Celebration, Florida

Celebration is a mixed-use community developed by the Walt Disney Company as an unincorporated part of Oscoela County in central Florida. It was founded in 1996 and constructed on land that the company had acquired in the 1960s to the west of Kissimmee and southeast of Disney World. The first large-scale community development to be built in the United States in almost three decades, it originally was projected to accommodate up to 20,000 residents upon completion, though the residential scope of the development has been scaled back in subsequent revisions to the master plan. Renters and owner-occupiers are accommodated in multifamily apartments and single-family homes. The town also boasts a corporate campus, with commercial office buildings running along a corridor that bisects the 10,000-acre site (half of which is preserved wetlands).

The design of the town identifies it as a stepchild of New Urbanism, a zealous movement in town planning that emerged in the mid-1980s and declared war on automobile-oriented suburban development. New Urbanists have pledged to forge an environmentally sustainable alternative to urban and suburban sprawl, and have vowed to reintroduce Americans to the civic virtues of an active community life as it is popularly imagined to have existed in the prewar U.S. small town. Distinguishing marks of New Urbanism in Celebration include the neotraditional style of the housing, the high density of suburban development, an interconnected grid-like street pattern (as opposed to cul-de-sacs), a mixed-income range of housing and rental prices, an active downtown center with shops and restaurants, and a strong emphasis on public space and “walkability.” The town plan also includes provision for a nonprofit community foundation to seed civic organizations and sponsor community life in general.

Celebration was perceived by some as a visible counterpunch to the privatizing ethos of the high-end gated community. More skeptical commentators saw Disney's role (initially dominating the governance boards, as is typical for a community developer) as a paradigm of postmodern corporate power, extending itself from consumer packaging to all aspects of the residents' social and cultural life. For communitarians, the town was hailed as a model of high civic participation. For libertarians, the rules and standards to which residents of the community must adhere were construed as restricting the rights of a free citizenry. In practice, residents wrestled with the tension between these competing views of their town. So high were the expectations for the performance of the community that the early years of settlement were filled with frustration, contention, and turmoil, much of it covered in the national and international press and in two book-length studies of the pioneer residents. These conflicts continued to reverberate and flare up with each new revision to the town plan. Far from being the conformist automatons that some in the media predicted residents of Celebration would be, the town's citizenry were responsive and outspoken from the outset, often to the chagrin of the Disney officials who oversaw the development. Whether they prove to be as active in the county and region only time will tell.

Children on a sidewalk in Celebration, Florida, in 1996.

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