Celebration, U.S.A.: Living in Disney's Brave New Town

Celebration, Fla., is the much-ballyhooed Disney effort to build a walkable hybrid suburb near its Orlando theme park to serve as a showcase for the most cutting-edge ideas about urban planning. In 1997, journalists Frantz and Collins (Teachers: Talking Out of School) moved to Celebration with their two younger children to write an account of one year in the early life of the town. They participated fully in the community and found their neighbors willing to talk, discovering the ups and downs of Disney's well-calibrated logistics, from the pedestrian-friendly town plan to the housing standards and innovative K-12 school. Among the complications were the bewildering array of pedagogical strategies adopted by the school, which drove families away; the homogenous town population, which was almost entirely white and middle class; and the proliferation of rules (residents are forbidden, for example, to park recreational vehicles on the street and to complain about the mosquitoes). But the authors avoid excoriating Disney and its developers, emphasizing that the town still offered a promising model for a ""better"" kind of American community: they found it ""a lovely place physically,"" whose design did indeed foster a neighborliness lacking in most of suburban America. Readers may wish that the authors had investigated their Disneyphile neighbors more closely--e.g., only at the book's end is it revealed that almost none of their houses have bookshelves. Nonetheless, this even-handed and thorough account of one family's experience in helping to build a new community from the ground up taps provocatively into a pioneering spirit in American life. (Sept.) FYI: In October, Ballantine will publish The Celebration Chronicles: Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Property Values by the cultural critic Andrew Ross, who also spent a year living in Celebration.