Michael Lassell

I love the idea of Celebration, and I was glad to peek inside the entire history, the architectural plans, and the activities of the residents. I didn't enjoy the author's sycophantic tone throughout, and I wish it had been more informative (how about an aerial map of the whole town?).

I think it's crazy that a corporation could create an entire town, but Disney did its research and followed all of those important New Urbanist precepts wonderfully. The town did strike me as fake occasionally, but remember what Kurt Anderson wrote in the New Yorker:

"Celebration’s “fakery”— its small scale, its density, its hidden garages, its pre-mall commercial core—is in the service of a coherent vision, as opposed to the accumulation of developers’ cost-efficient shortcuts and aesthetic bad habits that produce the random, sprawling, ghastly “real” suburbs of the late twentieth century."

Exactly. It's a step in the right direction, and how great that it has succeeded so far.… (more)