Product Details
Celebration, U.S.A.: Living in Disney's Brave New Town

Celebration, U.S.A.: Living in Disney's Brave New Town
By Douglas Frantz, Catherine Collins

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Product Description

What is it like to start a new community-not a suburb or a subdivision, but a town, intended to be a self-supporting community that combines the best of the new technological innovations and the most cherished nostalgic elements of American towns? In 1997, six months after the first residents relocated to Celebration, Florida--Disney's "model" town--Doug Frantz and Cathy Collins and their two children moved in to participate in and report on this new venture. Their account, which The Richmond Style Weekly called a "fascinating and evenhanded" report from the trenches, follows the ups and downs of the two years the family lived this experiment firsthand; the new afterword details their surprisingly difficult transition back to a "normal life" in Westport, Connecticut. Their experience tells us as much about ourselves and our hopes and dreams as it does about the daily reality of building a community from the ground up.

Product Details

  • Amazon Sales Rank: #922796 in Books
  • Published on: 2000-09-01
  • Original language: English
  • Dimensions: 1.13" h x 5.53" w x 8.29" l, .83 pounds
  • Binding: Paperback
  • 368 pages

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly
Celebration, Fla., is the much-ballyhooed Disney effort to build a walkable hybrid suburb near its Orlando theme park to serve as a showcase for the most cutting-edge ideas about urban planning. In 1997, journalists Frantz and Collins (Teachers: Talking Out of School) moved to Celebration with their two younger children to write an account of one year in the early life of the town. They participated fully in the community and found their neighbors willing to talk, discovering the ups and downs of Disney's well-calibrated logistics, from the pedestrian-friendly town plan to the housing standards and innovative K-12 school. Among the complications were the bewildering array of pedagogical strategies adopted by the school, which drove families away; the homogenous town population, which was almost entirely white and middle class; and the proliferation of rules (residents are forbidden, for example, to park recreational vehicles on the street and to complain about the mosquitoes). But the authors avoid excoriating Disney and its developers, emphasizing that the town still offered a promising model for a "better" kind of American community: they found it "a lovely place physically," whose design did indeed foster a neighborliness lacking in most of suburban America. Readers may wish that the authors had investigated their Disneyphile neighbors more closelyAe.g., only at the book's end is it revealed that almost none of their houses have bookshelves. Nonetheless, this even-handed and thorough account of one family's experience in helping to build a new community from the ground up taps provocatively into a pioneering spirit in American life. (Sept.) FYI: In October, Ballantine will publish The Celebration Chronicles: Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Property Values by the cultural critic Andrew Ross, who also spent a year living in Celebration.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
In 1997, New York Times staffer Frantz and wife Collins did a brave thing: they moved into Celebration, FL, created by Disney to serve as a model town of the future by drawing on the best of the past. Something for both Disney fans and bashers.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

USA Today
"[An] eminently readable account."