the sauce for the entree. Communities are not a product of place but of the entire warp and woof woven through complex human interactions. A lesson that TCC seems not to have learned. Great structures and fine looking plans for commercial centers do not necessarily result in functioning communities, regardless of what various unnamed marketeers would have all the suckers believe. Here’s their bullshit distilled into a nutshell: build good buildings and you will attract good people and have a good community. Social Darwinism rears its ugly head in certain designing minds. Hey, if you don’t think about the implications, that kind of pseudo-logic sort of makes sense. In a very twisted way.

           

Soon after you get accustomed to the often extraordinary architecture found in the Town Center you're hit by the biggest disappointment of Celebration: the essential blandness of its residential neighborhoods. In stark contrast to the many fascinating residences of other New Urbanist communities (Seaside and Windsor), few of the neighborhoods or houses in Celebration exhibit the flair and drama of creative urban planning or architecture. Although many are attractive in a standard suburban way and are obviously expensive, over and above the blandness there is something essentially chilling about Celebration, with everything so neatly lined up and determinedly well coordinated.

           
An artificial, Orwellian completeness pervades the environment that Disney has created. Of course, Disney’s goal was to provide a totality of vision that is meant to seduce visitors and residents alike into believing that what they see is the truth. But the individual residential structures are too alike, too cookie-cutterish to stimulate visual interest or excitement. In reality, Celebration is too much a traditional subdivision to stand out. Where Seaside homes are rich in diversity, Celebration homes are fundamentally boring and demonstrate so little variety as to be flat-out, dead-ass bland. They are expensive but lack that single most important ingredient that makes a neighborhood authentic: the spark of creativity, of spontaneity, of life itself.

And that finally brings me to that preposterous name: Celebration. Exactly what is it that's being celebrated? My guess is it’s not only Disney's vision, an idea offensive in itself, but it's also a self-congratulatory message put in the mouths of the residents.

We made it! We're certified successes. We're not like those poor slobs living in the dreadfully ordinary suburbs, worrying about when your neighbors are going to remove those offensive political signs in their yard or paint their house the wrong color. Yeah, baby, we've arrived!

Unlike Seaside, but like many other New Urbanism communities, some of the residential blocks in Celebration have service alleys in the back, where the garages are located. A design element I strongly favor, personally and professionally. However, by the standards of New Urbanism the yards in Celebration’s single-family neighborhoods range from small (good) to very large (not good), especially for the more expensive houses. Which largely creates a house/lot pattern that renders Celebration’s single-family residential areas indistinguishable from homes in traditional subdivisions. So much for the idea of using close proximity with the hope that neighbors will therefore be encouraged to interact (“Say, bud. You got a spare joint I can mooch?”) and thereby generate intimacy. Not to mention the paucity of mixed-uses, except for very limited areas in and around the Town Center.

But for me personally, the most chilling thing about Celebration is the absence of those institutions that make neighborhoods and towns in genuine urban places the wonderful environments they can be. Permit me to list the important urban institutions Celebration lacks. Courthouse, police station, fire station, public library, a real City Hall, a funeral home, and even a cemetery. Although by 2003 the Community Presbyterian Church was located adjacent to the Town Center, the absence of many other community-forming institutions and land uses is a purposeful rejection of those mechanisms that historically have played such vital roles in the development of authentic urban settlements. But think for a moment. What would our communities be like if they all excluded the physical manifestations of justice, individual learning, democracy, and even death that those structures represent? Where would we be today if our urban history had developed under that scenario? It's a chilling thought.

After you start looking around Celebration with a critical eye, you realize that the Town Center seems strangely out of synch with the rest of the development. Although it features a small food market, an eye care office, cellular telephone shop, movie theatre, upscale tavern (which is NOT a neighborhood bar), and jewelers, it lacks a supermarket, drug store or dry cleaners and, heavens forbid, a neighborhood bar or two and only has a comparative few multi-story apartments or row houses. Most of the businesses seemed positioned to feed on the life-blood of the growing tourist market.

On the four days I was there, the streets were filled largely, though not exclusively, with tourists like me. Well, perhaps not really like me since many were gawking in obvious admiration (what was I thinking?). But you get the point. The shops and expensive restaurants are intermixed with the so-called “municipal” buildings, which consist of the pseudo-Town Hall and the Post Office, as well as the Bank. As mentioned before, the community has no Fire or Police Departments or Public Library, which at the time I found extremely curious. Until a couple days later, after I had time to reflect on what I had seen. And then I wondered: Where is the diversity that makes our best urban neighborhoods so enticing and exciting? The differing racial and religious heritages. Different housing types and densities. Different sexual orientations. Different social milieu. And no affordable housing. Actually, TCC made payments to the State to avoid having to include housing for unsightly and highly undesirable lower income people. What a terrible shock. And where are the always fascinating counter-culture folk? The young people who look and act like they stumbled out of a 1971 time-warp? Where is Celebration’s spice of life? No way. Just ain't there. So quit looking. All you’re gonna get is stolid upper middle-class, upper-income. Whitebeard all the way. What? No diversity?

Recently, Stetson University, a non-sectarian, comprehensive, private university whose main campus is in nearby DeLand, located just north of Orlando, established a center in Celebration. According to information posted on the University’s website, major funding for the Stetson’s Celebration campus “is provided through grants from the State of Florida, Ford and Knight Foundations, and from The Celebration Company.” Wow, there’s a big surprise. That Disney would help bankroll a private university campus adjacent to the Town Center, adding yet another piece to their jig-saw puzzle. See, we are a real community, is what Celebration seems so very desperate to prove.

It should be noted that in 2004 Lexin Capital purchased the Celebration Town Center from Disney and promptly began converting 105 apartments in the Town Center into condominium type ownership and sold the units to individual owners. Andrés Duany, in his essay, “The Celebration Controversies” (INTBAU, Vol. I, No. 8, 2004; found online at: http://www.intbau.org/essay8.htm) finds that sale to Lexin entirely acceptable since “Main Street, like other modern retailing must be centrally managed to remain competitive.” So, according to Duany, that famous Cuban-American urban planner, commercial ventures are more competitive if they are “centrally” managed? Isn't that what Communist states did with their economies? Like Castro’s Cuba? Centrally managed? And we all know how well that worked. What about market-based capitalism founded on competition? Wonder how many free market economists would agree with his fatuous statement?

That’s a good point from which to launch my critical observations about what Celebration pretends so hard to be and what it really is. To put it as bluntly as possible, despite its masquerade as the “Town” of Celebration, Celebration is not a political jurisdiction of any variety and has no municipal government. Therefore, it has no registered municipal voters, no public municipal elections, no elected municipal officials, and no democratic process. Period.

No matter what it pretends, it's merely a tract of privately owned land known as the Celebration Community Development District run by The Celebration Company (TCC), a wholly-owned subsidiary of The Walt Disney Company. Moreover, to assure itself that Celebration’s residents would never play an unforeseen and uncontrollable role in Disney’s main property, the larger Reedy Creek Improvement District, the land comprising Celebration was severed from Improvement District. That way Celebration homeowners could never claim to be residents of the Improvement District and therefore could never vote. Democracy, after all, is not a laughing matter and should never be left in the hands of people not tightly controlled by Disney’s mouseketeers.

Okay, let’s look at democracy in action at Celebration. Although the commercial properties were owned by TCC and are now owned by Lexin, the residential properties are owned by homeowners who form the Celebration Residential Owner’s Association (CROA), which is governed by a seven-member Board of Directors, five elected to the board by homeowners in the district and two seats elected “at large.” Yes, indeed, that's democracy in action. But wait.

Celebration has two other boards supposedly sharing in governance of Celebration. The Celebration Non-Residential Owner's Association (CNOA), which is governed by a five-member Board of Directors, appointed by TCC. The third board is the Celebration Joint Committee (CJC), which is THE governing body, is comprised of two representatives each from the CROA and CNOA boards and are appointed by TCC.

Not to spoil your illusions but the CJC is legally defined so that TCC has the first, second, third, and final say on all decisions large and small. No matter what the home owners or non-residential owners want until those owners constitute 90 percent of the various properties. End of story. In essence, Celebration wears an intentionally false face on almost every façade, Janus many times over. Illusion and pretence, that's what Disney has always been.

So, why should that be important to anyone? What’s the big deal? Because Celebration is not just an address, not just another neighborhood. For the Disney folk, it's an ideal, an example for the entire world to see, admire, and covet. At this point you should recall the quote from Michael Eisner. It's a type of urban Utopia interpreted and defined by none other than the great philosopher, Walt himself. The Disney Corporation, in its Celebration experiment, has seemingly allowed people to choose to live in the idealized and sanitized past. In a town where everyone is supposed to have the very same set of ideals and goals, sharing a single concept of how life should be lived to the fullest.

But, when you examine it, those are beliefs in which residents have no say, no choice. Their only choice is whether or not to sign the covenants and move to Celebration. After that, the choices are made for them. Remember, there is NO elected representation whatsoever as the general public understands or experiences it. That means NO participatory democracy. Hey, isn't that the America we all know and love? Whoa, big fellow. Something seems badly wrong with that scenario.

By its own definition, Celebration is a town without life's ugly bumps and warts. No loud boisterous neighbors. No junker cars or RVs parked in driveways characterized by broken concrete or patched asphalt. No houses with faded paint that’s chipping away. No financially strapped people living in just barely standard housing. No residents complaining publicly about the voracious mosquitoes. No kids who terrorize neighbors and vandalize property in the middle of the night. No barking dogs that wake you up at 4:30 AM. Right. And what's wrong with that, you ask?

What I want you to do, dear Readers, is think about the community in which you now live or the one in which you grew up. About what’s right and what’s wrong with it. The warts and the halos. Disney has attempted to alter your experiences of the realities of urban/suburban life by creating what he thinks is the most appropriate environment. Then Disney insists that all his residents acquire the most appropriate attitudes and the correct commodities as he defines them. Examine those ideas carefully and you will find that a twisted sort of environmental determinism is hard at work. Live in a perfect community and you too will become perfect. Or else. Now that’s starting to sound way too much like fascism for me.

The Disney folk would love you to believe that Celebration is an ideal community in the small town mode that was inspired by exciting places like Savannah and Charleston, Easthampton, and Nantucket. But what we can't forget is that each of those cities developed historically, over a period of two hundred or more years, as independent, democratic, self-created, and self-directed communities run by the residents themselves. Not a planned one regulated by a Board of Directors largely appointed by The Celebration Company. Hey, if Disney’s experiment in creating an ideal community had been tried in those cities by the British back in the 1700s, the American settlers would have revolted in outrage, tarred and feathered every one of the bastards responsible and ran them out of town. Think I'm kidding? If you do, read a little Tom Paine and get in touch with your not-so-bloodless democratic roots.

Finally, Celebration's designers and residents have not presented themselves and their pseudo-town as just another place to live. They have actively proclaimed its specialness, its outstanding dedication to building a sense of place. A unique community with state of the art healthcare, technology, and educational facilities. A truly innovative lifestyle. But the amount of control that Disney possesses, which no doubt Celebration’s residents have willfully signed over to them in the form of subdivision/deed restrictions and covenants, is diametrically opposed to the image of small town America that Disney has paid billions of dollars to symbolize in his theme parks. And for a modest piece of which Celebration’s residents have paid hundreds of thousands of dollars.


Implications

About the most charitable thing you can say is that Celebration is a pseudo-community whose very foundation is a snake's nest of contradictions. Designed to recreate the image of the worry-free, small town America so beloved by Norman Rockwell and his uncritical admirer, Walt Disney, and the idealism and security associated with the post-war era, it is in actuality a community that is controlled by a strictly enforced set of rules and regulations to which all residents must agree and follow. Or move not move in. Those choices are the only ones available. Go back in time and try that in the Charleston of the 1700s. But you better be well armed and have a couple fast horses.

Although Celebration claims that it has a dedication to the ideal of community that is not found in the modern age, the very institutions and organizations that are the source the life-force of authentic American communities are absent. No representative government means, therefore, no democracy. What the residents have in common are commodities (houses) and a set of restrictions (legally binding covenants) that dictate what type of shrubs can be planted in the yards, how high the fences may be, and even what you can say in public about life in Celebration.

Celebration romanticizes the past by demanding idealized physical forms (expressed in Master Plans and the design of individual structures) that thought-less Americans associate with the best and purest aspects of American life. In Celebration, Disney has attempted to create a utopian community ruled by a single vision. A vision structured through a set of principles to which every resident must subscribe. Then the vision is held up as an example to the rest of us who are on the outside and are supposedly looking in with envy. Right.

Celebration has been conceived as a shining city high on a hill. A fortress, if you will, in which residents can therefore live a more secure, meaningful, and peaceful existence. Yet, Celebration is, at its very core, a false image of a place America never was and never could be. Never, that is, if we really and truly believe in the philosophy of the Enlightenment that gave life to our Bill of Rights, Declaration of Independence, and the Constitution. Not if we are dedicated to living freely, determining our own destiny through the messy and oftentimes upsetting process called Democracy.

           
But faux cultural images, like Disney World and Celebration, are dangerous only if we fail to recognize their essential emptiness and blatant hypocrisy. Alexander Wilson, in his always interesting book, The Culture of Nature, quotes the Disney “Imagineer” who wrote the following: “The environments that we create are more utopian, more romanticized, more like the guest imagined they would be. For the most part, negative elements are discreetly eliminated, while positive aspects are in some case embellished to tell the story more clearly.”

Wait just one minute! How’s that again? Can the story be told “more clearly” by embellishing it? Isn't that just another Big Lie? Joseph Goebbels, the master Nazi propagandist, would have felt very comfortable with that idea. Try this little embellishment. Adolph Hitler really didn't believe in genocide. He simply wanted to purify the Aryan Race by removing non-Aryans (largely but not entirely Jews) and defectives—the mentally challenged, homosexuals, and the physically disabled—from the Third Reich's gene pool. Yeah, that works. But only if you're a fascist hate-monger or a damned idiot. When you eliminate negative elements you don't like and add positive elements you do like “to tell the story more clearly,” the result is a LIE. Period.

Romantic conceptions of history are intrinsically false views that can get us in enormous trouble if we forget how essentially wrongheaded and stupid they are. Ultimately, the twin ideals Disney has enshrined in Celebration are the escapism and make-believe that characterize not utopian communities but the nearby Disney World theme park. And those plastic ideals are ones I for one can live without. Real cities can be messy places to live in but at least they have the advantage of being authentic. I'll pass on the sanitized, plasticized, fake version, thank you.