The Mickey House club - Disneytown in Central Florida

ArtForum, Feb, 1997 by Andrew Ross

"Theming" has been a feature of urban design and planning for some time now: private and public properties alike are being gussied up like Disney sets, as if tailored from some grand wardrobe of stage effects, so that the new built environments of America's developing neo-urban spaces smack of "variations on a theme park," as Michael Sorkin put it. This phenomenon - what it actually feels like and where it is leading - has been discussed and theorized more than it has been documented on the ground. At the very least, we can say it must be different from living in a real theme park, as Uncle Wait did when he occupied an apartment above Main Street USA, in Disneyland.

The Disney company is now building a whole new town, called Celebration, in central Florida. On a recent trip there I met and talked to people who are themselves living in apartments above the main drag. Residents of this upscale, neotraditional town tastefully laid out around a sculpted lake and wetland areas to the south of Disney World can feel they have little connection to the thronged Kodak-picture spots around Cinderella's Castle: perched above sedate retail stores that show no trace of Disney merchandise on the shelves, they live next to buildings designed by some of the world's fanciest architects - Cesar Pelli, Robert Venturi, Philip Johnson, Graham Gund, Aldo Rossi, Michael Graves. It's more like Realtorland than Tomorrowland, and the lucky owner-occupiers don't mind the fact that their investments are garnering a wave of media attention, not to mention a steady stream of visitor-gawkers. All of them know, but most probably don't care, that they are living out a dream of Walt's for a planned community "built from scratch on virgin land," a "living blueprint of the future." These words belong to the plan for an experimental community, EPCOT, that was sketched out and promoted in the mid '60s, just before Walt's death, but they went unrealized in the project's built version. The contrast between Walt's ambitiously futuristic EPCOT city plan and the early-century-small-town look of Celebration speaks volumes about the transformation of social and cultural values in the intervening thirty years.

The original, Corbusier-esque plan was for a rationalized ville radieuse, its center city enclosed by a climate-controlled dome and linked to a greenbelt and outlying residential areas by electric mono-rails, people movers, and underground automobile routes. The town was to be located at the center of the company's Florida property, and its residents were to work in the Disney theme parks, or in an industrial sector that was to be an advanced fusion of "the technical know-how of American industry" and the "creative imagination of the Disney Corporation." Here was a plan that was the essence of Modernism: rational, geometric, functional, soul-denying. It would have been the ultimate workers' city of the Fordist era - triumphing over Henry Ford's own unrealized plans for Muscle Shoals, Alabama, and improving on earlier company-built worker communities like Cadbury's Bourneville and Lever's Port Sunlight, in England.

EPCOT was always supposed to be more than a functional environment for living and working. Its layout suggests an ambition to control completely its residents' labor, recreation, and consumption. Above all else, it was designed for show, by the masters of show business, who wanted it to be "a showcase to the world of American ingenuity and free enterprise." Suburbanization and urban renewal had already taken their toll on America's cities, and the ghetto uprisings in Watts, Newark, and Detroit lay just around the corner. The EPCOT plant owed its inspiration to an ideal of urban planning that would very soon be declared bankrupt. Top-down planning was already viewed with suspicion, and would soon be seen as arrogant and disrespectful of the needs and desires of residents.

During the internecine Disney family struggles that followed Walt's death, his Modernist plan shriveled away, and when EPCOT finally opened, in 1982, it was a schizophrenic affair - one half an extension of the World's Fair pavilions run by major US corporations, the other half an international food court on a grandiose scale. It was also nonresidential. Pictorial vestiges of Walt's plan live on in a few of the pavilion rides, though these futuristic dioramas of floating cities, space colonies, and desert farms were already outdated in 1982 and are virtually museum pieces by now. To this day, these obsolescent visions of the future are populated by space-suited families of a kind that was satirized to death in Jetsons: the Movie (1990). By 1982, the decor for the iconography of white flight was being provided by the "back to the future" ethic of the Reagan revolution, and the gleaming futurist look was bequeathed entirely to the design of corporate buildings and hotels.

With its bright Victorian and southern coastal homes mingling with affluent colonial mansions, and its compact and picturesque downtown, Celebration is emerging as a full-blown example of the neo-urbanist vision, which harbors a seductive promise of a return to small-town innocence, where children play in safety and neighbors eagerly share each others' lives. When fully built and populated, it will house the same number of residents - 20,000 - for which Walt's EPCOT was designed, but that is about the only common feature of the two plans; in every other respect, the two communities are polar opposites, one racing toward the next frontier, the other yearning for lost horizons. Of the two, Celebration's design seems more suggestive of the family values inveterately linked to the Disney name. Each plan, however, probably reflects the prevailing consensus of its day, respectively predating and postdating the great challenges to gender- and hetero-normativity that rocked nuclear-family doctrine in the late '60s and '70s.