Walt Disney World, Celebration City, and Problems of New Urbanism

While the New Urbanism movement is enticing on the surface – with promises of

integrated communities, shared use zoning, and more pedestrian (and user) friendly

designs of living spaces – it also has significant drawbacks, specifically racial and

socioeconomic prejudice and an aura of artificiality. New Urbanism advocates moving

away from the “sprawl” that proponents say has consumed the United States in the form

of suburbia, and returning to the town model where people work where they live and

enjoy a combination of their work and home lives. This goes against the contemporary

norm that divides the home and work space and taken form largely as suburbs where

people live and commercial or business zones where people work. Also stressed as part

of the movement are pedestrian friendly designs and straight streets. (Sander 214) One of

the greatest and most evident manifestations of the New Urbanism model in society is

with the Disney theme parks and land outside Orlando, Florida. The use of conceptual

models and social theories in alignment with New Urbanism by Walt Disney, and later

his company of the same name, in the design of Walt Disney World and environs

(namely Celebration City) highlight both the benefits and ultimately the pitfalls of the

New Urbanism approach. While the Disney endeavors deliver great amounts of spatial

(and in some senses also social) order on the surface, serious problems tying into the

aforementioned racial and socioeconomic diversity underlie these efforts. Moreover, as

is the case with much of New Urbanism, the nature of the project itself gives off and

extremely artificial sense.

The Walt Disney World project, a 43-square mile site developed and opened in

the 1960s by the Walt Disney Company as an eastern theme park, sought out more than

just to develop a financial behemoth in central Florida. The man himself – Walt Disney –

had substantial social motives centering on combating the modernism that he viewed had

overtaken and surrounded Los Angeles (site of his first theme park) and much of the rest

of the country. Walt felt that greater social control was needed to combat the ills of

modern and eventually post-modern society that he foresaw as taking over the entire

country. Embodiments of this type of control are evident throughout mechanisms at both

Disneyland and Walt Disney World for staff, visitors, and anyone else who must come in

contact with the park; having visitors queue in specific lines, dress codes for employees,

and clear paths of direction are all elements of these parks that illustrate the desire for

greater social control of the space. At Disneyland, at the heart of Anaheim city, Walt

only had a certain degree of control of the land as his theme park was surrounded by non-

Disney vendors who did not have to adhere to his rules. However, in developing Disney

World, his control of the vast space of land and the nature of the Orlando environment to

be in his view uninfected by the ills of modern society allowed him to exercise greater

creative social control in the area. One Disney historian writes: “Significantly, Disney’s

mission in Florida was less to build another theme park then to create a new, orderly type

of community…” (Archer 325-7, 33) The type of order that Walt wanted transcends all

elements of the Disney experience from Main Street USA built when the park opened, to

EPCOT Center, to the more recent Celebration City – a community that is outside the

park itself. Celebration City is a 5000 acre, multi-use residential community outside but

within close proximity to the Disney complex itself, built and run entirely by the private

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Disney corporation. It is based on the ECPOT model designed by Walt to create

community living with integrated living spaces and full of citizens with similar values.

In almost every respect it models the New Urbanist plan for city design and development

and serves as the epitomic example of the best and worst of such designs. (Archer 333)

On The Downfalls of the New Urbanist Movement

A number of major problems face New Urbanist projects like Celebration City.

First, New Urbanism projects a social system on the people who lives there and removes

a degree of choice in how they live. Secondly, such projects go against widely held

contemporary social norms and views of autonomy and self-determination. And finally,

such projects create a sense of false nostalgia and artificiality in their designs.

At their core, New Urbanist projects force a cultural and social schema on their

residents. This is evident not only in the form they take by mixing land use, but also in

the type of people that these projects attract. New Urbanist communities impose a value-

judgment and schema of the type of life that people should want to be live. That is, rather

than give the choice in the current system of separating business and work, it assumes

that everyone who lives in a given location wants work and home life to be integrated in

the same space. As our system is now, if you want to live by where you work you can,

but if you don’t (as most people choose) you do not have to. However, in a New

Urbanist community, such as Celebration City, this choice goes away and everyone by

default must live close to their work in higher density communities. This imposition of a

value-judgment on how people should want to live (with work and home close in

proximity) stifles diversity of views and lifestyles and imposes social and cultural

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controls to a much greater degree than modern suburban life does. New Urbanism allows

people less of a choice of how they want to live in that it assumes that everyone wants to

live in a neo-traditionalist community with work and home life together.

By making this assumption and confirming this value-judgment, even if you only

have selected New Urbanist communities interspersed with more modern suburbs, thus

giving residents a choice to live in this model or not, it still results in a lack of diversity

due to self-selection. Essentially, the people who choose to live in New Urbanist

developments will only be those people who want to live where they work. And because

this is an ideological choice to do this and oppose the mainstream model of choice, the

types of people who live in these new communities will be more homogenous and less

diverse. Less diversity means lower amount of unique cultures mixing and ultimately

less cultural production, which goes directly against what the New Urbanist movement

was trying to reclaim – cultural production and genesis. Furthermore, the degree of

socioeconomic and racial diversity in such projects is equally hampered as many people

of different socio-economic backgrounds or of different races lack the desire and means

to live in these communities. (Fulton 6, 25) And in excluding the socially and

economically marginalized groups of society form these communities by default, they do

not address the problems that we have today with urban deterioration and how to help the

underclass. (Harvey 2)

New Urbanist projects also move away from the democratic and independent

oriented axes that characterize modern life. In stressing the communal and collective

well-being, New Urbanism sacrifices a degree of self-autonomy and control. In the

suburbs, personal space and choice are prized assets – reflecting the norms of many

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Americans. The ability of everyone to have a yard or some space surrounding their

residence to call their own, and the size of this space in general is a hallmark of the

suburbs and a major coup for all who live there. Such personal preferences on space

evaporate under the New Urbanist model as the residential space becomes more tightly

compacted and higher-density. Living where you work and working where you live

requires a sacrifice of personal yards surrounding residential buildings. This requisite

condition of the New Urbanist model of decreasing or in some cases altogether

eliminating the yard-space of residences opposes the democratic principles of self-

autonomy and independence that characterize modern American political and social

ideology. People like to have to their space and the mindset of a yard for everyman in

America that he can call his own would be a tough vision to shatter for many people in

this country. It is not that such reengineering of space that the New Urbanist movement

demands by reducing individual autonomy and control over land by the owner is a bad

thing in general, but instead that it is difficult and in some senses socially dangerous to

undertake such a move when cultural norms and public sentiment wants the

independence.

Finally, New Urbanist movements are surrounded by an aura of artificiality and a

forced nostalgia. New Urbanist models were developed as reactionary models to the

growing suburban nature of society in the post-World War Two era, as seen by Walt

Disney’s example discussed earlier. In being reactionary in nature, New Urbanism

attempts to create a type and style of life (or rather recreate a style of life) that has since

passed in this country. (Fulton 4) Suburbs continue to blossom and their growth has not

decreased, and yet at the same time the New Urbanist movement works to move against

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them. It is not as if the suburban model was exhausted the New Urbanist model moved in

to fill a void, but rather that it attempted to force a now-defunct model of life onto the

social and spatial fabric. Moreover, even if people living their do accept this new

community as reality and genuine, are they actually accepting the community into their

lives or just the façade of living a new community? Will substantive changes actually

accompany the new design of life? (Harvey 2) Attempts to force such structures and

plans in areas where they would not be viewed as naturally appropriate in the modern

context creates a sense of falseness and fakeness that it doesn’t quite fit in with the

surroundings. One excellent example of this can be seen in the focus on straight streets

and the grid pattern that the New Urbanist movement stresses. In trying to reclaim the

designs of many decades ago, New Urbanism re-emphasizes the street axis and the

straight line as an orienting tool in daily life. (Duany 34-5) Straight streets culminate and

organize space in such a way as to draw attention to buildings, monuments, parks, or

other major structures. Contrastingly, curvilinear streets that are characteristic of the

modern suburb lack the focus on orientation of axis and instead rely on a softer

integration with the environment – not drawing attention to as much as one winds a bend

of enters a cul-de-sac. The point here is that following the New Urbanist model of space

organization and using straight streets and lines to draw attention to significant structures

in a neighborhood or area that lacks such structures manifests the very sense of artificial

space organization that I have discussed above. At times, New Urbanism seeks to force

the spatial reality of a community to bend towards its plan of how to organize the space,

even if the space doesn’t fit the mold.

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On Disney and the Problems of New Urbanism

The above mentioned problems, some of the many associated with the New

Urbanist movement, are directly applicable and evident in the development of Disney

World and the Celebration project.

As previously discussed, in developing Walt Disney World, Walt did so in

response to the modernism that he saw as a negative influence on the country. He wanted

to create a community and place where people who shared his views on the nature of life

and neo-traditionalist patterns and schemas of organizations could come together. His

strict imposition of controls on how life operated in his theme parks directly reflects the

nature of New Urbanist projects on a whole – to engineer life and behavior by organizing

space. The perfectionist attitude exemplified by Walt coordinates nicely with New

Urbanist ideas of ideal communities that integrate life and work together into one system.

Additionally, in both the design of places like EPCOT Center and Main Street USA, Walt

created real-life, physical idealized versions of how he thought communities should be,

regardless of the particularities of each situation. Walt had a view of how the world

should operate and how life should be lived and designed his space accordingly, very

similar to New Urbanist models of designing the space with the mindset that people

should live with work and home together in one integrated system rather than giving

them the choice of deciding how they prefer to live. Walt and New Urbanists also fell in

line on the neo-nostalgia of these places. Walt’s idealized main street and the New

Urbanists designed communities are in many ways simply physical representations of

nostalgia. While this is not negative in of itself, focusing too strongly and becoming

preoccupied with nostalgia and the past hampers efforts to move towards future plans

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with any real success. Even EPCOT Center, the future community designed by Walt and

as a model for Celebration, now has a nostalgic sense of how people in the past though

the future was, rather than reflecting how modern society views what the future

communities will be like. Both Walt and the New Urbanists run the risk of becoming

trapped in their own nostalgia and not being able to move forward into the future.

New Urbanism is not an entirely bad idea, and Walt Disney World is by far from

a horrible endeavor. Rather than consider these items as failures or as things to be

correct, it is instead important to understand the connections between the two and the

overall limits of the New Urbanist movement. These limitations include a lack of choice

and diversity in the communities, the imposition of a specific social vision on a

community, and the artificiality of the environment and forced nostalgia. Working to

manage these problems and mold New Urbanism to minimize their effects could be

beneficial for future developments and may be able to lead to a truly sustainable

community form for the future.

Works Cited

Archer, Kevin. “The Limits to the Imagineered City: Sociospatial Polarization in

Orlando.” Economic Geography. Vol 73, No 3.: July 1997.

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Duany A., et al. Suburban Nation: The Rise of Sprawl and the Decline of the American

Dream. New York: North Point Press, 2000.

Fulton, William. The New Urbanism: Hope or Hype for American Communities?

Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, 1995.

Harvey, David. “New Urbanism and the Communitarian Trap.” Harvard Design

Magazine. MIT Press: Winter/Spring 1997.

Sander, Thomas H. “Social Capital and New Urbanism: Leading a Civic Horse to

Water?” National Civic Review. Vol 91, No 3. Fall 2002.

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