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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.
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?
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
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."
Was that the guy who wrote the giberish article that got published in a scientific magazine or something? I vaguely remember.
Of all the comments I've ever posted, this is definately one of them
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.
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!}
Agreed. I was there when I lived in Jakarta (it seems most westerners live in Jakarta only because it's half way between Singapore and Bali), and while Jakarta has its (very distinct) hellish aspects (try breathing) at least it is a living hell, not the dead, faceless, mall-on-every-block, shopping-zombie hell of Singapore...
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!}
When you type a ' or a " into Microsoft Word, the "Smart Quotes" feature kicks in that converts them into supposedly better looking characters. The idea is to get an effect like this ``The Associated Press used to use two single quotes, like this'' instead of the uglier "This is the pathetic old way".
As long as you view the file on a Windows(tm) system, all looks fine. But if you happen to be using Unix(tm) or Linux(tm), it doesn't understand the funny character code and renders it as "?".
I must agree that Jon really should fix this one. Speaking of which, anyone know what happened to his attempts to embrace Linux?
D
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Interesting article, but you've got those annoying question marks again. Might I suggest The Demoroniser.
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Open mind, insert foot.
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
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
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
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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
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
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
Don't be silly. Florida doesn't have a culture at all. My part of the state, the panhandle, has been a backward, rural area practically forever, and we likes it like that. We wouldn't know culture if it bit us on the ass. When Tallahassee was trying to find a motto for a tourist campaign, my favorite suggestion was "Tallahassee: Exits 28, 29, 30 and 31"
When I tell people I'm from Florida, they immediately ask about Orlando or Miami. I've begun to tell people I'm from South Georgia, since it's far more accurate.
However, everything south of Gainesville is still new, and is only habitable due to the miracles of Air Conditioning, Malaria Control and the US Army Corps of Engineers. (Although that last one is turning out to be a major fsck up) The penninsula has not had the TIME to develop any kind of culture with which it can show up the panhandle.
Miami (which effectively includes everything up into West Palm) had a very small culture for a while, and then it promptly died. What's left is a huge urban sprawl that is *very* similar to Los Angeles. I don't think that anyone who's really dealt with Miami much likes it. I can't stand the place.
Tampa/St. Pete are okay, but not amazing. The Cape area, on the opposite side of the penninsula is even deader. St. Augustine (which is very old) and Daytona are about as far south as I'd like to go on the Atlantic coast.
Orlando however, is just awful. Boston and San Francisco have hundreds of years behind them. They have histories, and until this century people from all classes actually lived there and raised families there, and their kids grew up and usually stayed. Orlando would be nothing more than orange groves and probably landfills if Uncle Walt hadn't shown up. While they've brought the wealth and population increase associated with civilization, all that you've got to show for it is a jillion tourists and a town that's more or less faceless because who's going to develop anything nice in Orlando anyway? No one'll care, and no one'll ever be interested in seeing it. The only public works project that's important to Orlando is, I'd guess, the airport. It's the only damn visible thing to the hordes of people that come through the place.
Boston, NYC, SF, etc. became neat cities for the sakes of the people who lived there. It was just incidental that it attracted other people. Their wealth was acquired through various industries and persuits that didn't depend on tourism. Tourists can be appeased with a Potemkin village because they don't have time to dig deep. And that'll never be satisfying for real.
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
First, I would certainly agree that current zoning laws should be changed - they are way too rigid.
I don't see a great suburban conspiracy here. I don't see government, zoning authorities and so on trying to rope people in and imprison them in suburban homes. I see several factors that made suburbia popular:
- Virtually everyone would like to own their own home.
- Most people would like a little outdoor space to call their own.
- City life was crowded, nasty, brutish and short. Because people had to be crammed tightly together, disease spread more easily than it did now.
- With people of different social classes living close at hand, crime became a significant problem.
These factors were all mentioned in a book that vigourously advocated the New Urbanist vision. Zoning laws came about because the residents of these places wanted to protect them from becoming like the city.
Now, I understand your dislike for suburbs - as you point out, they are virtual jails for people without cars. But I think that the suburbs cannot be successfully reformed until the reasons for their success are understood. I'd like to see planners take a more balanced view, considering what's good about suburbia as well as reacting to what they find distasteful.
What the high prices in New Urbanist communities indicate are that many of the elites of our country like them. Certainly in the case of Celebration, the Mouse's cachet helped as well. This does not mean the ideas would work on a citywide scale, where people with $ 10,000 incomes have to be accomodated as well as those with $100,000 incomes. People with the high incomes feel authentic fear of those with low incomes. If you visit a low-income slum (as I have), you'll see that there are reasons for this prejudice.
Incidentally, my own personal taste is for the Hollywood Hills or Malibu, neither of which are traditional suburbs. They are also as expensive to live in as Celebration. If not more so.
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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?
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Since there are so many forces involved, I don't think I'd accuse my parents of racism because they bought a snazzy suburban house. There were better public schools, a massive front and back yard, and oodles of space. Those are all major advantages having nothing to do with racism.
At any rate, I think the real reason to move to the suburbs was to get away from the perceived dangers of the inner city. Imagine if there were no blacks, but there were white gangs who were running around making life hazardous. Would people not move out under those circumstances as well?
Now, I will admit there was some racism in that suburbs tried to prevent blacks from moving in. This was due to fear. If there had been white gang members terrorizing the cities, I am convinced that the same thing would have happened. Suburbanites would have tried to pass laws preventing gang members from moving in.
I would call that "justified fear" as much as racism.
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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
Tallahassee and the panhandle definately have a certain presence. They've been around long enough to have acquired a personality, and it's not a half bad one. I had thought that I was pointing this out in my earlier post, but perhaps it did not come through as clearly as I had intended. But the personality of the area is not quite the same as culture, which I was interpreting as something more along the lines of 'high culture.'
However, Tally broke some round number in the 1990 census. This has caused a whole bunch of chain stores to move into town. They're really turning the place into the same generic Anytown USA hellhole that I'd like to avoid.
Personally, I'll always rate north Florida above south Florida. The only good places south of Gainesville would be Tampa/St. Pete and the Keys. Key West has been suffering in recent years, but since hardly anyone outside of the state is aware that they're a whole chain of islands, the others are still pretty cool, or were the last time I was there. Kinda wish that they hadn't put in the highway - now you have to go to the Dry Tortugas to get away from it all.
Orlando and the West Palm/Miami sprawl though.... man, I wouldn't mind melting some icecaps to get rid of them. Just blocks and blocks and blocks of strip malls and identical, poorly built houses. Huge surface roads and even bigger highways. It's a nightmare, IMHO. What gall an Orlando poster has to criticize anyone on culture!
I think that a couple of the reasons that Florida is having so much trouble attracting tech companies are these: First, the tourist market overshadows everything else, with the possible exception of farming. (which we are consistently losing to California, because they tend to have slightly better weather)
Second, there is a crappy school system. UF is good, and FSU and UM probably come in second, but everything else is awful. And there are no private universities to speak of, partially because everything's still very new, and partially because we have a lot of AARP members that fsck up our taxes, etc. because they have no interest in it: they're retirees from out of state.
You can't deny that the Valley would have been as successful if not for the good technical schools out there. In Boston we've got Harvard (for managers) and MIT (for geeks) and a zillion other schools, coming out of the woodwork. This situation is not likely to change anytime soon, so a lot of technical people from Florida tend to leave. Lord knows I never thought I'd live in Massachusetts, of all places! (But I'm moving, so instead of living with a bunch of Yankees in MA, I'll be living with a bunch of tree-huggers in WA ;)
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.