Disney's Celebration: An Element of the Culture Industry

My Father is obsessed with buying and selling real estate and one of his favorite places to go to look at houses is Celebration. We have gone there as a family a good number of times, enough for me to comment on personal experiences as well as my own research.


Celebration is a small town that was developed to merge the best aspects of American suburbanism with European modernism. The town is laid out in a grid pattern, with a main street (called Market Street) that encompasses the commercial district. Celebration was a centrally planned town and for this reason is held to Disney’s high standards. There is virtually no litter, housing contracts are not negotiated, crime is negligible, and the image of perfection is conveyed on every square inch of the town.


Once again, Disney is trying to achieve utopia, but instead of a theme park designed for entertainment this is a real place where real people live. In one author wondered “whether Celebration's developers had learned from the past or just gone back to some glorified version of it. Was Celebration selling nostalgia or peddling amnesia?” In Disney’s quest for perfection, they may have ignored progressivism and instead tried to recreate a place where people never have to deal with issues or face pressing problems. Many critics contend that Celebration is a continuation of the Disney Delusion:

“A trip to Disney World represents the perfect vacation—clean, controlled, filled with predictable magic and regulated fantasy. To critics, and there are plenty, Disney's theme parks, combined with its movies and animated films, are illustrations of the defilement of American culture. The parks are, as writer James Howard Kunstler described them in his book The Geography of Nowhere, capitals of unreality dedicated to temporary escape from modern life”

           
 Perhaps the greatest criticism of Celebration is its rejection of creativity and individualism. Builders must adhere to strict codes and residents are usually not allowed to make personal touches on the outside of homes. In an effort to achieve utopia, Disney has embraced totalitarianism and rebuffed democracy. One goal of Celebration is to promote community (this is why yards are small to encourage residents to walk to parks) but this community is forced instead of organically created. Although Celebration might try to recreate small town America, the demographics are not nearly diverse enough to establish Celebration as a microcosm of America. The town is made up of mostly white, upper or middle class families that do not represent the country as a whole. For this fact alone, residents are robbed of the experience of living in a “real” community setting where all different cultures are put into a melting pot and a new culture comes out.

            
Of course, Disney probably had no intention of creating a realistic expression of the American town. Instead, Disney tried to take the best elements of American culture and put them in a town where everything can be controlled and regulated. This is, in essence, part of the Disney way of doing business. Celebration is really just a festering wound covered in makeup. In an effort to put their own dash of the culture industry on this town, Disney has succeed in bringing their own view of the American Dream to thousands of visitors each year. 


sources: http://ezinearticles.com/?New-Urbanism---A-Critique-of-Disneys-Celebration---Social-Elitism,-Developers-Practicality-Profit&id=851222

http://www.nytimes.com/books/first/f/frantz-celebration.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celebration,_Florida