The New Yorker, July 22, 1996, pp.36-39. TOMORROWLAND. Living in a community planned by Disney has to be a nightmare, doesn't it? By Witold Rybcznski Famous firsts are recorded by sports statisticians, academic journals, and the Guinness Book. Everyday firsts are not. I've never heard of a statue to the suburbanite who sprinted through the first mall, or to the person who punched into the first ATM. I have these thoughts while I'm standing in front of 931 Jasmine Street. It is unlikely that there will ever be a commemorative plaque here, but perhaps there should be. The building itself, while attractive, is unremarkable. It is a one-story house of a type that is not uncommon in the South. The hipped roof extends over a deep front veranda. The walls are clapboard; the double-hung windows are shuttered. There is a U-Haul van in the driveway. I'm standing on the sidewalk watching Larry Haber move into his new home. He is a good sport and pauses so that I can take a photograph. Larry and his wife, Terri, and their two young children are the first residents of an unusual town: a town that is being built by an organization whose chief business is storytelling and make-believe -- the Walt Disney Company. It was Walt himself who had the idea of building a town. Exactly thirty years ago, he announced that he was going to create a showcase for advanced technology -- a kind of urban laboratory. It would be called EPCOT, for Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow, and it would be an actual community. But Disney died before he could realize his vision of a city of the future, and his successors were unable to reconcile his coercive brand of social engineering with the demands of American home buyers. When EPCOT finally opened, in 1982, it did feature futuristic technology, but there were no residents. It was a theme park. EPCOT is situated in Walt Disney World, on the enormous tract of land -- twenty-eight thousand acres -- that Disney owns outside Orlando, in central Florida. There are two other theme parks there -- the Magic Kingdom and the Disney-MGM Studios -- and a fourth, Disney's Animal Kingdom, is slated to open in 1998. Even so, about a third of the land remained unused. The idea of building a residential community had lingered on in the Disney Company's corporate memory, and when a master plan was being prepared under the aegis of the current C.E.O., Michael Eisner, it was determined that it was finally time to implement Walt's vision. There were also practical considerations: highway access to the theme parks and various wetlands restrictions made residential use attractive. "At that point, we could have gone in any direction," says Disney's Tom Lewis, who oversaw planning during the first five years of the project. "It could have been a second-home community or a resort or a retirement village. Instead, we decided that it would be a place where families would have their primary residences. We wanted it to be a real town." The notion that Disney World could be a setting for real life will strike most people as improbable. Yet the town promises not only to be real but to be a model for others to follow. Celebration, as it is called, is not a theme park. It is an unincorporated town under the rule of Osceola County. There will be a school, a health campus, and an office park. Planned recreational facilities include a golf course, a lake, and miles of walking trails and bike paths. The town center will have restaurants, shops, offices, a supermarket, a bank, a small inn, and a cinema. When Celebration is completed, in ten or fifteen years, it could have as many as twenty thousand inhabitants. It is the most comprehensively planned new town since Columbia, Maryland, and Reston, Virginia, were built, in the mid-sixties. Celebration's temporary preview center opened last August. Although no houses -- not even a model home -- had actually been built, twenty thousand people visited the site during the next two months. So many of them expressed an interest in buying homes there that it was decided that the only fair way to sell lots was to draw names out of a hat. (Entrants were not screened, and Disney employees were not given preference.) About twelve hundred prospective residents put down refundable deposits of up to a thousand dollars for the chance to become one of three hundred and fifty-one home buyers or a hundred and twenty apartment renters in Celebration's first phase. Lots were drawn that November. "Things have moved very quickly," I was told by Don Killoren, who is the general manager of the Celebration Company, a Disney subsidiary. "But I'm not really surprised. We did a lot of research. We knew the type of houses that people wanted." Killoren is being slightly disingenuous. Undoubtedly, one reason people wanted the houses was that they were Disney houses. (A 1990 international study identified the five brand names that were most widely recognized and most highly esteemed around the world. They were Coca-Cola, Sony, Mercedes-Benz, Kodak, and Disney.) The house that the Habers are moving into was built by David Weekley Homes, of Houston -- one of two home builders chosen by Disney after an exhaustive national selection process. House prices range from about a hundred and thirty thousand dollars for a town house to more than three hundred thousand dollars for the largest detached house. A rigorous selection process was also used to arrive at eight local builders who are building more expensive, one-of-a-kind houses, which constitute a quarter of the total in the first phase. Prices for these custom-built houses start at around four hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars. You would look in vain for manifestations of any of the current vogues in high-fashion architecture. There is no free-form deconstructivism here, no corrugated-metal high tech. Instead, there are gable roofs with dormers, bay windows and porches, balustrades and columns. Like all houses built commercially in the United States today, these houses favor distinctly traditional styles. The Habers' house, on Jasmine Street, is an example of Coastal, which is a loose interpretation of the type of house that was built in the South Carolina low country. It is a style characterized by deep oneor two-story porches, high ceilings, full-length windows, and first floors raised off the ground. Coastal is one of six -- and only six -- architectural styles permissible in Celebration; the others are Classical, Victorian, Colonial Revival, Mediterranean, and French. The six styles are defined in a pattern book, which insures that the builders achieve a degree of architectural clarity that is missing in most builder homes. Unusual, too, is Celebration's approach to parking. Alleys running behind the houses give access to garages in the rear, and many of these garages have rooms above them. Larry Haber has built a suite for his mother-in-law above his garage. Leaving the Habers' house, I drive down Campus Street, which has town houses on one side and the site of the future school on the other. The town houses are still under construction, but ahead of me is a group of about twenty completed buildings: the downtown. Most of them are three stories high, fronting narrow streets. There's not a pedestrian mall in sight. The buildings seem vaguely familiar, like the sort of smalltown architecture that is found across America -- or used to be, for this looks, at first glance, like a nineteenth-century downtown, and actually recalls Disneyland's Main Street, U.S.A. The buildings line up to the sidewalk, and I can't see any parking lots. (I later discover that the lots are shoehorned into the center of the blocks, behind the buildings.) The sidewalks are shaded by trees; the main street -- Market Street -- is lined with palm trees. At the base of Market Street is a small lake. The street beside the water is called Front Street, as it is in many old river towns. The downtown doesn't really feel historical, however, for there is no consistency to the architecture. There is a plain office block that might be of the late eighteen-hundreds, a two-screen cinema -- the only building not quite finished -- that looks as if it might turn out to be Art Deco, and a bank with colored horizontal streamlining stripes that are straight out of the nineteen- twenties. There are also buildings -- including the town hall, the post office, and a visitor center -- that look quite modern. Michael Eisner is an architecture buff who has previously commissioned such world-famous architects as Arata Isozaki, Michael Graves, Frank Gehry, and Aldo Rossi to design buildings for Disney. Celebration, too, has a cast of celebrated architects: Graves designed the post office, Philip Johnson the town hall, Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown the bank, Cesar Pelli the cinema, and the late Charles Moore the visitor center. I dislike the town hall: as with so much of Johnson's work, it tries to be monumental and manages to be merely bombastic. Most of the other signature buildings appear to me to be lacklustre rather than inspired; Graves's post office, though, is delightful, and Pelli's cinema will be appropriately dramatic. But I am most impressed by what architects call the "background buildings" -- the ordinary buildings that give character to a town. Here they manage to be both unpretentious and charming, which is more difficult to achieve than it sounds. They are all the work of either Robert A. M. Stern or Jaquelin Robertson, of Cooper, Robertson & Partners. Stern and Robertson are also the planners of the town, although the credits for the design of Celebration resemble those of a Hollywood screenplay. (With an estimated cost of two and a half billion dollars, however, Celebration is much more expensive than any movie.) First, in 1987, Disney held a design competition. It invited Andres Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, whose concept of traditional neighborhood development is a major influence on Celebration's residential areas, alongwith Charles Gwathmey, of Gwathmey Siegel & Associates, and Stern to submit plans. Then, instead of choosing a winner, Disney asked the architects to work together to develop a consensus design. An expanded program, including more commercial uses and a new expressway, required a revised plan, which was prepared collaboratively by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, and Cooper, Robertson & Partners. And, ultimately, Stern and Robertson were commissioned to prepare the final master plan, and also to design the health campus (Stern), the golf clubhouse (Robertson), and all the background buildings downtown. The downtown buildings are owned by Disney and are leased to retail tenants. But there is no Banana Republic here. Instead of major national chains, Disney has chosen only local and regional shops and restaurants. The intention is to attract the public by creating an experience different from that found in a typical shopping mall, Don Killoren told me. Though a downtown like Celebration's, with but a single landlord, does resemble a shopping mall, there is one crucial difference here: this is a commercial area where people will also live. All hundred and twenty apartments are in the downtown area, many of them above shops or restaurants. As I walk around, I see construction workers putting finishing touches on four apartment buildings; the tenants are due to start moving in this month. When the bank, the post office, and the town hall open to the public, which will be in August (the formal opening of the downtown is scheduled for November), the mixture of tourists, shoppers, residents, and office workers should provide precisely the sort of daylong activity that is the hallmark of a successful downtown. A lively downtown, apartments above shops, front porches, houses close to the street, and out-of-sight garages all add up to an old-fashioned sort of place. But there is more to Celebration than nostalgia and tradition. What families like the Habers really want -- what most Americans really want -- has less to do with architecture and urban design than with good schools, health care, safe neighborhoods, and a sense of community. "We understand that community is not something that we can engineer," I was assured by Todd Mansfield, who is an executive vice-president of Disney Imagineering, the division that oversees the design and construction of all the company's enterprises. "But we think that it's something we can foster." Despite Disney's reputation for obsessively leaving nothing to chance, fostering has not meant controlling. The Celebration school (kindergarten through twelfth grade) will be owned and operated not by Disney but by the Osceola County School District. The school will open next year and will eventually serve about fourteen hundred students -- from the surrounding county as well as from the town. What is unusual about the school, apart from pedagogical innovations, is that it's in the center of the town. Children will be able to walk and bike to class. This fall will see the opening of the Teaching Academy, a teacher-training facility that is owned by Disney, run by Disney and Stetson University, and housed in a handsome building designed by William Rawn, who is also the architect of the school. The health campus, now under construction on the outskirts of town, is a large facility belonging to Florida Hospital and including outpatient surgery, advanced diagnostics, primary-care physicians, and a fitness center. A fibre-optic network will eventually link both the school and the health facility to individual homes. This is just the sort of technological innovation that Walt Disney imagined would be the cornerstone of life in the future. But Michael Eisner's Celebration is actually the opposite of Walt Disney's urban vision. Walt Disney imagined a world in which problems would be solved by science and technology. Celebration puts technology in the background and concentrates on putting in place the less tangible civic infrastructure that is a prerequisite for community. Home buyers agree to be governed by their own homeowners' association and by a set of restrictive deed covenants whose purpose is to strike a balance between individual freedom and communal responsibility. You can park your cars in front of your house, for example, but no more than two cars. You can sublet your house -- or your garage apartment -- but you can't lease individual rooms. You can hold a garage sale, but only once a year. Writers and artists can work out of their homes, but not dentists -- unless they live in the "home business district," where professional offices are allowed. A real sense of community can't develop in a vacuum, however, and Disney seems to have gone out of its way to insure that Celebration will not become a hermetic place. It is neither walled nor gated, unlike many recent master-planned communities. None of the streets are private. Policing is by the county sheriff's office, not by hired security guards (although the homeowners' association may hire additional security if it chooses to). The golf course, designed by the Robert Trent Joneses -- father and son -- is a public daily-fee facility, not a private club. Yet, in spite of these efforts to make Celebration open to the outside world, much of the public assumes -- or, at least, hopes -- that a Disney town will be a perfect town. "It's one of my fears," says Todd Mansfield, who is himself going to build a house in Celebration. "We have people who have purchased houses who think they're moving to Utopia. We keep having to remind them that we can't provide safeguards for all the ills of society. We will have everything that happens in any community." He's right. I'm confident that despite the advanced Honeywell security systems there will be break-ins. Despite the fibre-optic networks, there will be children with learning problems. Despite the state-of-theart medical technology, there will be sickness. And, despite the sociable appearance of the front porches, there will be neighborly disputes. If there weren't, Celebration would not be the real place that Disney says it will become. Charles E. Fraser has thought a great deal about creating real places. He is the creator of Sea Pines Plantation, on Hilton Head Island, in South Carolina; between 1956 and 1982, he oversaw the building of about thirty-four hundred homes there. Fraser pioneered the post-Second World War application of many of the concepts such as deed covenants, architectural-review boards, and neighborhood planning which are today standard practice in master-planned communities. I ask him how a sense of community was created at Sea Pines. "My wife and I gave a party every Saturday night for the first ten years," Fraser says. "We invited all the new residents and second-home owners who were on vacation. I was only twenty-seven and not very knowledgeable, but I knew it was important to introduce people to each other." It was a good idea: by the time there were two thousand residents, Sea Pines had as many as two hundred clubs and social groups. Modern mobility means that the process of neighborhood creation, which previously took decades, must be "jump-started." Fraser adds, "I've come to the conclusion that relatively small groups -- two hundred or three hundred families -- that share a common responsibility such as a swimming pool or a park are the answer." At Celebration, where he has been a consultant for the past seven years, innovative covenants have been written to permit the creation of precisely such small sub-neighborhoods. According to census projections, the population of the United States will increase by more than twenty-six million people during this decade. Most of this growth, Fraser points out, is now occurring randomly in metropolitan areas that are too large to have a single focus, like the old center-city downtown. What is needed, he suggests, is smaller planned communities at the edges of urban areas, which can offer people a sense of belonging. "Celebration is a model of such a smaller-size town," he says. "It can offer the range of neighborhood services and amenities -- schools, churches, shops -- that used to be the benefits of small-town living." After leaving Celebration, I drive to Winter Park, which is just the sort of small town that Fraser has in mind. Winter Park, with a population of about twenty-five thousand, is not far from greater Orlando. It started life in the eighteen-eighties, as a master-planned community. The main commercial street, Park Avenue, was laid out beside a twelve-acre strip of green, named -- what else? -- Central Park. The focus of the park was a railroad depot, which was the chief place of arrival for winter visitors. The surrounding residential neighborhoods have comfortably shaded curved streets and a variety of houses. Park Avenue is lined with low buildings containing shops and restaurants with offices and apartments above. I'm sitting in a bar that opens out onto the sidewalk. It's five o'clock, and people are stopping by for a drink before going home. The bar is noisy, bustling, and convivial. People appear to know one another. It isn't hard to imagine that this is what Celebration will be like. More than thirty years ago, the developer James Rouse (who went on to build the town of Columbia, Maryland) called Disneyland "the outstanding piece of urban design in the United States." Disneyland radically transformed the amusement park. Celebration, with its curious mixture of old- fashioned values and new-fangled organization, is a far cry from Walt Disney's vision of the future. Still, it will change the way we think about planning new communities, which is, after all, what Uncle Walt had in mind in the first place. [Four thumbnail watercolors] Downtown Celebration: Philip Johnson's town hall; Jacquelin Robertson's apartments (two views)' Robert Stern's shops and restaurant. [End] For 4 watercolors see: http://pwp.usa.pipeline.com/~jya/celeb4.jpg