Starting Over
Dear Russ,
I'm glad you mentioned the Send Key Syndrome. Writing
these "reviews," in quick succession without the benefit of endless editing and
rewriting, which is how I normally work (yes, Virginia, those "readable" books
are the result of great effort), has brought home to me one quality of this
sort of communication--it is really more like a street-corner conversation than
anything else. Certainly not a debate, let alone an essay--or a considered book
review for that matter. In fact, it is more like gossiping than anything else.
So, perhaps
Slate
should rename this section Book Chat, or Book Rap, or something like that.
Getting back to Celebration. I agree entirely that
communities are cemented by adversity, although I don't think that absolves
Disney from a royal screw-up with respect to the school. I can't think what
they imagined when they marketed an "old-fashioned town" and then put in place
an experimental school that would be considered radical even in communities
such as Berkeley and Cambridge. Incidentally, Ross offers the interesting
insight that it was Eisner himself, who is a supporter of nontraditional
education, who had a lot to do with the revolutionary curriculum.
Still, the question you ask is exactly right: How can a
corporation that markets escapism make a real place? The answer, I suspect, is
"with great difficulty." Which is the reason there will not be other Disney
towns. Nor should there be, in my view. That is why the fears expressed by Ross
and to a lesser extent by Frantz and Collins about corporate urbanism are
misplaced. There won't be any towns built by mega-corporations like AT&T,
Microsoft, or Pepsico. Of course, all master-planned communities are built by
corporations, but they are relatively small organizations that specialize in
"creating community." I'm thinking of the companies that build places like
Irvine, Cal., or Vail, or Sun Cities. And they are much more skillful at their
business than Disney proved to be in Celebration.
Which is why, despite the excellent town planning and
generally high quality of the architecture, I don't think Celebration is a
model. I've talked to many people in the real estate industry, and the
consensus is that a) no one but Disney could have built Celebration, and b)
even Disney can't be making money. No doubt we do need to find new urban models
for the millions of new houses that will be built over the next decades. In
that regard, Celebration offers lessons, rather than a prototype.
Or perhaps Celebration is really another manifestation
of a (uniquely?) American phenomenon: the visionary community. Referring to the
Castro district in San Francisco, Sun City, Florida, and a guru-inspired
commune in Oregon, Frances Fitzgerald wrote that their inhabitants were all
inspired by "the extraordinary notion that they could start all over again from
scratch." In many ways, that is the theme of the two books we have been
chatting about: people trying to start over.
Regards,
Witold
