Slashdot Log In
Review: The Celebration Chronicles: Life in Disneyville
from the all-hail-the-mouse dept.
| The Celebration Chronicles: Life Liberty, and The Pursuit of Pr | |
| author | Andrew Ross |
| pages | 340 |
| publisher | Ballantine Books |
| rating | 10/10 |
| reviewer | Jon Katz |
| ISBN | |
| summary | An unflinching look at Walt Disney's dream of the model community |
What happens when one of the world?s richest and best-known corporations decides to build a prototype community of the future?
In "The Celebration Chronicles: Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Property Value in Disney?s New Town," sociologist Andrew Ross recounts his year living in an apartment in Disney?s new Florida town Celebration, witnessing the combustible mixture of corporatism, utopianism, media, technology, urban planning and politics with middle-class American life.
By and large, it was time well spent. If you care about technology, the nature of the mega-corporation or urban planning, this is an important and surprisingly touching story. Ross delineates the impossible expectations and inexorable pressures on even the best-intentioned modern corporation, as well as the genuine yearning of ordinary people to live in the kind of place Walt Disney invoked in his sometimes creepily cheery theme parks.
Disney reigned in the age of the corporate plutocrat, when moguls not only made money but could use their powerful companies to advance particular political or social interests.
Thus, Bill Paley made CBS News a great news organization mostly because he wanted to. Today, his stockholders would never let him spend money for anything as foolish and wasteful as good journalism. Nor would IBM?s shareholders look kindly on the discarded patriarchal traditions of Big Blue. It?s a rare corporate mission that lasts more than a year or two.
But the old Disney company was always something of a laboratory and playground for its founder?s fantasies. Horrified at the suburban sprawl that engulfed his beloved Southern California, Walt conceived of Disney Land in part as an antidote and a respite. Though it?s easy to jeer at the Mouse and its many tentacles, it?s dishonest not to acknowledge how many millions of people love the things Walt Disney built, and have been drawn to his creations and visions. Disney?s theme parks are about the closest thing America has these days to a universal cultural experience.
More than anything, Disney said he wanted to build a place where people were free of cars, smog and noise and were drawn into contact with one another; where a sense of community and personal contact could be restored. And perhaps most significantly, where the power of technology would be carefully harassed for the common good.
In his mind, Disney Land and Walt Disney World weren?t mere amusement parks, but prototypes of new kind of communities. He was a classic technological utopian, unwavering in his conviction that technics could solve the world?s problems. He imagined that the innovations he pioneered - from monorails to highly advanced waste disposal systems - would move beyond his parks, into the wider world. Disney gave his engineers and futurists nearly free rein, and their accomplishments captured the public imagination in a much deeper way than their real-world equivalents - epochal periods like the Space Age - ever did.
EPCOT was, in fact, to be the world?s premiere showcase for innovative new technologies. Disney had dreamed for years about this Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow; he hoped to build it for 20,000 employees who would run his giant new resort complex in central Florida.
The pedestrian, not the car, would be king. The city?s retail center would be encased in a giant bubble, surrounded by concentric zones allocated to high-density apartment housing, green belts and recreation (playgrounds, churches and schools). Surface transportation would be clean and electrical, garbage whisked away by underground systems, a sense of community encouraged by architectural design, community gathering spots and activities, and lavishly funded schools.
Disney never got to built his city of the future, of course. His vision turned out to be mistaken: the Space Age collapsed abruptly and inexplicably, and the defining technology of this era has been the computer and the Internet, not inter-galactic travel.
His idea was probably doomed, anyway, as the nature of corporations changed dramatically. Companies like Disney are no longer run by powerful decision-makers, autocrats who can muscle through tough decisions, but by amorphous analysts, lawyers, boards of directors and stockholders.
The modern mega-company has neither the mandate nor the attention span to invest in long-term innovation and creativity; the CEO who worries about anything but short-term profits will soon be looking for work. Most large corporations specialize in acquiring and divesting themselves of things other people have created.
Thus, Disney?s worst fears came true. His successors, led by his brother, junked his elaborate plans (never fully disclosed) for a modern city and turned EPCOT into a giant corporate exhibit center and international food court.
But the idea didn?t die completely. It just ended up taking a different form.
In the late 80?s, Disney CEO Michael Eisner, as big a monomaniac as Walt, revived a chunk of Disney?s idea when he gave the go ahead for the construction of Celebration, a meticulously -designed (even the "downtown" retail outlets are chosen by Disney execs) town the company is still constructing for 20,000 people in the swampland south of Walt Disney World. The stampede for houses was so intense that the company chose residents by lottery.
From its Victorian downtown to its obsessively- groomed parks, Celebration is the ultimate planned community. All its "antique"-styled homes are wired for Net access and the town boasts a progressive school, hospital and high-tech infrastructure. Some of the world?s best architects were hired to design its public and residential buildings. Yards were kept small and houses close together so that neighbors would be forced to run into one another and form connections. Elaborate regulations govern everything from paint colors to lawn care.
Celebration also quickly became a focal point of the New Urbanism movement - a philosophy that calls for a mix of old and new housing styles and seeks alternatives to the sprawl, traffic, strip malling and social isolation engulfing much of America.
It?s still way to early to know whether Celebration can work, but Ross - who?s director of American studies at New York University - encountered plenty of problems during his year-long stay. People still drove miles to discount chain stores for better prices and wider selections that the aesthetically-pleasing but non-utilitarian Celebration retail district offers. The innovative school was, from the first, bitter controversial among parents.
Since the town was never incorporated, but part of the Disney empire in Florida, town officials were appointed by the company, not elected. (Disney is not into representative democracy. According to the amazing agreement the company reached with state officials, Walt Disney World is operated more like the Vatican then a business operating under local and state laws).
The mother corporation inspired a bizarre love-hate relationship with residents, who accorded it almost mythic powers and had ridiculous expectations that it would keep their homes and their town as meticulously clean and efficient as its theme parks. Real life, of course, is vastly more complex than the Magic Kingdom and subject to a different set of economic laws.
But the modern corporation isn?t into anything for the long haul. After intense and creative early involvement, the Disney officials who worked on Celebration all moved on, and pressure grew for profits rather than experimentation.
Although Disney architects designed every detail of Celebration, the corporation took little responsibility for the work of the contractors who actually built it. There were widespread complaints about the poor quality of housing construction - leaky roofs, crumbling walls. Hit-and-run journalists delighted in poking fun at Mousetown and pounded Celebration whenever anything went wrong.
From the first, the company feared that digital connectivity might prove too empowering for its uneasy residents, so the town?s computers network - one of the most touted elements of Celebration early on - remained primitive. The town?s rural, central Florida neighbors remained suspicious and hostile.
Meanwhile, disenchanted residents found themselves in an awkward spot, says Ross. Many invested their life savings in their expensive homes and didn?t want bad publicity to endanger their investments. Ross has taken the deepest look yet at Disney?s experimental town. His writing reflects the fact that he was an outsider, a self-professed writer and visitor who never seemed to completely permeate the town?s carefully constructed veneer. But what he did get to see was plenty interesting.
"The Celebration Chronicles" is a fair-minded and intelligent look at this strange community. Ross avoids the temptation to paint Disney as callous and evil, but he also fails to give us a vivid picture of what life there is really like for the mixed (old and young, married and single, gay and straight) demographic community forming there. Celebration residents are quoted, but life there is not really captured.
Celebration is ultimately a sad, even hopeless story. Clearly, many Americans are unhappy with the noise, enforced mobility and disconnection of contemporary life, even as they rush to malls to save every penny they can. It?s depressing that an entertainment conglomerate is the only prominent entity in the America that has taken any bold step towards addressing these concerns. The federal government has largely opted out of urban planning, and most corporations are too volatile and bottom-line driven to persevere through ambitious, even radical undertakings.
Here was one of the bolder efforts in modern times to return some sense of community and beauty to a country whose home dwellers are forced to choose between declining urban environments that are either declining or ascending so quickly as to price out the middle class, and ugly and increasingly congested suburban ones. Celebration, an effort at a better middle ground, deserved more support scrutiny than either Disney or the media has provided. To that end, "The Celebration Chronicles" is compelling reading and long overdue reporting.
Reading this surprising and original book, it?s hard to avoid the feeling that the real and most insurmountable problem Celebration faces is that the iron-willed, single-minded bully who conjured it up and whose ghost hovers over every one of those carefully-manicured lawns - Walt himself - wasn?t around to push his dream to fruition.
Purchase this book at Amazon.
Bah, humbug! (Score:3)
That said, Celebration et al aren't exactly fixing the problem. In fact, they're contributing to it.
I'm one of those urban-by-choice folks who feels incredibly strongly about the issue, but the problem I have with both the standard suburbs and "planned communities" like Celebration is they are carefully orchestrated to keep so-called "undesirables" out.
Now, if someone's breaking the law or creating a huge nuisance, I don't want to live with that either, and I'm going to call in the local law enforcement to deal with the issue. But speaking from personal experience, I've had very little in the way of problems since I moved to the city I now live in, in a supposedly "bad" neighborhood. I had much more trouble in the suburb I grew up in and in the college towns I went to school in.
The USA has a long history of thinking that moving someplace else will solve all your problems. Hell, it's how this country was founded.
The more intelligent response seems to me to be, wherever you live, to get to know your neighbors, set up some kind of Neighborhood Watch program, and realize that not everyone on your street is going to be the same color or religion or anything else as you. And just learn to deal with it! *sigh*