Twenty years after the Walt Disney Company broke ground on a master-planned community of Celebration, Florida, Kelsey Campbell-Dollaghan describes the town as “a paradigm for how contemporary Americans view utopian projects – with a huge amount of suspicion”:
Celebration, below its twee veneer and even below its shoddy craftsmanship, is a pretty sustainable idea. It has lessons for us to learn about how to quell the worst of the sprawl eating away at our country. And it is, by most accounts, a pretty good place to live: Public spaces, walkable streets, downscaled housing, and good schools, all within a compact downtown. Even its critics have to admit that it’s better than swampy, sprawling hellscape that lies just outside of it, dripping with strip malls and sweaty drive-thrus.
So why don’t we think of it as a success? For one thing, the mere whiff of utopia sets our teeth on edge these days. After a century of high-profile failures – from Fordlandia to Helicon Home Colony – most of us can’t shake the idea that behind those neocolonial shutters lurks something sinister, whether as simple as tax evasion or as truly nightmarish as a violent cult. In other words, Celebration is not only a victim of its own marketing, but a victim of a public that perceives planned communities as deeply creepy – which is how Celebration is described again and again.
Maybe the problem with Celebration isn’t its flaws, but the weariness with which the American public perceives the simple idea of utopia these days. After centuries of struggling to engineer a perfect society, utopia’s greatest enemy might turn out to be as simple as a creeping suspicion.
(Photo of downtown Celebration by Bobak Ha’Eri)
The Dish 
