David Schuermer

Department of English
University of Southern Illinois-Carbondale
dschuer@wko.com

 

Andrew Ross, The Celebration Chronicles: Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Property Value in Disney’s New Town. New York: Ballantine Books, 1999.

 

In reviewing Andrew Ross’s Celebration Chronicles: Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Property Value in Disney’s New Town, I am reminded of a simple statement Herbert Gans makes at the very beginning of his 1967 study The Levittowners: Ways of Life and Politics in a New Suburban Community. Addressing himself to the nature of community life in one of the first post-World War II suburban developments in America, Gans remarks that “people have some right to be what they are” (vi). It is not surprising that this statement comes to mind. Ross is quite aware of Gans’s study and makes good, albeit brief, use of it. Well he should, since his own book is also a study of community life, and though it is a much less formal study than Gans’s, it is one that seems to arrive at just about the same conclusion regarding the relationship between our “built environments” and the lives we lead. Ross notes early on that “Gans took up residence in Levittown… to find out what difference a place really makes. GI suburbia had become the preferred punching bag of critics of the mass-produced life in the postwar years… [and Gans] took issue with this view, which he characterized as an elitist perception on the part of urban intellectuals” (220). The typical urban intellectual whom Gans was attempting to rebut was someone like Lewis Mumford, urban historian and author of the magisterial The City in History, who believed that the American suburb was fast becoming a “low-grade uniform environment from which escape was impossible” (486). In Mumford’s view, the city presents a rich opportunity to nurture social diversity, which is crucial to the maintenance of democracy in a free state. The suburbs, on the other hand, present a threat to democracy. They segregate people by class and income, and this segregation breeds intolerance. Worse yet, the suburbs breed gullibility. As Gans notes, urban intellectuals and city planners are critical of the suburbs for fashioning a uniform and “gullible, petty ‘mass’ which rejects the culture that would make it fully human” (vi). The typical suburban citizen is gullible because he is the victim of mass production, “conforming in every respect to a common mold, manufactured in the central metropolis” (Mumford 486). Ironically, what Ross finds in the Disney-developed New Urban town of Celebration–a manufactured environment that makes Levittown look positively quaint by comparison–is the same thing that Gans finds in Levittown: it isn’t such a bad place to live after all.

 

Neither seems to be producing low-grade and gullible automatons; indeed, both harbor quite a bit of democratic free spirit, however homogenous the class and economic status of their inhabitants, and in spite of the corporate and market manipulations which brought them into being. Yes, Ross will discover the residents of Celebration are implicated in a market-driven experiment which attempts to sell the idea of “community” as if it were so many loaves of bread, but if we avoid the urge to treat these people as unwitting co-conspirators in their own market manipulation–in other words, as unwitting co-conspirators in some kind of inexorable corporate takeover of democratic values–we can learn something about what it means to develop something called “community,” a slippery term at best. We might learn, indeed, that we find “community” in some of the damndest places. Enter Disney.

 

Does the new town of Celebration offer a way of life worth celebrating? Ross takes a sabbatical from his position as Director of American Studies at New York University and moves to this newly developed suburb of Orlando, the home of Disneyworld, to find out. The Celebration Chronicles is the record of his year-long stay, and he is quite frank about his intentions. His is not the formal piece of sociological analysis that Gans produced:

 

Neither a journalist nor a social scientist by training, I had not angled for juicy headlines–there were enough out there already–nor had I aimed at an objective or statistical survey of the town–Celebrationites had been surveyed enough already. This book, like the hybrid nature of this community, is supposed to be a cocktail of personal and public observations, laced with those ingredients of analysis that seemed most true to my experience of the town’s residents and employees. (320)

 

Although Ross eschews the more scholarly approach, his book is much more than a collection of anecdotal observations of people and place. He manages to identify and discuss, in detail, the key notions and characters who inform the New Urban debate. In this regard, his book serves as a more than useful introduction to the student of popular culture. He is particularly good at discussing the troubling issues of personal liberty and private property when framed within the context of marketing and the “production/consumption” of class values.

 

At first blush, his Celebration experience would seem to be all about conformity and the maintenance of class boundaries. It is surely all of that, but it is also about property value and how the pursuit of property value jumpstarts a surprising degree of civic involvement. When put to the test of protecting their property value, Celebration residents appear to be anything but docile and gullible. To his credit, Ross does not patronize his subjects. He represents real people fighting real battles to control and define their community. And although they may not define that community in such a way as to convince Ross to move in with them–they actually suggest he stay and become the headmaster of their school–in the end he must acknowledge that something is working right in Celebration, in spite of its corporate origins and implication in Disney’s world of make-believe “imagineering.” Along the way he is able to unpack the ironies and contradictions that are bound up in the New Urbanist movement, for convincing people that community values can be packaged and sold is one thing, but creating a space in which these values can be developed is quite another.

 

I. New Urban Origins

 

Fingering Disney as a corporate villain is nothing new. Ross notes that Disney bashing has become something of a cottage industry among critics of popular culture.¹ Rather than level another blow alongside the Disney bashers from afar, he decides to go native and extend the neighborly hand of friendship, noting that “there is much to learn about places and people that do not feature on Saul Steinberg’s famous cartoon map of the ‘New Yorker’s View of the World'” (5-6). A creature of the urban landscape (downtown Manhattan where he lives and works), Ross samples the best New Urbanism has to offer and chronicles his experience. Yet what could have been a high-handed academic dismantling of Disney and upper-middle class homeowners who have been duped into buying instant community and civic values when in fact they are simply enhancing Disney’s investment portfolio, becomes instead a complex tale of evolving community identity, fraught with the contradictions which emerge when the pursuit of wealth conflicts with the pursuit of civic ideals and personal freedom. Thus Ross finds complexity where a skeptical academician might least expect to find it–among the well-manicured lawns and tightly woven realty covenants of Celebration.

 

Make no mistake about it: what drew Andrew Ross to Celebration was its status as a highly visible, and vulnerable, symbol of a corporate-sponsored New Urbanism–a heady brew and eclectic gathering of trendy postmodern architecture, contemporary urban design theory, corporate investment strategy, and old-fashioned social climbing. It is clear that he arrives in town the skeptic, if not the cynic. What is surprising, however, is that he finds a real community emerging as the unintended by-product of Disney’s well-crafted, one might almost say, suffocating, business plan. Ironically, the suburban conformity that people like Mumford rail against provides an opportunity for civic involvement that may well be beyond the reach of any number of jaded Manhattan sophisticates who have given up fighting City Hall. The New Urbanism, it seems, succeeds in spite of itself. It may be that residents of Celebration become a community only when they perceive their property values to be threatened, but nonetheless, they do forge a common bond and end up exhibiting those civic virtues which social scientists and New Urban town planners applaud.

 

What is the New Urbanism? If one is going to write about Celebration, then one must write about New Urbanism because Celebration is its most visible symbol. Ross does a good job unpacking its historical, architectural, and commercial origins. The New Urbanism movement is an attempt to transform the out-of-control development of the American suburban landscape. Its founding figures, Andres Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberg, have embraced commercial residential development opportunities like Celebration and Seaside, Florida, with a moral fervor, hoping to use market forces to their advantage, in order to, as Duany has said, “attack [the] enemy on [its] terms” (77) and, as Plater-Zyberg has said, “improve the world with design, plain good old design” (78). The bedrock principle of the New Urbanist movement is the belief that architecture and the organization of space have the power to influence social behavior; that, in short, the “built environment” can create democratic utopias. It is also a movement built upon a certain amount of nostalgia, for the New Urbanist architect and town planner are attempting to recapture the ambience of the New England colonial village–town centers, green space, interconnected walkways–where people shared space intimately and nurtured social relations conducive to the free exchange of ideas perhaps best exemplified by town hall meetings. At least, that is the myth. As architectural critic Michael Sorkin has noted, however, such a reading of New England social space conveniently ignores an environment that also made room for the notorious Salem witch trials. Nonetheless, the New Urbanist is battling a real demon: an ever-developing suburban sprawl which is consuming the natural environment at a prodigious pace and populating the landscape with one commercial strip after another, dotted with an occasional shopping mall in a vain attempt to manufacture public space in the context of commercial space. All of it, of course, is tied together by the automobile, which has added a cruel velocity to modern life. Clearly the automobile is implicated in the suburban sprawl. It carries people from one space to another, stringing out the social experience and mapping a community with no center and no edge. The New Urbanism may be described, in the end, as an attempt to create space with an identifiable center and edge–in short, to create “community” through the manipulation of space.

 

Early on, Ross points out that this search for an urban center and edge can be traced to architect Charles Moore’s 1965 article in the influential architectural journal Perspecta, entitled “You Have to Pay for the Public Life.” There Moore writes about the lack of a public realm on the West Coast, in particular, in the city of Los Angeles. Los Angeles, he claims, lacks an urban focus or center. He argues that “the houses are not tied down to any place much more than the trailer homes are, or the automobiles. [The houses] are adrift in the suburban sea, not so mobile as the cars, but just as unattached…. This is… a floating world in which a floating population can island-hop with impunity… ” (59). In Los Angeles there is little sense that a people have taken possession of a place and chosen to celebrate that place by marking its center. To identify a place and mark its center is self-consciously public act where people come together to celebrate a place for particular reasons, the marker then becoming the symbol of their shared values. Astonishingly–at least it seems so to us now, having been inundated in over three decades of Disney commercial hype–Moore identifies Disneyland as one of the few real public spaces in Los Angeles, one of the few spaces where one can find a center and edge, and thus “one of the most important pieces of construction in the West” for “it is engaged in replacing many of those elements of the public realm which have vanished in the featureless private floating world of southern California, whose only edge is the ocean, and whose center is otherwise undiscoverable” (65). We may trace Disney’s new town of Celebration to Charles Moore because he was the first to point out that Disneyland was a self-conscious attempt to create an interactive public space amid the disconnected suburban sprawl of Los Angeles. Moreover, Moore notes, when we enter Disneyland, we agree to play-act, and we agree to be watched while play-acting. In short, we agree to be self-consciously public in our behavior and to conform to shared expectations. And we agree to buy a ticket for the experience: we agree to pay for the public life we are missing out on elsewhere. Just like Celebration.

 

The bulk of Andrew Ross’s book, it seems to me, works out the complex implications of such a theatrical arrangement when it is translated to the Disney-built town of Celebration: what, indeed, he asks over and over, are the relations that exist between public and private performance when they are tied to property value? He unpacks the uneasy relationship that Celebrationites have with the media, design professionals and culture critics who patronizingly level a charge of “bogus living” at them. He finds the charge to be inaccurate: “I watched as some kind of provisional public sphere, built on blunt opinion, common sentiment, and the stoic pursuit of civic needs, pushed its snout into the moist Florida air. It was fresh, cranky, and fraught with all the noble virtues and sorry prejudices that contend in the republic at large” (314). This cranky civic virtue most revealed itself at two key moments during his stay.

 

II. Agreeing to Disagree

 

Although the book arranges itself chronologically, from Ross’s arrival in 1997 to his departure one year later, it pays special attention to two important community crises. Both crises offer an opportunity for Ross to reflect upon the tension between freedom and order that is inextricably bound up in the development of a utopian community. Residents soon discover that the chance to build a community of their own will require regulating their conduct and perhaps curbing their liberties in order to protect their property value. They also discover that they can come together and agree to disagree with what Celebration has to offer.

 

The first crisis is the wide-spread recognition that the houses of Celebration are poorly built. It turns out that Celebration was built upon the backs of unskilled migrant labor because that was the only labor available in the booming Orlando construction economy. How ironic that Disney was victimized by the very economy it was attempting to take advantage of, by the very laborers it was willing to exploit for profit. But then Ross’s chronicle is nothing if it is not ironic, for it continually evokes the arch irony that Disney, a company which perfected the art of bringing dreamlike order and beauty to disordered and ugly realities–witness almost any “classic” exercise in Disney sanitization, from Pocahontas to The Hunchback of Notre Dame–found itself, in Celebration, mired in the unseemly, and often embarrassing, real-world complexities of suburban development. The result? Pricey upscale homes with leaky roofs and pipes, cracked foundations, chimneys out of plumb, and doors that won’t close. Complaints are so widespread that residents organize a Homeowners Association to bring pressure against Disney. And thus a Celebration “community” begins to form–not as the product of market strategy and New Urban design, but rather, in opposition to corporate ineptitude, inefficiency, and greed. (Ross notes that in 1996 Michael Eisner, Chairman and CEO of Disney, earned $97,600 an hour while many Celebration construction workers earned little more than minimum wage, and Haitian workers earned 20 cents an hour making Mickey Mouse t-shirts. Here, and elsewhere, although Ross refrains from convenient “Disney bashing,” he is certainly not above cuffing them around a bit, and deservedly so.)

 

Unfortunately, this new-found “community,” born of opposition to the Disney “community-builders,” soon finds itself facing a prickly dilemma: going public with their complaints in an effort to pressure Disney into action runs the risk of damaging property value. Prospective buyers (those who would complete the development project and thereby secure its market value long into the future) would certainly shy away from upscale homes with leaky roofs and yards that didn’t drain. The common interest in protecting property values prevails. The residents keep quiet, and thus begins a long private battle with Disney which is ultimately resolved, but not without significant frustrations along the way. Nonetheless, the brouhaha over construction provides the first real evidence that something like a community was indeed forming, albeit not in the way Disney had envisioned or the residents would have wanted.

 

Herein lies the charm of this book. It is generous and big-hearted in its account of people trying to make their experiment in New Urban living work. It could have been a cynical and satirical evisceration of upper-middle class values, class snobbery, and corporate hypocrisy. Instead, it explores the contradictions, disappointments, and complexities inherent in managing one version of the “good life”–from both the residents’ and Disney’s point of view. In the process it lays waste the myth that there is anything so simple as the “good life,” even if one can afford to buy it or bring together the best minds in urban design to plan it. That is nowhere more evident than in the second crisis, and clearly, from Ross’s point of view, the most compelling crisis: the (mis)management of the Celebration school. Ross’s narrative of the school crisis takes up almost the middle third of the book, and well it should, because the Celebration school was billed as perhaps the single most attractive characteristic of this New Urban environment.

 

Once again, we find ourselves up to our eyebrows in irony: “Improbably for a town built to evoke old-time values, this school ha[d] been frontloaded with every bell and whistle from two and a half decades of progressive educational reform” (124). The majority of residents had moved to Celebration for the school, and Disney had promoted their “school of tomorrow” aggressively, making it the centerpiece of their marketing strategy. It turns out, however, the majority of residents weren’t quite ready for such reform. The new Celebration school would employ non-traditional testing and grading practices, and in the process expose the fundamental gap between what educators and the general public believe to be true about education. Education professors, by and large, are opposed to competitive testing, rote memorization, and reward and punishment; parents, on the other hand, particularly upwardly mobile, professional parents–the kind, in fact, most likely to buy a home in Celebration–tend to be interested in quantitative results and discipline. Their position is straightforward and difficult to counter: they believe they are living proof that traditional education works because they have been successful enough to buy into an upscale community such as Celebration, thus they conclude that what worked for them will work for their children.

 

Ross, it seems to me, is at his best when addressing the complexities involved in this discussion. He quite rightly, I believe, points to the fundamental issue at work in school reform, “that education serves best when it shapes the world anew rather than tailors itself to the status quo of the ‘real world'” (167), but he is generous enough to acknowledge that, although non-traditional education might make a Celebrationite’s child a better person, it won’t necessarily get that child into a prestigious college. And getting into the right college, finally, was the measure of pedagogical success for the majority of parents in Celebration. They organized and made their feelings known. They rallied in the face of a perceived threat to their children’s welfare–a noble undertaking indeed–and they did so effectively, much to the chagrin of Ross. In the course of one year, the progressive curriculum and pedagogy would be revised, and 23 of 53 faculty would leave the school, faculty who had been recruited to implement the progressive curriculum and pedagogy. Out of this disappointment, however, emerges a new sense of political empowerment, for Celebration residents end up backing one of their own residents as a reform candidate for the county school board. Civil disagreement, it seems, can be both dispiriting and ennobling.

 

The outcome of the school crisis may have disappointed progressive educators, but it couldn’t have disappointed many social scientists or New Urbanist town planners, since Celebrationites were stepping forward and practicing the very civic involvement these people had hoped they would. Like the construction crisis, the education crisis proved to be another test case in community involvement and civic responsibility, and one the Celebrationites would pass. The fact that the majority of Celebrationites (both parents and non-parents, since property value doesn’t distinguish between parents and non-parents) chose to turn their back on progressive educational reform and an innovative curriculum in favor of the more orthodox emphasis on quantitative results (what Ross refers to as “the iron law of the GPA”) and the passive instructional methodologies of the traditional classroom clearly disappoints Ross. He notes that “methods like authentic assessment and cooperative learning are not exactly new, but for many Celebration parents… they could just as well have been lifted from a therapy manual for psychiatric counselors” (125). However personally disappointed Ross might be in the parents’ uninformed opposition to progressive educational reform, in the end, his disappointment is quite beside the point. The point is the parents exercised their right to be what they wanted to be, and put into practice the very civic virtues town planners had hoped to see. Remember Gans here: “People have some right to be what they are.”

 

III. The Value of Valuing Property

 

Perhaps an equally important point to be made, however–and one which Ross makes quite clearly–is that even the struggle over the school, which was largely driven by parental concerns over SAT scores and college admissions, was also to a significant degree about property values. Families across the land often look to buy into a “good” school district, and the families of Celebration proved to be no different. Ross notes that realtors in Central Florida believe “the value of homes in [the] region can vary by over 15 percent depending on the test scores of the local school” (147). What makes the families of Celebration different–and what Ross finds so dispiriting–is that they have an opportunity to build a “good” school from the ground up, yet they balk at educational reform, and in part justify it because of their concern for property value.

 

In Celebration, community is a commodity–but that proves to be a curiously bittersweet phenomenon. Although the notion of “community” is all too often bundled into the package of amenities the housing industry has to offer, it can take on a life of its own. True enough, the community Disney was selling was not the community the residents bought, but the residents could have no way of knowing that, and neither could Disney. Both were victimized by the dynamic unpredictability of a market economy, if “victimized” is even the right word here. In the end, it seems to me, Ross chooses not to characterize the Celebration residents as victims–either of their own blind pursuit of property value or of Disney’s profiteering which masquerades as “imagineering”; likewise he chooses not to vilify Disney, although as already noted he is not afraid to criticize them. In the end, both stumble into “community.” If the measure of a community is the extent to which its members engage in the identification and debate over a set of core values–those things which they claim to share when they mark out a place for themselves and call it “theirs”–then Celebration measures up as a community. This, it seems to me, is Ross’s overall impression of Celebration, and it is an encouraging one. Not that property value came for these Celebrationites to be the measure of all things, but that they were able, even in this defectively “imagineered” space, to assemble, identify a center (however contentious), and forge a community bond through the enactment of civic virtue.

Note

 

1. Let the following passage from an article entitled “Disney and the Imagineering of Histories” by Scott Schaffer serve as an example of one of the more enthusiastic examples of Disney bashing: “The Walt Disney Company co-opts local histories, without their corresponding local social and political geographies, reconstitutes them as the Company’s own, and sells them to Disney’s customers as markers of American political, cultural, and imperial attitudes. This co-optation and perversion of local histories in the creation of the Disney Company’s products not only removes and rewrites these histories from their specific contexts, but also reduces the corresponding social geographies to terrains that can be colonized and brought within the ‘Small World’ of the Disney theme park, and can then be sold over and over again to new generations of children, thereby perpetuating the Disney Company’s transmission to new generations of the stereotypes created to justify American imperial power” (1).

Works Cited

 

• Gans, Herbert J. The Levittowners: Ways of Life and Politics in a New Suburban Community. New York: Pantheon Books, 1967.
• Moore, Charles. “You Have to Pay for the Public Life.” Perspecta: The Yale Architectural Journal 9/10 (1965): 57-97.
• Mumford, Lewis. The City in History: Its Origins, Its Transformations, and Its Prospects. New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1961.
• Schaffer, Scott. “Disney and the Imagineering of Histories.” Postmodern Culture 6.3 (1996).
• Sorkin, Michael. “Acting Urban: Can New Urbanism Learn from Modernism’s Mistakes?” Metropolis 18.1 (August/September 1998): 37-9.