The Celebration Chronicles & Celebration, U.S.A.
The Celebration Chronicles: Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Property Value in Disney’s New Town.
By Andrew Ross
Ballantine Books, New York, 1999. Hardcover, 352 pp., $25.95.
Celebration, U.S.A.: Living in Disney’s Brave New Town
By Douglas Frantz and Catherine Collins
Henry Holt and Company, New York, 1999. Hardcover, 352pp., $25.00.
For those who are following the New Urbanism closely, two newly published books make entertaining and informative reading. The Celebration Chronicles: Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Property Value in Disney’s New Town, by Andrew Ross, and Celebration, U.S.A.: Living in Disney’s Brave New Town, by Douglas Frantz and Catherine Collins, are the first in-depth personal accounts of living in a new urbanist community to be published.
We have Disney, the developer of Celebration near Orlando, Florida, to thank for these books. It took the name recognition of Disney to attract writers like Ross, the director of American Studies at New York University, and Frantz and Collins, a husband and wife team of experienced journalists who have written several books together. No other neotraditional development has inspired writers to move there in order to research and write about the experience. Up until now, books touching on the New Urbanism have focused either on architecture and design, or explored broad subjects like criticism of sprawl and revitalization of cities.
Few accounts have been written of what life is really like living in a new urbanist place. This is partly because so few people yet live in new urbanist communities — probably 25,000 to 30,000 as of this writing. New urbanist communities, therefore, tend to be seen through the prejudices of journalists and critics who may never visit them, or stay only briefly when they do. Ross and Frantz/Collins both approach their subject with an open mind, which is refreshing, and write personal, entertaining accounts of life in Celebration’s formative years. Although the design of the town and the tenets of the New Urbanism in general are discussed in both books, these accounts are mostly about people.
Celebration makes a dramatic subject because the involvement of Disney, the lavish attention the town has received, and the extravagant promises made to homeowners offer multiple storylines to be explored. The accelerated pace of development also contributed to the drama: Celebration is the only neotraditional project that opened with a complete downtown, the town developing at fast-forward speed like a flower opening in time-lapse photography. good subject Celebration, one of more than 100 new urbanist communities under construction nationwide, is located near Orlando, Florida.
It currently has about 2,500 residents, and eventually will have 20,000. While Celebration does not represent the New Urbanism in general (every project is different in certain respects), it is probably the best subject for a book at this point. With its ready made downtown and residential neighborhoods, it’s more complete than most other projects. Unlike Seaside, the well-known neotradi-tional resort designed nearly 20 years ago on Florida’s panhandle, Celebration is a year-round community.
I enjoyed both Celebration Chronicles and Celebration, U.S.A., and followers of the New Urbanism likely will find both volumes worthwhile, but the books differ significantly. The Celebration Chronicles has more political overtones. Although both books criticize the lack of racial diversity and affordable housing in Celebration, Ross devotes more attention to these subjects. He also examines the gay community in Celebration (despite the town’s orientation toward traditional families, it has attracted a number of gays). Celebration, U.S.A. is probably more accessible to a general audience.
I found Ross’s explanation of the New Urbanism to be better and more straightforward than Frantz/Collins. In Celebration, U.S.A., the town is repeatedly referred to as post- neotraditional, although what that term means is never made entirely clear. Frantz and Collins specifically cite Celebration’s “curvilinear” streets as an example of how the town has moved beyond the design concepts of other new urbanist communities like Seaside. They fail to realize that most new urbanist communities are not designed based on a geometric grid, and most include curved streets in an interconnected pattern.
Critics of Disney and Celebration will probably find some ammunition in both books. Neither Ross nor Frantz/Collins pull any punches in criticizing certain aspects of the town, such as its lack of diversity and affordability, the poor quality of construction of many homes, and the controversial handling of problems in the new school. These criticisms are not made in a vacuum, however, and careful attention is given to underlying causes.
Both books generally praise the basic new urbanist planning principles used to build Celebration, and the authors observe that pedestrian-oriented design with high quality civic spaces does encourage social interaction and make life easier in some respects. In a larger sense, however, residents of Celebration did not, at first, have it “easy,” despite the utopian design of the town. The rigors and stresses of creating a new community while living in a fish bowl of intense media scrutiny took their toll.
The Celebration Chronicles and Celebration, U.S.A., are entertaining and informative. Although the principles of the New Urbanism are rightly focused on physical design, in practice design gets mixed up with a lot of other issues — e.g. schools, the creation of civic institutions, cost of living, quality of construction, and the types of people and businesses a project attracts. Celebration provides a wonderful case study on how these issues and physical design combine to affect real people.
