SHARE:
Building A Town From Scratch
To be fair, of course, Celebration is not your ordinary planned community; it's the Walt Disney Company's unique vision of sustainable, low-impact suburban living: a Tomorrowland for the masses, but with real-life solutions to real-life problems. Mixed residential and commercial use reduces automobile traffic; ample park, recreational and other meeting space promotes civic interaction; a sprinkle of affordable housing encourages socioeconomic integration. Indeed, Disney officials say they are building much more than homes, offices and commercial space. They're creating a town from the ground up. Estimated cost: $2.5 billion. If all goes well, some 20,000 residents will one day live, work, study, play, shop and die in Disney's futuristic version of small town U.S.A.
"We're laying down the framework of a town," says Tom Lewis, Disney's corporate point man for the project over the past decade. "But the people who come to live here will make it a community. They'll be the ones who determine if it is a success or a failure."
The idea for such a town came from Walt Disney himself, some 30 years ago. At the time, he envisioned a living laboratory of new technologies and, to some extent, social engineering that might offer solutions to crime, poverty, pollution and other urban ills plaguing America. His plans called for a network of moving sidewalks, raised roadways and monorails, and a flashy landscape of post-modern homes and work spaces linked by a central computer system. Some reports reveal a near-Orwellian obsession with control: Residents would be required to work, slums would be forbidden, and homes would be leased rather than owned, giving occupants fewer rights. Walt called his project the Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow, or EPCOT. After his death in 1966, Walt's plans were shelved in favor of a less radical venture: EPCOT opened in 1982 as a theme park - a kind of ongoing World's Fair. By most accounts, it was Peter Rummell, then president of Disney Development Company, who resurrected Walt's plan. Rummell was charged with floating proposals for Disney's surplus land (much of it heavily laden with environmental restrictions) located about four miles southeast of the Magic Kingdom, near S.R. 192. In 1988, Rummell and Lewis pitched a plan to develop 4,900 acres while setting aside a near equal amount as a protected "green belt." Michael Eisner, Disney's CEO and himself a bit of an architecture buff, enthusiastically approved. "Michael said if we wanted to build it," recalls Lewis, "it would have to be something truly special and truly unique - something synergistic with the larger goals and values of the Walt Disney Company." (Eisner, himself, picked the town's much-ridiculed name.)
To be sure, Celebration would be no Levittown, the post-World War II Long Island community that initiated America's move to the suburbs by offering affordable housing. With Eisner's lofty mandate, the Disney design team focused their attention on the so-called New Urbanist communities started in the 1960s (most notably the towns of Reston, Va., and Columbia, Md.) in which designers began modeling new resort and residential communities in the style of the traditional small town: a diverse collection of architectural forms built in high density and surrounding a central business district. A second wave of these packaged communities arrived in the early 1980s with such developments as Seaside, near Destin, and Maryland's Kentlands project.
While results have been mixed, New Urbanists maintain - like Walt did, years earlier - that many of the social and environmental challenges of modern life, such as crime, unemployment and over-reliance on the automobile, are products of fundamental flaws within our designed environment. For the creators of Celebration, New Urbanism (often called neo-traditional planning) seemed a perfect fit. Who better than Disney to build the city of tomorrow in the image of our past?
To accomplish the task, Rummell assembled a team of famed architects and land planners. Among them: Robert A.M. Stern, Jacques Robertson, Philip Johnson, Michael Graves, Robert Venturi, the late Charles Moore and Cesar Pelli. Some worked on the master plan; others designed landmark buildings such as the town's bank, its courthouse, movie theatre and post office. Their work is clean and simple, yet varied in style. The only apparent rules of design: no chaotic, freeform deconstructivist architecture, and, to downplay the Disney connection, no mouse ears. A visitor, in fact, would be hard pressed to guess the town's developer, with only the name Disney appearing discretely on some signs.
Celebration indeed conjures the classic 19th century American village. Homebuyers choose from among six approved architectural styles - classical, Victorian, colonial revival, coastal, Mediterranean or French - each spelled out in painstaking detail in the builders' pattern book. The homes, like the master plan, are throwbacks: porch swings, balustrades, white picket fences and detached garages (some converted to rental apartments) in the back yard. And like many small towns, the residential neighborhoods radiate from a bustling commercial district. Shops, restaurants, movie theaters and basic services are just a short walk away. Behind the town center sits Celebration's swimming pool, tennis and volleyball courts and playground. A public 18-hole public golf course arcs above the residential neighborhoods.
But it is the riskier design features that define this and other New Urbanist communities: narrow building lots, public alleys slicing through back yards, million-dollar homes abutting $130,000 townhouses. Unlike its upscale competitors, the town will have no gates restricting outside access. Such planning quirks, together with the exaggerated neo-traditional architecture, bring a surreal, toylike feel to Celebration. It is an old town but without the wrinkles: All the paint is new, all the streets are clean, many trees and shrubs come fully grown from Disney's vast nurseries. Design critics label the town a cybertech version of Walt Disney World's Main Street, U.S.A.
It's a fair description. Behind the small town facade, Celebration is wired for the next century. Each home and apartment will be linked to a fiber-optic network carrying voice, entertainment and data transmissions. One day, officials pledge, residents will post messages on the town's community Web site, doctors will monitor blood pressure and other vital signs of home-bound patients, and students will access the school's online library without ever leaving home.
It is unquestionably this fusion of the old and the new that holds Celebration's appeal. Students walk safely to school, as the promotional promise goes, waving to friends and neighbors along the way. But when they arrive, they won't find a little red schoolhouse. The Celebration School (to be public and operated by the Osceola County School District) is a showcase of educational technologies and innovative teaching methods. An adjacent "teaching academy" - designed by a team of top educators from across the country - will be used to train teachers and to observe and evaluate teaching methods. Disney kicked in $10 million in construction and start-up costs for the school and academy.
The town's health center (known as the Celebration Health Campus) also will be a state-of-the-art facility, with complete outpatient and inpatient services, as well as a fitness center, lap pool and dance studio. The center, owned and operated by Florida Hospital, is billed as a laboratory for preventive medicine. A community outreach program will encourage proper diet and exercise for all residents. Sound too good to be true? Aside from the occasional knee-jerk Disney bashing (some social critics warn of an insidious conspiracy to foist Disney-style values upon unwitting homebuyers), only a few meaningful complaints about the Celebration plan have surfaced. Some prospective buyers grumble that in addition to a county property tax, residents are responsible for homeowners association dues, plus an annual CDD (community development district) assessment that can range from $300 to more than $2,000 annually. Celebration officials say the fees are consistent with other upscale communities. Other critics bemoan the deed covenants that restrict what homeowners can and cannot do. For example: residents can hold garage sales, but only one per homeowner each year; artists and writers can work out of their homes, but home offices for other professionals are restricted to a designated "home office district"; and to prevent Celebration from turning into a resort community (as Seaside has become) homeowners are required to live on their property at least nine months out of the year.
Don Killoren, Celebration's vice president and general manager, claims the covenants are rarely an issue with prospective buyers. Disney's research, he explains, reveals that buyers are more than willing to forgo such restrictions in exchange for a safe, orderly, predictable living environment.
So far, the numbers back him up. Last November more than 1,600 prospective residents lined up to place $1,000 deposits for the chance to be among the first 351 homebuyers or 122 renters in Celebration's phase one development. Home prices range from $130,000 to just over $1 million, rentals from $600 to $1,100 a month. Already, the entire 240,000-square-foot office park is leased, and the 68,000 square-foot commercial district should be fully occupied in time for the town center's grand opening festivities November 16-18. "There's definitely a growing niche for these types of communities - those that promise a return to the small town way of life," says Michael Sorich, an Orlando-based real estate appraiser. "It's clear that Disney has tapped into that demand."
What isn't clear is just how much profit Disney will turn from Celebration, and when. The question is an important one. Many developers lack both the patience and the long-term financing needed when projects have high front-end costs, like Celebration. Disney officials, while declining to reveal actual numbers, proudly point out that Celebration is part business venture and part experimental model for New Urbanist thinking. Killoren insists that the project will provide the company with the greatest possible return on its investment, while also shedding light on design-based solutions to growth management challenges. If that's true, Celebration might one day be the kind of mecca for community developers that Disneyland is for theme park operators.
"I hope they succeed; we all hope they succeed," says John Marsh, director of the non-profit Florida Center for Community Design and Research at the University of South Florida. "If Disney can prove that developers can make money doing these kinds of sustainable communities - which certainly cost more up front, but don't necessarily require the deep pockets Disney has - then you'll start seeing other developers borrowing and adapting their ideas."
One person who already sees that occurring is Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, a leading figure in the New Urbanism movement, whose Miami design firm participated in Celebration's early planning phases. Plater-Zyberk says a number of developers, convinced that Disney must know something they don't, have begun planning their own neo-traditional communities. "Small developers know that big corporations won't be taking any entrepreneurial risks. Everything they do has to be a proven, worthwhile investment," says Plater-Zyberk, whose credits include most of the early planning work on Seaside. "So Disney represents a mainstreaming of these ideas. That's a very important step in the right direction."
