Walt Disney and the quest for community - Disney's Model Citizens - Book Review

Architectural Review, The, June, 2003 by Timothy Brittain-Catlin

By Steve Mannheim. Aldershot: Ashgate. 2002. [pounds]33

Although not written in an enjoyable or stylish way, this little book provides a valuable, largely technical, insight into Walt Disney's approach to tourist planning, a subject very much broader than the downscaled historical facadery, and the other well-known and carefully contrived technical devices, which have given the Disney organization a bad name. The last years of the cartoon and entertainment pioneer were taken up with the planning of an 'Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow' of 20 000 inhabitants, to provide the public with a commercial theme park showcasing both technological progress and romanticized 'traditional' American values. This is the story of how Disney drew on the experience of his Californian Disneyland to devise a community, never realized, in which every aspect of life including language was controlled and designed; in which splendid neologisms such as 'edutainment', 'utilidors' (underground service passages), 'wienies' (principal local attractions) and 'plussing' (making thin gs work better) were coined; and where futuristic PeopleMovers were to whizz visitors around radially planned sites with exemplary safety and efficiency.

Mannheim is a property development consultant; he scarcely mentions the sociological aspects of Disney's ideas beyond a few paragraphs explaining the statutory planning context of Lyndon Johnson's America. Yet Disney's social ideas were both bizarre and influential. He was proposing a residential community in which the residents, like their houses, would constitute a perfectly-maintained tourist attraction. They would be tenants and not landowners, and therefore without voting rights; pensioners and the unemployed were ineligible. Rubbish would disappear down vacuum chutes, Swedish-style, to avoid unsightly carts; and maintenance activities would be restricted to the 'utilidors'. Disney had made films in Britain, and he seems to have wanted to realize an idealized Britain-of-the-movies in a Florida swamp; he had studied the English New Towns movement, and his personal ideas about planning layouts were derived directly from Ebenezer Howard's garden city diagrams. It appears that far from being a post-modern bl ip, the world of The Truman Show and the towns of the New Urbanists, such as the Disney's own 'Celebration', testify to a complex and significant strand of American culture and politics, for which Disney was to a considerable degree personally responsible.