Celebration, Florida was built by Disney. This is not a metaphor. The Walt Disney Company planned and developed the town in the mid-1990s as a model community, a demonstration that thoughtful urban design could produce the kind of neighborhood that Americans claimed to want: walkable streets, mixed uses, front porches, a town center, a sense of place.
The architects were serious people. Robert A.M. Stern, Aldo Rossi, Michael Graves, Cesar Pelli — the roster of firms involved reads like a who's who of late-twentieth-century American architecture. The planning principles were drawn from the New Urbanism movement, which had been arguing since the 1980s that conventional suburban development was destroying American community life.
The Stage Set Problem
The problem with Celebration, and with New Urbanism more broadly, is that it confused the appearance of community with community itself. Front porches do not create neighborliness. Narrow streets do not create walkability if there is nowhere to walk to. A town center does not create civic life if the town center is a retail development designed to capture spending rather than to serve residents.
New Urbanism confused the appearance of community with community itself. Front porches do not create neighborliness.
Florida is full of New Urbanist developments. Seaside, on the Panhandle, is the movement's most famous example — the town where The Truman Show was filmed, which tells you something about how it reads to outsiders. Celebration. Avalon Park in Orlando. Abacoa in Jupiter. Each of these places has the formal elements of a traditional town. Each of them is, in important respects, a simulation of one.
What Went Wrong
The New Urbanists were right about the diagnosis. Conventional suburban development — the cul-de-sac subdivision, the strip mall, the office park — is genuinely bad urbanism. It produces car dependence, social isolation, and built environments that are hostile to walking, cycling, and spontaneous social interaction.
Where they went wrong was in thinking that the solution was primarily formal. That if you got the street widths right, the setbacks right, the mix of uses right, the community would follow. What they underestimated was the degree to which the social life of a neighborhood depends on economics, demographics, and history — things that cannot be designed.
The real lesson of New Urbanism is not that its principles were wrong but that urbanism cannot be manufactured. Cities grow. They accumulate. They develop character through use and time and conflict. A development that arrives fully formed, with its character pre-specified by a planning document, is starting from a deficit that good design alone cannot overcome.