03 May 2007

Why the Celebration?

A few have asked why there would be critics of a place like Celebration, Florida. I can't find all of the critics online, so my representation of their comments will be a little indirect and undercited, but...
Witold Rybczynski writes a mostly positve commentary for one of his Slate slideshows, but he can't help but tack on a social commentary:
A four-bedroom house on a small lot—like the relatively modest Craftsman-style Bungalow pictured here, hardly a McMansion—now sells for $450,000. This is more than three times the average selling price of houses in metropolitan areas nationwide, which is currently $140,000, making Celebration the residential equivalent of a Lexus. The truth is that despite its best efforts, the populist Disney Co. has produced an elitist product.
One of the simple problems is that Walt had a vision for a community of the future, so unless this really is the most cutting edge social experiment ever, it hasn't live up to his dreams.

And some authors are focusing mroe on the toal impact of Disney on the landscape in the Orlando area. One example would be Foglesong's Married to the Mouse. One couple moved to Celebration and wrote about it in Celebration, U.S.A: Living in Disney's Brave New Town. Probably the most serious examination of the social side of things comes from Andrew Ross who is an NYU professor of American Studies. In, The Celebration Chronicles, Ross describes his observations after moving to Celebration. According to Amazon the first sentence of the book is, "
I live in a country that never runs out of promises." That sums up the chase after utopian dreams pretty well.

Some really object more to the artificially clean environment or the significant manipulation of nature. But most write about the experiment in terms that make it clear that Celebration has acheived something new and something worth watching and talking about.

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