CELEBRATION, FLORIDA

The town of Celebration, designed and built by the Disney Corporation near Orlando,
Florida, is certainly the most prominent—and perhaps the most controversial—of the
second generation of New Urbanism green-field projects. It followed the sole firstgeneration
new town, Seaside, Florida, by about ten years.
Celebration is the New Urbanist stepchild of Walt Disney’s original vision of EPCOT,
the Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow. Presented in 1966, the drawings
and the animated film showed a full-fledged city, organized as a radial system with
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business and commerce at the center, higher density apartments around a greenbelt, and
an outer ring of clean factories and low-density neighborhoods. Shelved at Disney’s
death, the concept of the “Model City” was revived in the late 1980s under the direction
chief operating officer Michael Eisner.
The design of what became Celebration was protracted over many years because it
involved the careful testing of every facet of the project. Among the sources of
inspiration were the reassessed tradition of the Anglo-American suburb, the new towns of
John Nolen (1869–1937), Seaside, Florida, and other examples selected from Werner
Hegemann and Elbert Peet’s The American Vitruvius (1922). Following a series of competitions involving
architects including Duany and Plater-Zyberk, Robert A.M. Stern, Gwathmey and Siegel,
Helmut Jahn, and Charles Moore, the final master plan was the work of Stern, with
Jaquelin Robertson and Associates. The town was officially launched on the 25th
anniversary of Disney World in October 1996.
Buffered from the highway by golf courses and a 4,700-acre greenbelt of wetlands, the
plan of Celebration remotely resembles EPCOT’s original concept. The half-circular and
radial plan of streets and neighborhoods, distorted by the environmental constraints,
focuses on an artificial lake along which the mixed-use town center develops. A wide
waterfront promenade, complete with a stepped embarcadero, parks, and fountains,
harbors a series of restaurants and cafes stretching from the cinema complex (designed by
Cesar Pelli) to the hotel. The one-block-long Main Street departs from the lake and
terminates in a square, identified by the 52 columns of the town hall (designed by Philip
Johnson), the circular post office (designed by Michael Graves), and the preview center
(by Moore/Anderson Architects) with its Outlook Tower. The public school (by William
Rawn), whose entrance faces a British-like crescent of town houses, is exceptionally
neighborhood friendly.
Inspired by Frederick Law Olmsted’s “Emerald Necklace” (Boston, 1878–95) and
Martin Wagner’s diagram for the greening of Berlin (1910), a system of “green fingers”
penetrates into the town and articulates its neighborhoods. One finger prolongs the main
street, which widens as a parkway on both sides of a canal and terminates at the golf
course; another one bisects the school’s property and embraces its playing fields. Smaller
parks, creeks, and lakes remind of nearby Winter Park—another major inspiration for the
design.
Celebration depends on connectivity and diversity: a system of navigable streets and a
full range of housing types in addition to shops and office, school, and civic buildings.
Most interesting are the Main Street apartments above shops (the open-air circulation is
an innovative solution to the challenge of separate entrances) and the courtyard-type
apartments along the canal. To avoid some of Seaside’s problems, the mixed-use blocks
of the center contain landscaped parking lots, and alleys give access to the private
residential garages. Yet, diversity also meant some concession to more traditional zoning.
The isolated office park or Celebration Place—two of the three buildings centered around
an obelisk were designed by Aldo Rossi and completed in 1996—faces the regional
highway; nearby and in visual contact with the town center is the community hospital.
Residential-only satellite neighborhoods, organized around greens, are not quite in
walking distance of the center.
The controversy swirling around Celebration, eliciting two books in 1999 as well as
countless articles, is due less to its design than to its controlling concept. Its government
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is, in fact, a private association—not unlike the tens of thousands of homeowners’ or
property owners’ associations, both common in the suburbs and increasingly in inner
cities across the 50 states; yet, it was attacked as a first case of “private government by
corporation.” Most critics focused on the failure of the original public school’s
curriculum, conceived by Disney in collaboration with the Harvard School of Education.
The experimental curriculum did not match the more conservative aspirations of the
parents, and their civic dissatisfaction was presented as a failure in building a genuine
community. Eventually, they succeeded in changing the course of the school.
Another controversial factor is the code or pattern book, written by Ray Gindroz of
Urban Design Associates (Pittsburgh), that strictly defines the six permitted styles:
Classical, Victorian, Colonial Revival, Coastal, Mediterranean, and French. The issue of
individual freedom has been raised, as the precision and inflexibility of the code are
unmatched in New Urbanism communities. However, the choice made in Celebration
was to risk eliminating the exceptionally good design in order to avoid the kitsch and the
very bad. As a mitigating factor, the civic structures and the mixed-use buildings along
Main Street were not coded, but rather commissioned to first-rate architects who worked
closely together.
Disney’s decision to put the centrally managed main street and shops at the very
center of the community and away from the main highway was well supported by the
residents afraid of the impact of regional traffic on the community. Yet the development
industry accused Disney of infringing one of the tenets of commercial practice, thus
making the project unsustainable without subsidies—an allegation that Disney has
strongly denied.
The most influential new town since Radburn, New Jersey (started in 1929),
Celebration is being built out as planned—the alternative model to traditional suburban
sprawl. However, its garden city-like density, its limited capacity for growth, and the
absence of a structuring (local and regional) transportation system preclude its being the
long-term solution to the challenge of smart growth in North America.