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Review: The Celebration Chronicles: Life in Disneyville
What happens when one of the world?s richest and best-known corporations decides to build a prototype community of the future?
In "The Celebration Chronicles: Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Property Value in Disney?s New Town," sociologist Andrew Ross recounts his year living in an apartment in Disney?s new Florida town Celebration, witnessing the combustible mixture of corporatism, utopianism, media, technology, urban planning and politics with middle-class American life.
By and large, it was time well spent. If you care about technology, the nature of the mega-corporation or urban planning, this is an important and surprisingly touching story. Ross delineates the impossible expectations and inexorable pressures on even the best-intentioned modern corporation, as well as the genuine yearning of ordinary people to live in the kind of place Walt Disney invoked in his sometimes creepily cheery theme parks.
Disney reigned in the age of the corporate plutocrat, when moguls not only made money but could use their powerful companies to advance particular political or social interests.
Thus, Bill Paley made CBS News a great news organization mostly because he wanted to. Today, his stockholders would never let him spend money for anything as foolish and wasteful as good journalism. Nor would IBM?s shareholders look kindly on the discarded patriarchal traditions of Big Blue. It?s a rare corporate mission that lasts more than a year or two.
But the old Disney company was always something of a laboratory and playground for its founder?s fantasies. Horrified at the suburban sprawl that engulfed his beloved Southern California, Walt conceived of Disney Land in part as an antidote and a respite. Though it?s easy to jeer at the Mouse and its many tentacles, it?s dishonest not to acknowledge how many millions of people love the things Walt Disney built, and have been drawn to his creations and visions. Disney?s theme parks are about the closest thing America has these days to a universal cultural experience.
More than anything, Disney said he wanted to build a place where people were free of cars, smog and noise and were drawn into contact with one another; where a sense of community and personal contact could be restored. And perhaps most significantly, where the power of technology would be carefully harassed for the common good.
In his mind, Disney Land and Walt Disney World weren?t mere amusement parks, but prototypes of new kind of communities. He was a classic technological utopian, unwavering in his conviction that technics could solve the world?s problems. He imagined that the innovations he pioneered - from monorails to highly advanced waste disposal systems - would move beyond his parks, into the wider world. Disney gave his engineers and futurists nearly free rein, and their accomplishments captured the public imagination in a much deeper way than their real-world equivalents - epochal periods like the Space Age - ever did.
EPCOT was, in fact, to be the world?s premiere showcase for innovative new technologies. Disney had dreamed for years about this Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow; he hoped to build it for 20,000 employees who would run his giant new resort complex in central Florida.
The pedestrian, not the car, would be king. The city?s retail center would be encased in a giant bubble, surrounded by concentric zones allocated to high-density apartment housing, green belts and recreation (playgrounds, churches and schools). Surface transportation would be clean and electrical, garbage whisked away by underground systems, a sense of community encouraged by architectural design, community gathering spots and activities, and lavishly funded schools.
Disney never got to built his city of the future, of course. His vision turned out to be mistaken: the Space Age collapsed abruptly and inexplicably, and the defining technology of this era has been the computer and the Internet, not inter-galactic travel.
His idea was probably doomed, anyway, as the nature of corporations changed dramatically. Companies like Disney are no longer run by powerful decision-makers, autocrats who can muscle through tough decisions, but by amorphous analysts, lawyers, boards of directors and stockholders.
The modern mega-company has neither the mandate nor the attention span to invest in long-term innovation and creativity; the CEO who worries about anything but short-term profits will soon be looking for work. Most large corporations specialize in acquiring and divesting themselves of things other people have created.
Thus, Disney?s worst fears came true. His successors, led by his brother, junked his elaborate plans (never fully disclosed) for a modern city and turned EPCOT into a giant corporate exhibit center and international food court.
But the idea didn?t die completely. It just ended up taking a different form.
In the late 80?s, Disney CEO Michael Eisner, as big a monomaniac as Walt, revived a chunk of Disney?s idea when he gave the go ahead for the construction of Celebration, a meticulously -designed (even the "downtown" retail outlets are chosen by Disney execs) town the company is still constructing for 20,000 people in the swampland south of Walt Disney World. The stampede for houses was so intense that the company chose residents by lottery.
From its Victorian downtown to its obsessively- groomed parks, Celebration is the ultimate planned community. All its "antique"-styled homes are wired for Net access and the town boasts a progressive school, hospital and high-tech infrastructure. Some of the world?s best architects were hired to design its public and residential buildings. Yards were kept small and houses close together so that neighbors would be forced to run into one another and form connections. Elaborate regulations govern everything from paint colors to lawn care.
Celebration also quickly became a focal point of the New Urbanism movement - a philosophy that calls for a mix of old and new housing styles and seeks alternatives to the sprawl, traffic, strip malling and social isolation engulfing much of America.
It?s still way to early to know whether Celebration can work, but Ross - who?s director of American studies at New York University - encountered plenty of problems during his year-long stay. People still drove miles to discount chain stores for better prices and wider selections that the aesthetically-pleasing but non-utilitarian Celebration retail district offers. The innovative school was, from the first, bitter controversial among parents.
Since the town was never incorporated, but part of the Disney empire in Florida, town officials were appointed by the company, not elected. (Disney is not into representative democracy. According to the amazing agreement the company reached with state officials, Walt Disney World is operated more like the Vatican then a business operating under local and state laws).
The mother corporation inspired a bizarre love-hate relationship with residents, who accorded it almost mythic powers and had ridiculous expectations that it would keep their homes and their town as meticulously clean and efficient as its theme parks. Real life, of course, is vastly more complex than the Magic Kingdom and subject to a different set of economic laws.
But the modern corporation isn?t into anything for the long haul. After intense and creative early involvement, the Disney officials who worked on Celebration all moved on, and pressure grew for profits rather than experimentation.
Although Disney architects designed every detail of Celebration, the corporation took little responsibility for the work of the contractors who actually built it. There were widespread complaints about the poor quality of housing construction - leaky roofs, crumbling walls. Hit-and-run journalists delighted in poking fun at Mousetown and pounded Celebration whenever anything went wrong.
From the first, the company feared that digital connectivity might prove too empowering for its uneasy residents, so the town?s computers network - one of the most touted elements of Celebration early on - remained primitive. The town?s rural, central Florida neighbors remained suspicious and hostile.
Meanwhile, disenchanted residents found themselves in an awkward spot, says Ross. Many invested their life savings in their expensive homes and didn?t want bad publicity to endanger their investments. Ross has taken the deepest look yet at Disney?s experimental town. His writing reflects the fact that he was an outsider, a self-professed writer and visitor who never seemed to completely permeate the town?s carefully constructed veneer. But what he did get to see was plenty interesting.
"The Celebration Chronicles" is a fair-minded and intelligent look at this strange community. Ross avoids the temptation to paint Disney as callous and evil, but he also fails to give us a vivid picture of what life there is really like for the mixed (old and young, married and single, gay and straight) demographic community forming there. Celebration residents are quoted, but life there is not really captured.
Celebration is ultimately a sad, even hopeless story. Clearly, many Americans are unhappy with the noise, enforced mobility and disconnection of contemporary life, even as they rush to malls to save every penny they can. It?s depressing that an entertainment conglomerate is the only prominent entity in the America that has taken any bold step towards addressing these concerns. The federal government has largely opted out of urban planning, and most corporations are too volatile and bottom-line driven to persevere through ambitious, even radical undertakings.
Here was one of the bolder efforts in modern times to return some sense of community and beauty to a country whose home dwellers are forced to choose between declining urban environments that are either declining or ascending so quickly as to price out the middle class, and ugly and increasingly congested suburban ones. Celebration, an effort at a better middle ground, deserved more support scrutiny than either Disney or the media has provided. To that end, "The Celebration Chronicles" is compelling reading and long overdue reporting.
Reading this surprising and original book, it?s hard to avoid the feeling that the real and most insurmountable problem Celebration faces is that the iron-willed, single-minded bully who conjured it up and whose ghost hovers over every one of those carefully-manicured lawns - Walt himself - wasn?t around to push his dream to fruition.
Purchase this book at Amazon.
Once again, Katz attempts to make something paradigm-shifting out of the relatively mundane. It seems that his basic motivation with regard to writing articles is to ensure that there are enough new buzzwords and vaguely defined "new waves" to propel thousands of cocktail parties.
-awc
Why is it that every time JonKatz writes about anything, some people will always take the time to tell him how worthless and boring he is and how much his last piece sucked?
If you know beforehand that you won't like it, why do you read it?
Andrew Ross was the editor that fell for Alan Sokal's deconstructionist hoax a couple of years ago.
I hate to play the Nitpicker's Game, even with a target such as Jon Katz, but "Disney Land" has never existed. Disneyland, on the other hand, has been around since 1955. There's never been a space in the name. Never will.
*shrug*
I don't care, as long as I get to ride the Haunted Mansion.
I've been to this place before. Lemme tell you its creepy as hell. Ever seen pleasantville or the truman show? The town looks just like that. I wouldn't want to live there because first I don't like neighbors. Second I'd hate having to live under stringent conditions on how the outside of my house would look. Third everything is as expensive as hell. You'd have to be making serious money to keep up any kind of a respectable lifestyle. Florida is nice to visit, but I'd hate to live there, especially at celebrations.
"There is nothing more intimidating than an idiotic smile worn by a manifest non-idiot." --unknown
The town?s rural, central Florida neighbors remained suspicious and hostile.
I live near Central Florida and have driven by Celebration a few times. Its not far enough away from Orlando to have rural neighbors -- Celebration is part of the city's huge suburban sprawl.
Anyone who is interested in the original plans for EPCOT's city of tomorrow should visit www.waltopia.com.
Rogers Cadenhead (Web: http://www.cadenhead.org/workbench)
I 'won?t' read this garbage with ?????'s strewn all over the place. You realize you're helping Miscro$soft's campaign to embrace and extend the internet, don't you?
On the other hand, it is clear from linving in places like Sunnyvale and Cupertino that some sort of urban planning is needed to make our living spaces enjoyable.
I can see no savlation for Sunnyvale and Cupertino other than being razed to the ground and started over.
You want to see a meticulously controlled society modeled and planned to create some sort of rich u/dis-topia using technology look no further (or no closer I guess).
It was Gibson, who in an Article for Wired a few years ago called it "Disneyland with the death penalty."
Um, is it the *same* Andrew Ross?
It?s depressing that an entertainment conglomerate is the only prominent entity in the America that has taken any bold step towards addressing these concerns.
Not true. In Geneva, IL, a town near Fermilab, a developer is building a subdivision using New Urbanist priniciples. The prominent enitities here being Geneva and the developer.
The federal government has largely opted out of urban planning, and most corporations are too volatile and bottom-line driven to persevere through ambitious, even radical undertakings.
Thank goodness the federal government is no longer active in urban planning. Cabrini Green and the Robert Taylor homes occupying he entire south shore of Chicago were more than enough.
It was like living in Logan's Run, or something. I've always had a *thing* against hyper-organized environments. For example, I've always felt that playgrounds SHOULDN'T be perfectly safe -- it should be possible to get yourself killed on the monkeybars.
Singapore was my worst nightmare come to life. Saigon, by contrast, was a great place. Erratic like you wouldn't believe, and correspondingly amusing.
Of course, maybe that's just me.
Well, as a certifiable Katz-basher on some other topics, fairness demands that I speak up when he turns out some good work. I felt that I got a good sense of what this book was about, and why I might care, and why it is important. The Celebration Chronicles is now going onto my "must read this someday" list.
Notice that the review did not mention "Columbine", "porn", or "geek" once. :^)
Thank you, Jon.
You want the real thing? - go to Switzerland and live.
I'm unfamiliar with the causes of the question-mark substitution. Can you explain what makes them appear, and what makes you mad about it?
Gee, that sounds ominous, doesn't it?
... or Littleton. [There's the Katz connection!] When you insulate yourself from your neighbors, when you eat at Appleby's and shop at Target or the Gap, you're eliminating most of the sense of community that was important to people's lives just a generation ago.
...
The New Urbanists are a set of architects and city planners who believe that America lost its soul when it moved to the auto-oriented suburbs, from Levittown right up to the Antelope Valley
New Urbanists believe that encouraging small, close-knit, pedestrian-oriented neighborhoods with neo-traditional architecture is one of the keys toward restoring that social structure.
I'm not convinced, and if anything, Disney's experiment in Celebration shows that this ideal can have a dark side. Still, there are many other examples that are not run by The Mouse; in fact other communities often eschew the corporate influence that seems endemic here. That doesn't mean they don't (for instance) have a Starbucks -- but it may mean requiring a franchise operator to be a resident.
The school at Celebration has been one of the touchiest problems they've dealt with. Florida law didn't allow them to run a private school here, so they had to accomodate many state laws and found they couldn't do some innovative things they wanted. Say what you will about Disney; they do care about education. It's the parents, ironically, who've objected to the direction the school has taken.
This experiment still has much to teach us
Here's an article on Celebration, with several photos.
Here's a visitor's overview of Celebration.
Sources for a dissertation on Celebration.
New Urbanism and Celebration.
lake effect weblog
{Network engineer in Chicago--looking for work!}
A news article a few weeks ago said about a third of the parents pulled their kids out of Celebration's schools because they were too nonconventional. Their schools where trying all kinds new high tech techniques and open classrooms; unconvential grading too. However, parents can be notoriously conservative about anything that might affect kids chances about getting into conventional colleges.
Katz writes:
Celebration is ultimately a sad, even hopeless story. Clearly, many Americans are unhappy with the noise, enforced mobility and disconnection of contemporary life, even as they rush to malls to save every penny they can. It?s depressing that an entertainment conglomerate is the only prominent entity in the America that has taken any bold step towards addressing these concerns.
Jon, please read up on the New Urbanism, especially the work of Andres Duany and his wife Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk. Celebration is just one corporate-influenced interpretation. Others have been done with less autocratic standards and more attention to variety in the architecture, from the Duany Associates community Seaside Florida (location of The Truman Show) to newer developments in Seattle, San Francisco, and Atlanta. This dialog is far from complete.
The federal government has largely opted out of urban planning, and most corporations are too volatile and bottom-line driven to persevere through ambitious, even radical undertakings.
As well they should. Urban planning is by necessity a local process; the only thing that the feds or corporations can do is direct it away from the community's interests.
Here was one of the bolder efforts in modern times to return some sense of community and beauty to a country whose home dwellers are forced to choose between declining urban environments that are either declining or ascending so quickly as to price out the middle class, and ugly and increasingly congested suburban ones. Celebration, an effort at a better middle ground, deserved more support scrutiny than either Disney or the media has provided.
Again, I share these frustrations over modern social values -- but Celebration is only one data point in this movement. To some extent, it's already become received wisdom among urban planners and some developers, who have adjusted their approaches without creating wholly unique communities.
The history of such experimental communities is replete with failures or at the very least failures with regard to (often very unrealistic) expectations.
lake effect weblog
{Network engineer in Chicago--looking for work!}
A return to America's semi-imaginary small town past as a model for the future? Sort of like the Amish- live most the time in past modes, but selectively incorportate modern innventions. Ray Bradbury wrote lots of stories juxtaposing past and future American values.
First off, let me say I think the review content,that which truly reflects on the content of the book, was well written and a good read in itself. However One of the things that Katz has put in the review to further illustrate one his points is wrong. That point of contention is the association he makes with people going to "shopping malls" to save money. The fact is people don't go to malls to save money they go there because they want to go to the "mall". Price thoughtful shoppers go to (shunnn) Wal-Mart or better yet...Ebay..With regards to the book, it talks about people driving for miles to avoid the high end retail district of Celebration,that is in effect the same as the people who drive to SAM's or costco rather than go to the local mall. The ebays and onsale.com's of the world illustrate this point even better,because now people dont even have to drive,and thus save gas(providing shipping and handling cost more than their gas costs).
The day I live in a community that has a mouse as a mascot, and have to eat at a restaurant that has a clown as a mascot (McDonalds), is the day I go berserk with an assault weapon.
:-)
Of course, OSes with cute little penguins are OK.
/* this is a joke */
Tired of being "punished" by the Slashdot $rtbl since 2002. I'm now over at http://soylentnews.org/ .
This is fucking /. When I see all these STUPID FUCKING question marks everywhere ... why? What the fuck is going on here? Can we not even escape the fucking BEAST on slashdot? For crying out loud ... Rob's mispellings are a million times over more preferabe than those FUCKING QUESTION MARKS.
PROOFREAD YOUR FUCKING DOCS.
support gun control: take guns from cops
Interesting article, but you've got those annoying question marks again. Might I suggest The Demoroniser.
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Open mind, insert foot.
Actually, I got bored and looked at this through IE. The smart quotes show up as question marks there, too. E-Sabbath
I, too, find the ? marks irritating. Jon, cut it out! If you must use MS tools to create your documents, at least you could clean them up before posting them on Slashdot. Otherwise, I'll be forced to change my vote on the next "dump Katz" vote. ;)
Geeky modern art T-shirts
Celebration was doomed from the start. Large corps still don't realise that useful, community-centred things can't be planned top down by people who think they know best. They grow from the grassroots, messily and often haphazardly, but with the intense involvement of people with a stake in its outcome. It's why the Net grew and why Communism failed. I think I'll buy the book and see if this theme comes out...
- Read fiction at www.espressostories.com
For those interested in the whole affair, look up the paper's title in Altavista. Here's some of Sokal's commentary on the spoof.
Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
As for Tallahassee, where I live, you'd hate to live there, but it's a generic town, undergoing a bit of urban sprawl, and it's not all that expensive. You can always get a doublewide, you know.
You're really being far too gracious to Tallahassee. It's the armpit of Florida, both socially and geographically.
-Andrew
While I'm not a huge fan of national (or multinational) corporations in general, Disney has had the rather unusual experience of being bashed for decades because they are Disney. There's very few corporations that have reached the status of cultural icon, and Disney is perhaps unique among that handful--their primary "product" is stories and experiences for children. Generations of Americans have grown up on Disney.
Because of that, it seems people have unrealistic expectations for everything they do--too high and too low, depending on how the viewer regards them. This is how a movie like Pocahontas can be fiercely attacked for being "insufferably politically correct" and "stereotyping Native Americans" at the same time. Never mind that Dances with Wolves was starkly black-and-white in its presentation of "Indians good, White people bad" in a way which Pocahontas avoided--Kevin Costner can do what Disney can't. (At least until "Waterworld," but we digress.) As for being an unrealistic portrayal of Indians, as Mel Gibson put it, "it has a talking tree in it, for God's sake."
With Celebration, I think people have had similar sets of unrealistic expectations. If the town had been set up by another major company with comparable resources--AT&T, say--it probably wouldn't have been subject to the same firestorm of criticism, and on the flip side, it probably wouldn't have attracted people expecting it to be nearly utopian. Pocahontas is just a movie, and Celebration is just a planned development.
Personally, I wouldn't mind living in Celebration's apartments. Sure, you'd probably have to buy some things from stores along U.S. 192, a couple miles away. So what? Unless you're working in its modest office park (or in retail), you're commuting to work anyway. And I like the idea of living near a pretty central park area within walking distance of a grocery shop, bakery, bookstore, coffee shop, movie theatre and four restaurants.
It's not Utopia, and it's not something that couldn't be duplicated elsewhere, and maybe duplicated better. But despite that, and despite the inevitable problems with a community like it (it's not the first "New Urban" town but it may be the first on its scale, and certainly the first with the level of media attention it gets), Celebration does work, and if it inspires other places to try similar development, I think it'll only be for the better.
>>It's the armpit of Florida, both socially and
>>geographically.
Any town that considers a (pre)school like half-ass U to be a university....
Hell, I've thought for quite a while that Florida should cede everything north of Gainesville to georgia and alabama and be done with the panhandlers.
OTOH, the panhandle probably DOES provide a buffer zone that keeps the georgians and alabamans from penetrating too deep into civilized Florida.
I live in Orlando, and it has the POTENTIAL to grow into a decent, large city, ala San Fran or Boston. The only problem, is that while other large cities in the US, Orlando's growth has been explosive only within the last few decades. Orlando, therefore, has yet to build the mass-transit infrastructure as New York or Boston have, or the telecommunication infrastructure San Francisco can brag about.
Before Disney came to Orlando, it was just another dumpwater redneck town like any other (excepting Orlando and Gainesville) inland Florida town. If for nothing else, we should be thankful for Disney's civilizing influence.
Imagine all the people...
Y'know, I was about to read my first Katz piece in awhile when I realized he still can't manage to post text without having a question mark appear instead of an apostrophe. I just can't stand it.
The revolution will NOT be televised.
They are exactly like Micro$loth.
I dunno; at first I thought the same thing, but then I realized that I'm at work on an NT box...
Go figure.
Matt
At first, the idea seems cool. But remember this: For some reason, people have chosen overwhelmingly to live in suburbs, not in cities. Why? I don't know the full story, but I can give you a few useful guesses.
First, people want to feel they have some land to call their own.
Second, people want to feel safe, and that means living with people similar to themselves. For an idea of the strength of this desire, I refer you to Claritas, the "You are where you live" market research folks.
Third, people like their cars and don't want to take public transportation because of its tremendous inflexibility.
The first move in producing the New Urbanism is to block off sprawl by making development illegal outside of a certain ring. Then, they change zoning to allow for more development within the ring. The result is more apartments and fewer single family homes; exactly what people hate. The secondary result is that land becomes much more expensive inside the ring. As the population increases, more and more people find themselves priced out of single family homes, and even apartments become dear. The final result is far more traffic, and therefore much more traffic congestion - exactly what the New Urbanism claims to want to avoid. Actually, to them, this is an excellent result because it forces you to shop at local stores instead of driving to the supermarket, and to use public transport instead of driving your car. An interesting reference for this is Randal O'Toole's article in Reason magazine.
If that's what you want, this is fine. But I don't think it's what the bulk of the public wants. At present, I believe the public doesn't fully understand the implications of the New Urbanism, and it certainly has been well promoted.
Of course Celebration and Seaside are both "from the ground up" developments, and should be able to overcome the problems associated with taking a whole city and switching it into a new mode. Before thinking they are realistic prototype communities, take a look at home prices there. Ouch. Both communities have average home prices in excess of $ 400,000. This is a lot for South Florida; I was there a couple of years ago, and you could get a nice waterfront home (on the intercoastal, not the ocean front) for $ 279,000, and a typical boring suburban home sold for $ 150k. I'm sure these communities will make plenty of money for the developers, but I'm not convinced that they are sound investments, nor that they are any kind of prototype that will help us solve our nagging housing affordability problem. In fact, we have seen that the New Urbanism is going to make housing more expensive overall; there's no way to avoid that and still capture the supposed benefits.
This is not to say that our current world is perfect, or that we shouldn't continue to try and improve it. But this kind of top-down vision strikes me as dangerous. The works of Christopher Alexander are an interesting ancestor of the New Urbanism which adds the inherent desire for flexibility and freedom to the mix. I think his own top-down ideas are just about as impossible as the New Urbanism, but I really like his bottom-up, incrementalist thinking. By all means check out 'A Pattern Language' and 'The Timeless Way of Building'.
D
PS Discouragingly enough, Disney has used lousy contractors before, and with similarly dismal results. They had a joint venture with a contractor to develop and sell some land. Customers, relying on the solid gold character of the Disney name, flocked to the venture. The contractor couldn't build homes fast enough, and wound up cutting corners. So when Hurricane Andrew came, the homes self-destructed. Oops. (This information is from Carl Hiiassen's book 'Team Rodent').
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the main trouble with making these sort of "ideal" communities is that they try to impose the ideals from the outside->in. this never works. -- "In the social movement of the present day there is a great deal of talk about social organization but very little about social and unsocial human beings. Little regard is paid to that 'social question' which arises when one considers that the arrangements of society take their social or antisocial stamp from the people who work in them... "The experiments now being made to solve the social question afford such unsatisfactory results because many people have not yet become able to see what the true gist of the problem is. They see it arise in economic regions, and look to economic institutions to provide the answer. They think they will find the solution in economic transformations. They fail to recognize that these transformations can only come about through forces released from within human nature itself.. 'The well-being of a community of people working together will be the greater, the less the individual claims for himself the proceeds of his work, i.e. the more of these proceeds he makes over to his fellow-workers, the more his own needs are satisfied, not out of his own work but out of the work done by others'. Every arrangement in a community that is contrary to this law will inevitably engender somewhere after a while distress and want. It is a fundamental law, which holds good for all social life with the same absoluteness and necessity as any law of nature within a particular field of natural causation. It must not be supposed, however, that it is suff~cient to acknowledge this law as one for general moral conduct, or to try to interpret it into the sentiment that everyone should work in the service of his fellow men. No, this law only lives in reality as it should when a community of people succeeds in creating arrangements such that no one can ever claim the fruits of his own labour for himself, but that these go wholely to the benefit of the community. And he must himself be supported in return by the labours of his fellow men. The important point is, therefore, that working for one's fellow men and obtaining so much income must be kept apart, as two separate things. Self-styled 'practical people' will of course have nothing but a smile for such 'outrageous idealism'. And yet this law is more practical than any that was ever devised or enacted by the 'practicians'. Anyone who really examines practical life will find that every community that exists or has ever existed anywhere has two sorts of arrangements, of which the one is in accordance with this law and the other contrary to it. It is bound to be so everywhere, whether men will it or not. Every community would indeed fall to pieces at once, if the work of the individual did not pass over into the totality. But human egoism has from of old run counter to this law, and sought to extract as much as possible for the individual out of his own work. And what has come about from of old in this way due to egoism has alone brought want, poverty and distress in its wake. This simply means that the part of human arrangements brought about by 'practicians' who calculated on the basis of either their own egotism or that of others must always prove impractical. Now naturally it is not simply a matter of recognizing a law of this kind, but the real practical part begins with the question: How is one to translate this law into actual fact? Obviously this law says nothing less than this: man's welfare is the greater, in proportion as egoism is less. So for its translation into reality one must have people who can find their way out of egoism. In practice, however, this is quite impossiblc if the individual's share of weal and woe is measured according to his labour. He who labours for himself *must* gradually fall a victim to egoism. Only one who labours solely for the rest can gradually grow to be a worker without egoism. But there is one thing needed to begin with. If any man works for another, he must find in this other man the reason for his work; and if anyone is to work for the community, he must perceive and feel the value, the nature and importance, of this community. He can only do this when the community is something quite differcnt from a more or less indefinite summation of individual men. It must be informed by an actual spirit, in which each single one has his part. It must be such that each one says: 'It is as it should be, and I *will* that it be so'. The community must have a spiritual mission, and each individual must have the will to contribute towards the fulfilling of this mission. All the vague abstract ideals of which people usually talk cannot present such a mission. If there be nothing but these, then one individual here or one group there will be working without any clear overview of what use there is in their work, except it being to the advantage of their families, or of those particular interests to which they happen to be attached. In every single member, down to the most solitary, this spirit of the community must be alive... The recognition of these principles means, it is true, the loss of many an illusion for various people whose ambition it is to be popular benefactors. It makes working for the welfare of society a really difficult matter-one of which the results, too, may in certain circumstances comprise only quite tiny part-results. Most of what is given out today by whole parties as panaceas for social life loses its value, and is seen to be a mere bubble and hollow phrase, lacking in due knowledge of human life. No parliament, no democracy, no popular agitation can have any meaning for a person who looks at all deeper, if they violate the law stated above; whereas everything of this kind may work for good if it works on the lines of this law. It is a mischievous delusion to believe that particular persons sent up to some parliament as delegates from the people can do anything for the good of mankind, unless their activity is in conformity with the fundamental social law. Where 'supply and demand' are the determining factors, there the egoistic type of value is the only one that can come into reckon ing. The 'market' relationship must be superseded by associations regulating the exchange and production of goods by an intelligent observation of human needs. Such associations can replace mere supply and demand by contracts and negotiations between groups of producers and consumers, and between different groups of producers... Work done in confidence of the return achievements of others constitutes the giving of *credit* in social life. As there was once a transition from barter to the money system, so there has recently been a progressive transformation to a basis of credit. Life makes it necessary today for one man to work with means entrusted to him by another, or by a community, having confidence in his power to achieve a result. But under the capitalistic method the credit system involves a complete loss of the real and satisfying human relationship of a man to the conditions of his life and work. Credit is given when there is prospect of an increase of capital that seems to justify it; and work is always done subject to the view that the confidence or credit received will have to appear justified in the capitalistic sense. And what is the result? Human beings are subjected to the power of dealings in capital which take place in a sphere of finance remote from life. And the moment they become fully conscious of this fact, they feel it to be unworthy of their humanity... A healthy system of giving credit presupposes a social structure which enables economic values to be estimated by their relation to the satisfaction of men's bodily and spiritual needs. Men's economic dealings will take their form from this. Production will be considered from the point of view of needs, no longer by an abstract scale of capital and wages. Economic life in a threefold society is built up by the cooperation of *associations* arising out of the needs of producers and the interests of consumers. In their mutual dealings, impulses from the spiritual sphere and sphere of rights will play a decisive part. These associations will not be bound to a purely capitalistic standpoint, for one association will be in direct mutual dealings with another, and thus the one-sided interests of one branch of production will be regulated and balanced by those of the other. The responsibility for the giving and taking of credit will thus devolve to the associations. This will not impair the scope and activity of individuals with special faculties; on the contrary, only this method will give individual faculties full scope: the individual is responsible to his association for achieving the best possible results. The association is responsible to other associations for using these individual achievements to good purpose. The individual's desire for gain will no longer be imposing production on the life of the community; production will be regulated by the needs of the community... All kinds of dealings are possible between the new associations and old forms of business--there is no question of the old having to be destroyed and replaced by the new. The new simply takes its place and will have to justify itself and prove its inherent power, while the old will dwindle away... The essential thing is that the threefold idea will stimulate a real social intelligence in the men and women of the community. The individual will in a very definite sense be contributing to the achievements of the whole community... The individual faculties of men, working in harmony with the human relationships founded in the sphere of rights, and with the production, circulation and consumption that are regulated by the economic associations, will result in the greatest possible efficiency. Increase of capital, and a proper adjustment of work and return for work, will appear as a final consequence... References: http://home.earthlink.net/~johnrpenner/Steiner-Soc ial.html
The Pullman district south of Chicago was a corporate community designed and built "the first planned industrial town in America" in 1880.
u llman_strike.html
The company, company housing, company stores, company schools and company churches, etc. were the only resources allowed in the town. During the 1880's, repeated wage cuts and rents and prices in the town that kept steady or rose, led to a strike in 1894.
http://www.chipublib.org/004chicago/disasters/p
I don't know what's going on here, but for some reason I can't put links in my comments any more, even when I make them "HTML Formatted". Could some kind soul let me know how to do it?
h tml
Anyway, here's Randal O'Toole's article I wanted to reference:
http://www.reason.com/9901/fe.ro.densethinkers.
You can visit Claritas, home of "You are where you live" at:
http://www.claritas.com/
or look up your zip code at
http://yawyl.claritas.com/
D
----
Does this sort of community remind anyone else
of "Shockwave Rider" or is it just me?
Anything so far removed from reality that actually needs to create something so artificial as Disneyville practicaly defines a civilisation that is doomed. Good luck USA, you'll need it.
An informative article that brought something interesting to light which was previously completely off my radar. That's what I come here for.
Still ready to flame the man at a moments notice, tho', if he throws out any more of that opportunistic butt-licking shite I've seen before!
: )
**>>BELCH
Those nasty non-standard characters ??? are bad enough in articles from other sources, but there is no good excuse for these things in original articles in /. Hire a editor or find some volunteers; that shouldn't be hard. Or pass everything through a simple filter that changes all non-standard characters to "'" so Netscape won't convert them to "?". (That makes me think: could I implement this locally? Does Netscape have an X resource for that or could I make some kind of filter? Hmmmm.)
The article is well conceived and well executed. However, the sentence,
"And perhaps most significantly, where the power of technology would be carefully harassed for the common good. "
Should probobly have read,
"And perhaps most significantly, where the power of technology would be carefully harnassed for the common good. "
** Black holes are where God divided by zero **
That said, Celebration et al aren't exactly fixing the problem. In fact, they're contributing to it.
I'm one of those urban-by-choice folks who feels incredibly strongly about the issue, but the problem I have with both the standard suburbs and "planned communities" like Celebration is they are carefully orchestrated to keep so-called "undesirables" out.
Now, if someone's breaking the law or creating a huge nuisance, I don't want to live with that either, and I'm going to call in the local law enforcement to deal with the issue. But speaking from personal experience, I've had very little in the way of problems since I moved to the city I now live in, in a supposedly "bad" neighborhood. I had much more trouble in the suburb I grew up in and in the college towns I went to school in.
The USA has a long history of thinking that moving someplace else will solve all your problems. Hell, it's how this country was founded.
The more intelligent response seems to me to be, wherever you live, to get to know your neighbors, set up some kind of Neighborhood Watch program, and realize that not everyone on your street is going to be the same color or religion or anything else as you. And just learn to deal with it! *sigh*
"Somebody exploded a letter-bomb today
Katz, sometimes your articles are good and interesting. Sometimes they really suck. However, they ALWAYS bore me to death because they are so long and wordy. Please please please try and be more to the point!
...is to get away from minorities. Face it kiddies. It ain't pretty, but your parents are racist.
I posted an article about "Celebration" to Slashdot two months ago, written by another writer.. It never aired.
Where Katz got the idea to write about it doesn't concern me. The idea that people think its a "good idea" to let a company control what theyre able to buy, hear, or listen to is what really scares me. Makes me wonder how many years before Disneyland succeeds from the Union and declares itself an independant country. Theyre halfway there -- They already have their own police force and judicial system.
Bowie J. Poag
Bowie J. Poag
Who wants to live in a town where the police are dressed as donald duck. And your bins emptied by plutos and everybody is SO F*CKING CUTE AND CUDDLY!!?!!? I mean disney wouldn't pass that up for advertising would they? Bloody subversives they are. F*ck you Walt Disney, you fascist. I hate disney btw heh heh. Tex Avery was a god. Brad (Cartoons are meant to be mad and loony, not sloppy , slack and sentimental bollox.)
It isn't only racial minorities that people were trying to move away from, it was also religious minorities. For a while, being Jewish or even Catholic in a WASP neighborhood was every bit as "bad" as being black.
And even more than that, flight to the suburbs is an attempt to get away from that which is "different" from you, in whatever way you find that "difference" disturbing. Maybe you've got no problem living next door to black people, but gay couples freak you out. Etc. *shrug*
Celebration and such may fix the dependence on cars and similar environmental factors, but otherwise it's just adding to the problem. Then again, this country was founded on people who thought moving away from neighbors they didn't like would fix everything.
"Somebody exploded a letter-bomb today
The Valley in general is a big advertisment for too much growth and too little planning, but the real problem is much deeper. I never met a group of people who were more disconnected from their living environment than when I lived down in the South Bay. The transient population (i.e. people with no roots in the Bay and no real interest in staying there) was through the roof. With everyone focused on their job, their car, and their own 1/8 acre of grass, it's not a big suprise that the neighborhood is generally in disarray.
There's something that can be said for a community of like-minded people getting together and leaving management to a like-minded group of managers, but a really cool place to live has to be one that you get involved in. If a developer is putting up a building or mall you don't like, go to the DCLU meeting and tell them what needs to be changed! Attend those community meetings. If you're too busy to be bothered, you probably deserve what you get.
Jeremy
My little suburb has quite a few minority families, yet I and other whites still continue to live there. How do you explain that?
Of all the comments I've ever posted, this is definately one of them
I agree that not everyone wants to live in the city. The problem that the New Urbanists are tackling is that not everyone wants to live in the suburbs either, but current zoning laws make it difficult to avoid them.
Regarding the fact that the prices of Celebration homes are higher than in the surrounding areas: This strikes me as a sign of how spot-on the New Urbanism is. After all, if the idea of living this way didn't appeal to these people, they wouldn't be paying more for the priviledge, right? The appeal of living this way is also apparent in the rapidly rising housing prices in New York, San Francisco, Seattle, etc...if a large number of people with money didn't like city living, they wouldn't be paying a premium to live there.
You speak of New Urbanism as a "top-down" approach to planning, but neglect to note that the rush to suburbia was also a "top-down" decision. In the late '40s, with a huge influx of returning war veterans and fears of a return to the depression, the need to bulk up demand for goods was quite apparent. Thus, the zoning laws were created that made mixed-use residential impossible to make. Thus was created the notion of single-use areas; residential here, commercial there, industrial over there, with people driving like crazy between them. This was a new thing then (as was the notion of everyone having a little slice of green, instead of sharing it), and it was very much dictated from above.
The past 50 years have shown us how vastly inefficient this way of thinking is, and that inefficiency is manifested in longer commute times, loss of suburban air quality, and severely strained water/electirical/sewage systems, not to mention social effects. I think the New Urbanism, or some variant of that, is a welcome change from the current state of affairs.
On a personal note, i grew up in the affluent suburbs of San Francisco (Orinda, just over the Berkeley Hills), and i couldn't wait to get out, for many of these reasons. When you can't drive (like when you're a kid), suburbs are basically home-based prisons. Just this weekend i celebrated living 10 years in San Francisco, a city i love to my core, "My Cool, Grey City of Love" (George Sterling)
mahlen
All progress is based upon a universal innate desire on the part of every organism to live beyond its income.
--Samuel Butler
On NPR's Morning Edition this past Friday they had a story about a planned community developed by a company which previously focused on building retirement comunities. You can listen to the story here or get to the main page here.
is woefully out of date, obsolete and in desperate need of an 'upgrade' in both vision and hardware.
Chuck
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
They also issue their own currency ("Disney Dollars"), and maintain strict border control (you can't get in without a Disney-issued pass or ticket).
If they were smart they'd open casinos and sell duty-free tobacco and cigarettes.
BTW, If you want detailed explainations of the M$ character set situation, find some links to same under "Character sets" at Character sets section of Gary's Encyclopedia
In brief, M$ has gotten their character set made an international standard, but no page-authoring software or page authors I've seen yet bother to use the M$ standard name in the page header. Even if they did, Netscape probably has not equiped its browsers to deal with it.
Mr. Katz proclaimed, among other things... "...And perhaps most significantly, where the power of technology would be carefully harassed for the common good..." Holy Cow... Jon, I support a bunch of computing end-users here who would certainly agree that harassing technology for the common good would indeed be a Great Thing. Of course, some users' would define 'harassing' technology as doing an impact-resistance test with a sledgehammer, but that's a whole 'nother story. Oh, BTW, Green River College has some great courses in basic English and college writing. ;-)
Jon,
As long as you use the fucking ?smart quotes?, a good fraction of the comments will be about what a standards-violating IDIOT you are, not about the article?s contents.
You?re an idiot.
Rob?s an idiot for not running the demoronizer on your so-called HTML.
I?m a bigger idiot for spamming the comments without reading the article.
But if you do something annoying -- like write an article on a wiffleball bat and tap someone on the head with it -- expect the reader to react to the style not the content.
Did I say you?re an idiot?
Don
-- Real free software sites don't use GIFs.
but you can't force someone to use it.
People still picked suburbia out of their own free will.
I don't know anything about the redlining, though. What was the banks' reason for it?
D
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Thanks for the additional links. They help to flesh out this article for those of us who are interested.
This book should be on everyones standard readng list.
Decades before Gobbson, Sterling, And the other "cyberpunks" there was John Brunner with a clearer vision in the 60's of things than most folks living in the 90's have.
Stand On Zanzibar, ShockWaveRider, The Sheep Also Look UP.....Rather than plod thru another marketing spin piece by Jon Spencer Katz go read some real stuff.
Poor little clams! Snap! Snap! Snap! Poor little clams! Snap! Snap! Snap! Poor little clams! Snap! Snap! Snap!
To cpt kangarooski ... I must say I never thought I'd come to defending Tallahassee on Slashdot. It just never occurred to me that the two would coincide. :) Tallahassee does have culture, and while geographically it might be the armpit of Florida, otherwise it's pretty decent (and getting better in some respects). So thanks for sticking up for the place, although it certainly has it's faults. But a lack of culture (however ass-backwards it may be :) is not one of them...
... or was it Tampa/St. Pete? If the latter, okay, I'll take offense and go on with life. :) Orlando, though ... I lived for a few years in Tallahassee, and now live in Houston, TX. And hey, if you ever want a preview of what Orlando will be like if no one down there figures it out quickly enough, come to Houston. It's this huge city with a disproportionately small personality ... it really is Orlando on a massive scale. Not that I dislike Orlando -- I even like Houston. They just lack personality ... which is something you really can't say about the panhandle. Like it or not, the place definitely has a distinctive presence.
... but the concentration of good technical companies and good technical people is quite low in Florida, considering that it's right behind New York, California, and Texas in population.
I find it ironic that the heaviest criticism of Tallahassee and the panhandle (which can be very different things or one and the same, depending on how you look at it/them) came from someone out of Orlando
In my book, even ass-backwards culture outranks no culture at all -- for me, Tallahassee was pretty okay. In fact, I'd say Tallahassee, Jacksonville, and Tampa/St. Pete are some of the best places to live in Florida (but not necessarily in that order), although for the net-savvy crowd that Slashdot is (mostly), the overall level of technical sophistication in Florida is a bit on the low side. Obviously, there are exceptions to this
To cpt kangarooski ... I must say I never thought I'd come to defending Tallahassee on Slashdot. It just never occurred to me that the two would coincide. :) Tallahassee does have culture, and while geographically it might be the armpit of Florida, otherwise it's pretty decent (and getting better in some respects). So thanks for sticking up for the place, although it certainly has its faults. But a lack of culture (however ass-backwards it may be :) is not one of them...
... or was it Tampa/St. Pete? If the latter, okay, I'll take offense and go on with life. :) Orlando, though ... I lived for a few years in Tallahassee, and now live in Houston, TX. And hey, if you ever want a preview of what Orlando will be like if no one down there figures it out quickly enough, come to Houston. It's this huge city with a disproportionately small personality ... it really is Orlando on a massive scale. Not that I dislike Orlando -- I even like Houston. They just lack personality ... which is something you really can't say about the panhandle. Like it or not, the place definitely has a distinctive presence.
... but the concentration of good technical companies and good technical people is quite low in Florida, considering that it's right behind New York, California, and Texas in population.
I find it ironic that the heaviest criticism of Tallahassee and the panhandle (which can be very different things or one and the same, depending on how you look at it/them) came from someone out of Orlando
In my book, even ass-backwards culture outranks no culture at all -- for me, Tallahassee was pretty okay. In fact, I'd say Tallahassee, Jacksonville, and Tampa/St. Pete are some of the best places to live in Florida (but not necessarily in that order), although for the net-savvy crowd that Slashdot is (mostly), the overall level of technical sophistication in Florida is a bit on the low side. Obviously, there are exceptions to this
I always get this feeling, when I see on TV, or in some way come across a planned community. This eerie sense, icy cold, slimy, of something amiss strange and sinister. Fake, and nothing but a facade.
Examples in cinema and television being the apartments and luxurious paradise offered in The Devil's Advocate. The factory-oriented town in the Simpsons run by a evil world-dominating mougul. The covenant bound neigborhood in the X-files with creatures in your lawn.
Utopia is a very frightening thing. For, with peace, and serenity, comes loss of control, and bondage. Independance and utopia are two different things that never go together.
A somewhat appalling example of this would be Aldous Huxley's "A brave new world". The complete brain-washing, and caste system, the organization, segmentation, and structurization of a chaotic entity are what make it seem so off.
A city or a town is a thing that cannot be created. It has to evolve, it is a mixture of old, new, dirty, clean, rich, poor, colorful, bland, ugly, pretty. It is an eclectic mixture of everything that urban and human life has come to represent.
With streets criscrossing in haphazard manners, and strange people. Collages of colorful billboards, and signs, franchises, chains, and stores. Capitolisim breathing.
I suppose perhaps that's what strikes the wrong note in most people when it comes to planned communites. The subconcious equation of control over citizens with socialisim or similar forms of government.
I've lived in communities that are segmented, structured, laid down by hand, and controlled by a governing body. They're called military bases. They are cold, silent, un-giving, and gray repetitive landscapes of industry, unity, and control.
In stark contrast is the human element, vibrant, breathing, families, picnics. Picnics on a barren airstrip near a seawall, with jets screaming in off the inland sea onto the airstrip. A mother and two daughters working their gardens at the foot of a massive fuel farm. Garden plots supplied by the base of course.
I'd rather live, where freedom can be seen every day. Where the people across the street build their flower-bed into what appears to be a fortress. Where a guy paints his house in vibrant victorian candy hues of pink and blue. Where you don't see 2.3 children, two minivans in every garage, and soccer practice with shake & bakes for dinner.
Suburbia was the late 80's and early 90's vision of peace, unity, serentiy, and freedoms. Suburbia, has evoloved into another utopia. Governed by silent icy cold covenants, where dogs bark in the twilight hours, echoing across meticulously groomed lawns, and gray sided houses.
Unity, planned community, utopia, and things like celebration freak me out. I hope I captured that feeling I can't quite place my finger on in this writing.
I disagree and hold myself in contempt, what blashphemy!
If you think that Social Text is alone in this, you obviously haven't lived much. Hell, Slashdot is prone to publishing and agreeing with anything that appears to support certain preordained conclusions, as any (KDE, FreeBSD, Red Hat, Windows, BeOS) user can tell you....
I don't think so. Try unjustified fear.
And yes, some of it is based in racism. Like my mother asking me if there were any white people in my neighborhood. Um, the only marauding gang of young men, black in this case, that I've encountered were the ones who pushed my car out of a snowdrift during the godawful blizzard we had in March.
Some of it is just based in irrational fear of "the city." There is no reason for my boyfriend's mother to believe there is a high likelihood of someone in a large group of people getting mugged in a city park on a Saturday afternoon, but well, it's "the city." And that kind of BS really pisses me off.
People scare too easily, what can I say?
"Somebody exploded a letter-bomb today
I think that I read that the Zippy comic strip creator grew up in the Disney or some other planned community. Show what happens with all that conformity on the poor souls who can't take it. The whole Disney community stinks of the Facist Utopia where you trade in your freedom for safety just to find your freedom gone and your not safe.
I'm a Singaporean studying in the US. Maybe I can add some perspective here.
We don't have much of historical, cultural, or geographical value. If you were to market Singapore to tourists, how would you do it?
You can blame the shopping zombification of Singapore on the Tourism Promotion Board, which markets Singapore as a comfortable place for tourists, but with a touch of the exotic orient. As a result, authentically historical places like Chinatown are 'refurbished' -- shophouses along the waterfront are demolished and converted to 'antique shops' and 'art galleries'. And the thing is, it works: blame this on the comfort seeking tourists, and the new loving young.
But this isn't any worse than what goes on in the US. The strip malls and gigantic blacktop car parks for every k-mart in suburban US make me sick. The giant, obese Americans gorged on junk food. The skyscrapers and shopping malls in Manhattan. It's just as bad, if not worse, except the limited space in Singapore makes escape difficult.
Singapore is by no means a Disneyland or Utopia. It has far too many mundane problems, and not just the insidous ones associated with Utopianism.
And that, my friend, is a lesson the editors of Social Text should have learned in school.
Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
The economy, at any time, reflects the "votes" of consumers. Governments (at least in this case), reflect the votes of voters. These are generally the same people/entities. So, while it is true that government introduces "noise" into the pure free-market prices and distorts them, it is also true (imo), that those government policies are generally more-or-lees what the body-politic want as well.
In other words, those very subsidies that encouraged suburbia were put in place not only so that certain persons or groups could make lots of money, but also because a lot of people wanted them. Certain other people figured out to give that to them, hence greatly profiting themselves financially, politically, or both. For better or worse, that's how it works in the U.S.
Put up or shut up. Name even one so-called "post-modern" writer with whose work you have a serious philosophical disagreement, and explain that disagreement. Or did you come to your conclusion - that "Social Text" is nothing but a fabric of nonsense - which you state as strongly as though you personally know what you're talking about, by nothing better than reading reviews of reviews? Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
Yeah, this is true, if you think that GM, Ford, and Chrysler are 'consumers' and 'the body politic' (why do you think the interstate highway system was built?). In any event, this is pretty much irrelevant to the original comment, which compared attempts at New Urbanism to the big, arrogant hand of the elite, while the postwar rise of the suburbs was supposed to be the will of the people. By your thinking, if the powers-that-be decide to implement New Urbanism ideas, then that must be the will of the people, too.
I think you're sort of right, and what I'm saying is it doesn't matter. Both postwar and current urban planning (or lack thereof) are heavily influenced by government. It doesn't help to romanticize one as 'natural' and denigrate the other as a manmade abomination, no matter which you think is which.
The place isn't as bad as it seems. There are several communities around that have the same visual guidelines: MetroWest, Dr Phillips, Heathrow (one of those farther north areas), Lake Mary, and even Deltona and Deland areas. The only major difference at Celebration is that at Celebration you can not park your cars on every streetside, you can not construct play areas in your frontyard, and you can not paint your house a non skeemed color (not that bad since they paint your house for free, or relative if you consider the property value difference). Of course no where around here in any walled community can you work on an automobile in your driveway. These are things that are the norm for central Florida. As for the school the number one thing that I hear (from the wife that is a teacher in the next county) is that either teachers do not like teaching on that schools format (I must note that this school is run by Orange Cnty- Disney just funds the technology), or parents are not used to the interactive homework model which they must participate in with their child via the house computer.
I dunno what's with you idiots; at least Katz can spell, and knows when "it's" does and doesn't have an apostrophe.
More than that, he's an intriguing writer, and always covers interesting topics. God knows he can write a movie review more coherently than Taco; most of the "writing" here wouldn't pass bar in a freshman English class. None of you -- particularly the posters -- can write worth a shit. Don't try and kid yourself into thinking otherwise.
You want to criticize someone because "it's fun?" Criticize your own stupid ass. Better yet, wait until you get past 11th grade before you try to learn how to critique.
I, for one, welcome our new Antichrist overlord.
oh honestly, what kind of reason is that? 'he is contributing something, unlike most of the critics'???
according to that logic, if rob posted some flaming piece of garbage on slashdot and people hated it you'd *still* defend the flaming piece of garbage simply because 'it's a contribution.'
saying 'katz sucks' is fine. dammit, a news site needs to know what the people want. how else would rob know if people want to hear more of katz's essays unless people *comment* on katz's essays? should he have a poll "Does Katz suck? Yes/No/Robsucks"?
oh... and for the record i also think katz articles are not worth reading. mostly because:
-he's always trying to make a big important issue out of something that's not (then again, this is why i don't like most journalists)
-he's not a linux user, and he's writing on a linux oriented web-site (that in itself isn't so bad, but katz seems to steer around anything too technical, even if his audience would appreciate it)
-those stupid apostrophe's that turn into question marks in netscape. did he write that in frontpage or something? doesn't that alienate his mostly-anti-ms audience? doesn't he realize this?
i keep reading katz articles hoping someday he'll write something i'll genuinely enjoy reading.
New Urbanism doesn't require massive multifamily housing blocks; that's the goal of Modernism, by and large, and indeed, most people consider Brasilía (sp?) a failure. New Urbanism is mostly against building for the convenience of automobiles, and can easily handle detached single family dwellings if zoning and transit don't require everyone to drive everywhere.
Curitaba, for instance, is said to be quite pleasant, having decided to defend its pedestrian boulevards and make their bus system fast and easy to use. I haven't been there; I have been to central and medium-suburb Paris, mostly townhouses and four -or-six story apartment buildings, and found it really remarkably livable, even the un-swank neighborhoods that aren't incredibly expensive. I could even imagine living in the outskirts of Tokyo, where the dwellings are tiny by US standards but I found the layout full of safe, interesting public spaces. It can be done.