The Celebration Chronicles

by Andrew Ross, Ph. D.

  For those residents who had been lured, in part, by assurances of a brave new wired world, the high-tech operation that greeted them and serviced their needs in the first two years was one of the bigger disappointments in town. The existing, buggy network, providing community updates and an activities calendar, Internet access, and limited bulletin board space for personal ads, was a thin shadow of what had been imagined. The online infrastructure was also dominated by a one-way flow of information from the company. You could send personal e-mail, access the World Wide Web, find out what movies were showing downtown, when the next PTSA meeting was scheduled, and generally stay abreast of upcoming events. But it was technically impossible to post publicly to the community at large, while the more interactive components of the network—operational access to the school and to physicians at the health center—were nowhere in sight. As for TV, Jones Communication, the local cable franchise, offered a community channel, where tapes of official meetings or forums were often broadcast, but, again, there was no provision for public access channels where residents could air their own content.

  Over half of the pioneer residents already owned a personal computer, but most had not used it for Internet access, and so the advanced technology and access provided gratis to pioneer families as part of an AT&T survey were a great bounty for these “newbies.” In general, they were happy to be guided through the portals of cyberspace. To insulate their future shock, the home page of the community cyber network was called The Front Porch and was designed graphically to comfort rather than disorient the senses. But for residents already familiar with computer tool basics, the oversold image of a town on the cutting edge of technology was a bit of a joke. These included residents who volunteered to maintain some aspect of the network. Scott Biehler, who had worked part time on the AT&T survey and who updated the Calendar of Events on the community network, was of no two minds about the hollow promises: “This is not a wired community at all,” he pointed out, “it’s not even a high tech town.” Bill LeBlanc, who had previously worked in the University of Miami’s computing center, observed that residents like himself had “taken a step backwards in moving here,” and that “we’ve been hoodwinked technologically.” Scott Fought, founder of a California computer company, who also helped out with the network, described the technology as “basically 1980s quality ISP.” I had to count myself among the crestfallen, having expected a high-speed T1 connection in my apartment. I had also read about the open speech environments of other wired communities, like the Blacksburg Electronic Village in Virginia or the Infozone in Telluride, Colorado, and had hoped to see evidence of that “virtual republic” of free speech that Internet advocates have long touted as the new medium’s contribution to the future of democracy.

  Celebrationites were all too aware, and more than a little embarrassed, that the town and its school were being ballyhooed around the nation as twenty-first-century cyberpioneers at a time when both of their high-tech services were pretty basic and when “vaporware” (cyberproducts that do not yet exist) was the norm. Only part of the problem appeared to lie in the chronic mismanagement of the network. Willing and proficient residents like Biehler, LeBlanc, and Fought were discouraged from taking an active, technical role in improving or innovating the system. Nor had the facility been used in any way for active community discussion through an open list-serve, distributing messages and postings to all the network subscribers. Naturally, it was not in the developer’s interest to encourage public discussion of this sort. Neither the company nor community managers were eager to see the proverbial “handful of discontented residents” air their views in an online forum. In July, in the first real instance of civic networking independent from Town Hall, an action group of “concerned parents” began to post their discussions about the school on one of the network’s bulletin boards. In response to their call for a public meeting, 150 parents showed up in the school cafeteria. Biehler, who first posted the parents’ notices, reported that he had to re-post them several times. The postings kept disappearing, according to network managers, because of a “bug” in the system.

  Shortly thereafter, management of the network was transferred to a start-up company owned by a resident, Ken Liles. Liles promised to galvanize the interactive features of the network, including the virtual community forum it lacked from the outset. He was already thinking about the potential impact this might have on community life. “Would this displace the need,” he wondered, “for a physical community center” of the sort that was already high on the residents’ wish list for new amenities? “Which of the two would residents be willing to pay for?” Would they settle for the electronic Town Hall meetings conducted by community managers or would they hold out for face-to-face meetings? Celebration—the first town to be built where everyone was hooked into the same server—might have been a good place to answer that kind of question. But not yet. In its fledgling years, at least, the electronic grapevine had been silent while the ears of the physical town—its streets and block parties—had been burning with rumor and circumstance.

  When I last visited the town in January 1999, the network’s Web site had been redesigned. The interactive component that Liles proposed was there, but it was not going to rock anyone’s world. “Gatekeepers” from several residents’ groups and organizations were now permitted to post their own information about group activities, at least after the content had been approved by the network manager. More interesting to me was a feature of the old Web site that had been dropped. The network no longer carried a virtual archive of previous pages. The town’s history, as it had been documented on this depository, had been erased. The new management would not return my calls, but there was lots of talk about trouble at the cyber-mill. A week later, the company backed out of the contract, fired all its employees, and closed its doors.

  Commercially curious about technology use, AT&T, one of TCC’s corporate “strategic alliances,” had decided early that the semi-controlled environment of the town would be ideal for market researching their communications products. The company hired a team of economists, psychologists, computer scientists, statisticians, anthropologists, and marketing professionals to undertake a behavioral study of the use of advanced technology among the first three hundred families. This expensive study was terminated after a year, with little to show for its efforts other than some flat-footed data analysis. “Strong evidence,” the study report claimed, “shows that fax machine activity is positively correlated with long distance outbound voice calling.” Apparently, residents using fax machines for the first time were sending recipes, greeting cards, and pictures, and then calling up the far-distant recipients to discuss the faxes. “This would suggest a bundling strategy,” the report concluded. “AT&T could partner with a fax machine manufacturer and give machines to AT&T customers to incent Long Distance usage.” The report also noted that “some teens are chatting [online] and using the phone simultaneously—Are they a potential target for Internet telephony?”

  Celebration had been planned to host a fiber-optic delivery system for dispatching interactive multimedia to buildings on a fiber-to-curb network. The system would have a huge bandwidth capable of furnishing the myriad services—switched digital video, telephony, cable TV, and high-speed data transfer—associated with the much-hyped information superhighway. By 1996, when residents were due to move in, the immediate future of digital delivery had turned uncertain. Fiber optics were no longer being touted as the definitive industry standard. The company backed off and decided simply to future-proof the town, laying a network in the ground and installing multiplex outlets and empty conduits in houses to cover any eventuality. Amy Westwood, TCC’s director of network development, explained the new timidity in terms quite removed from Disney’s gung-ho trademark bluster around technological innovations: “Our approach has always been to take smart, small baby steps, and not take these huge leading edge–type of leaps, only to find out that potentially there’s no value to the hom
eowner.” As for “determining the future,” she explained that responsibility would lie with Honeywell, AT&T, Jones Communication, and Vista United, TCC’s alliance partners, or “coopetitors,” as she put it, among the “stakeholders in technology.”

  The uncertainty surrounding these technologies was not simply the result of local teething problems. It reflects a general climate of doubt about how to create new markets at a time when corporate America sees high technology as the only vehicle for embodying and carrying forward traditional ideas about the shiny new future. R&D and short-range planning is a dog’s breakfast of disarray and overcompetition, with scant attention to people’s real needs. On the highway to the future, the signposts and road surfaces seem to change every year. The Disney company had been a veteran traveler along this road. But while the heady promise of cutting-edge technology has always been a staple billboard feature of the Disney profile (bolstered by the think-outside-the-box reputation of the Imagineers), the company’s internal policy is mostly governed by the principle of “no field innovation.” Disney has been more intent on advocacy, or “telling a story about technology,” as EPCOT does, than on transforming any technical field itself.

  The most notable exceptions have been aimed at worker and crowd control and at waste disposal. Disney’s audio-animatronic puppets, as Walt pointed out in a 1964 interview, “don’t have to stop for coffee breaks and all that kind of stuff.” “One advantage of mechanical animation,” he elaborated elsewhere, “is that machines don’t demand higher wages.”7 So, too, the Wedway people-mover and other means of transport are basically assembly lines for processing the movements of visitors to the parks. Walt Disney World’s awesome underground garbage disposal system is as efficient at sucking away trash (at speeds of up to 60 mph) as the sales environment of the park is at sucking money out of visitors’ wallets. Otherwise, the company, for the most part, has limited itself to offering a showcase environment for other corporations’ products. In common with the other alliance partners in Celebration, technology specialists like AT&T and GE are primarily there to showcase their names and products—a marketing opportunity for which they pay millions of dollars—but they are not encouraged to innovate, either on their own or by working together, in response to community needs.

  With so many technology-forward residents and companies in town, it is unfortunate there is so much resistance, on the developer’s part, to allowing the town to become a living laboratory for interactive technology. As a highly placed operative in one of the technology alliances put it: “What we have is a snazzy display, designed to impress the casual visitor. Disney is building a library, with lots of plush cherry oak paneling, and all the right names are on the book binding, but if you take a book off the shelf, there’s nothing inside it.” Around town, even the most seasoned resident, on occasion, could still feel like part of the display shelf. As one of my neighbors put it to me, with more than a touch of X-Files brio, “I sometimes feel like we’re like being harvested for outer space.” But nothing so daring was afoot. Bold technological innovations that build on, or answer, people’s needs and desires are seldom the product of large corporations. Indeed, corporations are more likely to patent such inventions and let them gather dust so as not to threaten the steady sales of their existing technologies. The future is a risky business, and is usually invented by people with nothing to lose.

  4

  MAIN STREET IS BETTER THAN ALRIGHT

  “Americans work awfully hard to get such a raw deal. It’s really not a good deal that’s being dealt to these people. They’re so hard working—husbands, wives, sons—and for what? Crap food, second-rate shopping experiences, a second-rate public realm, and an automatic commitment to purchase of an automobile. That car costs six thousand dollars a year to run on average. You can go to Bali for your holidays for that, for God’s sake. And it’s not a choice, it’s part of a contract. As an American, part of my contract is owning one car per adult. I think it’s a raw deal.” —Andres Duany, interview with author

  In media stories about Celebration, pioneer residents were occasionally typecast as nostalgia hounds, fleeing from the complexities of modern life to a picture-perfect past that never was. Sometimes, the stories took this impulse in the spirit of the latest retro mood, as indicative of a national, or generational, trend to revive the days of yore. At other times, they assumed that residents were sincerely escapist. Naturally, Celebrationites resented this kind of profile, regardless of its tone. While mostly cooperative with the press, they often took offense at three-minute stories that required reporters to offer some pat overview of their reasons for moving to town. On several occasions, I watched as a journalist or news crew interviewed a resident in front of her home or down by the lakeside. “Do people here feel that they are returning to a simpler way of life?” “Are you happy to have stepped back in time?” It was difficult not to empathize with the folks on the receiving end of such questions. When I winced, it was with the full knowledge that the resident under interrogation was unable to do so at that precise moment. The laborious task of correcting a stereotype would begin. “Well, it’s not quite like that …” Clichéd questioning from the press was a cross to bear in this town. Many Celebrationites had become well practiced in giving interviews, and some had perfected the art of soundbiting, even lifting quotes from some previous media story and recirculating them. Teens, especially, were already blasé about having TV crews following them around.

  Almost everyone was weary, if not intolerant, of the routine media banter about Mickey Mouse as mayor of the town, but the stories about the bygone days were especially galling. Celebrationites were right to feel this way, since few, if any, appeared to have moved there with the expectation that the town would be like a time machine, conjuring up a vanished world of affable tradesmen, welcoming mom-and-pop stores, and eccentric local characters like the batty widow in the crumbling mansion on the hill. Besides, the sales brochures had promised too many contemporary things to lock into illusions of yesteryear: ultraprogressive schooling, state-of-the-art medical technology, and enough high-tech razzamatazz to bring on a mild, epistemological headache.

  A good number of the pioneers had been highly successful in their careers. They had not achieved their stations in life through the pursuit of escapist fantasies, and they proved as competitive within the affairs of the town as they had been in the business or professional world. Some had grown up in small towns, and wanted the same for their children. Many more had known only life in subdivisions, and saw the new town as a true alternative to the cheerless isolation of suburbia. Only a few were in classic “white flight” from cities like Miami or from suburbs where the racial composition had “tipped.” Several, senior in years, acknowledged that the old-time decor brought out the child in them, although many of the retirees genuinely wanted to be around younger folk and children. Most nester parents admitted, in retrospect, that the school had been the main attraction. As Jackson Mumey, one of the first residents on the pioneer row of Teal Avenue, liked to put it, “we came for the school, and they threw in the house.” There were also Celebrationities who privately confessed to me that a house in this town was an investment opportunity they could not pass up.

  To be sure, I also met residents for whom the environment was a catalyst for their pet fantasies. John Pfeiffer, an ex-doctor, moved here from the Midwest to pursue his ambition (now realized) of becoming a monorail driver in the Magic Kingdom. John Sarantakis, an exbusinessman, raised in a cold-water flat in Lowell, Massachusetts, had settled on Celebration after searching high and low for many years for a Shangri-La village he had once seen in a 1940s movie. Maureen Rubel, lately from Connecticut, and sales manager of a medical technology company, was attracted by the frontier romance of subsistence rural living eked out by the modest crackers depicted in the Florida novels of Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings.

  Whatever their story, or fantasy, they had entered the field of vision of influential people in the media, education,
and design professions who would judge them guilty by association with the contrived traditionalism of the town’s antique facades. Almost fifty years before, the first wave of war vets who moved their families to places like Levittown were subjected to the scorn of elite urban critics, for whom cookiecutter suburbia symbolized a soulless haven for the conformist masses. When that same class of critics trained their contempt on neotraditional places like Celebration, sniffing out inauthenticity behind every picket fence, the target was more upmarket, but the charge of bogus living no less patronizing.

  For some time now, it has been considered a feat of publicly minded heroism to save and restore old buildings. By contrast, constructing old buildings from scratch is considered a morally corrupt act of forgery. One enterprise is true and noble, the other is false and vulgar. According to this double standard, gentrifying urbanites are serving an admirable cause by restoring Federal townhouses, while well-heeled suburbanites who move into brand new neotraditionalist communities are fodder for the heritage machine that merchandizes a counterfeit past.1 This is no small irony in a country whose most cherished public buildings are often ardent copies of ancient European originals (New York’s lost Penn Station, cause célèbre of preservationists, was, after all, a copy of the Baths of Caracalla in Rome).

  The good life, on Veranda Place. (Photo: the author)

  To get beyond these moral judgments of taste, it may be important to grasp that the antique porches of a place like Celebration can symbolize things other than a sentimental craving for days gone by or a sorry lack of imagination about the future. They can be a conservative marker of status for their owners, and they can also be a radical criticism of the whole way of life that is associated with the present-day suburban landscape. The key to understanding this paradox lies in the great shifts in architectural thought and practice that separate ur-EPCOT’s city of tomorrow from Celebration’s community of yore. Three broad-based movements had helped to shape the neotraditionalism of this new town: historical preservationism, postmodernism, and New Urbanism.