The postwar formula for mass suburbanization emerged from the pressure of a powerful coalition of real estate, finance, and transportation interests. It also included the oil, asphalt, and rubber industries, tire manufacturers and dealers, motor-bus operators, parts suppliers, road builders, state highway administrators, service-station owners, and many other groups that pursued their common interests as the American Road Builders Association in 1943. Everyone remembers President Eisenhower calling attention to the evils of the “military-industrial complex” and its powerful lobby. Few know that Harry Truman characterized the housing industry lobby as the most dangerous in America.10 After the war, the vested interests of these groups meshed with the federal need to create jobs and provide affordable shelter for over 16 million returning vets. When the FHA guaranteed bankers’ loans to builders, and the VA offered low-interest mortgages as part of the GI Bill of Rights, vets could virtually borrow the entire value of a home without a down payment. Government subsidization of suburbia grew by leaps and bounds, whether in direct aid to white home buyers or in the financing of roads and infrastructure.
Social engineering was a crucial, and immoral, part of the formula. In the name of “neighborhood security,” the FHA adopted the Home Owners Loan Corporation’s codes governing racial zoning, especially its secret ratings categories for valuing neighborhoods and blocks according to racial homogeneity. The FHA’s infamous Underwriters Manual recommended restrictive covenants that prohibited mixed-race developments and set in motion the practice of redlining neighborhoods and ZIP codes as off-limits to loans from banks and coverage from insurance companies. Discrimination in lending and selling continued well into the 1970s, long after it had been declared illegal. In one final twist, land and housing prices exploded at the very moment that minorities were allowed into the housing market, in the mid-1970s.11 In the period of the New Deal coalition, between the mid-1930s and the mid-1970s, when the “good” federal government earned itself high moral credentials, official housing policy had been outrightly segregationist. Eighty-two years after racial zoning was banned, fifty-one years after discrimination in government lending was banned, thirty-one years after the Fair Housing Act outlawed all discrimination in housing, and after numerous related legal decisions, we still have a housing landscape that is highly segregated and subject to an essentially unfair distribution of services and life opportunities.
While the legacy of this racial engineering has left large footprints all over the place, the physical planning principles of the suburban formula are still legally enshrined in the zoning and building codes that govern the housing industry. The basic elements include maximum housing densities and minimum lot sizes and setbacks, the separation of commercial and residential space, and street hierarchies governing limited-access highways, arterials, connector roads, minor roads, and cul-de-sacs. Introduced initially as safeguards of public health for affordable housing outside of blighted cities, they rapidly became insurance against market risk and were institutionalized in local and regional planning codes all across the nation. Under these zoning codes and regulations, New Urbanist towns like Celebration are literally illegal in most counties.
With an evangelical zeal that seems to characterize architectural movements as a whole, New Urbanist advocates can often be found venting against the backslidden depravity of almost anything built since the 1940s. In the more extreme versions of this holy war, the modernist slab, the honky-tonk strip, the centerless subdivision, the freeway interchange, and the mass-market mall are all viewed as products of the same evil empire—a philistine bureaucracy that has laid waste to the landscape and sacrificed community life in its haste to serve the peddlers of tract housing and gas-guzzling automobiles. The result can often be highly moralistic. Commenting on a popular restaurant chain, James Kunstler, the most cantankerous of New Urbanism’s enthusiasts, notes: “The Red Barn is an ignoble piece of shit that degrades the community.”12 The author of two wrathful jeremiads about suburban alienation, The Geography of Nowhere and Home From Nowhere, Kunstler’s broadsides are stuffed with contempt for lower-middle-class taste, any kind of popular culture or avant-garde architecture, and most forms of urban behavior that deviate from his crotchety version of orderly civic conduct. But his spitfire grandstanding on the public lecture circuit is an important counterpoint to the careful packaging and politicking of Andres Duany and partner Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, founding figures of the movement, in their efforts to loosen the stranglehold of prefabricated development.
The Congress for New Urbanism, founded in 1993 and representing “a broad-based citizenry, composed of public and private sector leaders, community activists, and multidisciplinary professionals,” includes, among its charter principles, a program for the wholesale reform of urban policy. Many of its members (including Ray Gindroz and the Pittsburgh firm UDA, which produced Celebration’s Pattern Book), have worked on infill projects in several large cities. But, to date, the proving ground of New Urbanism has been in suburbia and not the large metropolitan areas. Duany and others have campaigned tirelessly to reform the bureaucratic suburban formula in the belief “that the suburbs are the precursor of the twenty-first century city.”13 Their mission is moral and corrective—to recover the lost art of small-scale planning (“we don’t have to invent anything, it’s all been done”) that created the compact towns of presuburban America, and to design close-knit communities that are more economically and environmentally sustainable. With the support of sympathetic planners, local authorities, politicians, and citizen enthusiasts, Duany-Plater-Zyberg (DPZ) and other firms have forged a working relationship with developers in the hope of rewriting the planning codes, public policies, and commercial habits that govern the housing industry. Where the will is weak, growth management legislation in states like Florida has thrown developers into the arms of dialogue.
Capitalizing on popular sentiment for the “lost community” of the small American town, New Urbanism adopted neotraditional style as a vehicle for its goal of restoring prewar planning. Mindful of the charges of pandering to the conservative taste for Victorian values, Duany insists that the traditional housing styles are simply a tool to promote the town-planning principles and have no particular significance in and of themselves. They are popular, and not just among well-heeled white folks: “When you really talk and listen to people in the black neighborhoods of Coconut Grove or St. Louis or farm-working Oxnard, you discover that they want ranch houses with little columns in front.”14 Nothing could be more sacrilegious to architects than the suggestion that style is simply an expedient vehicle, or a Trojan horse for smuggling in adversary forces. These “little columns in front” are an affront to architecture’s avant-garde, whom Duany describes as “nostalgic for the future.”
The struggle to prevail requires tactics: “You have to create your own enemy,” Duany says, “you have to simplify your enemy and you have to attack your enemy on your terms.” Fighting within the “belly of the beast” of the marketplace, which cares not for ideas but for profits, it is the commercial success of New Urbanist towns that will “induce the beast to swallow its own poison.”15 Half joking about his own Cuban-American background, Duany comments: “Instead of exhausting ourselves with endless frontal attacks, we capture the radio stations and the revolution is won. No bloodshed, exactly what Fidel Castro did.”16 In Duany’s case, the radio station is the urban code, which regulates the building type and the relationship of buildings to public space. Pioneered at Seaside, the much-lauded resort town on Florida’s panhandle Gulf Coast, this zoning code has evolved into a more complex set of regulations, adopted as some version of a Traditional Neighborhood Ordinance by many local planning authorities. Celebration’s Pattern Book is an elaborate version. In the West Coast wing of the movement, which tends to argue for denser urban pockets linked by light rail, codes for the Transit-Oriented Development have been developed by Peter Calthorpe and others.17 These codes, which are tailored to local conditions, climate
s, and regional variety, are written to wrest control over design from the large engineering firms that issue prepackaged templates for block developers.
Underlying all New Urbanist efforts is the bedrock belief that the design of a physical environment has a fundamental impact upon social behavior. No principle is more steadfastly upheld. This belief is expressed either through vilification of the enemy—“A modern subdivision is an instrument for making people stupid”18—or as a benign statement of purpose—“We wish to improve the world with design, plain good old design.”19 But the belief is still consistent with the old doctrine of “salvation through bricks,” which set the bulldozers in motion in the understanding that top-down planners know best. While DPZ’s charrettes typically involve several days of meeting with local officials, community leaders, architects, interest groups, and citizens, Duany is wary about too much citizen participation:
After being a rigorous practitioner of the public process, I have lost some confidence in it. When given the chance to make decisions, more often than not, citizens will make palpably wrong ones. They are usually against mixed use. They are always against higher density; they love five-acre zoning.… Until confidence is restored by some real successes and planners are allowed to implement the difficult decisions, a mob often decides against its best interests.… The citizens will close the drawbridge, oppose mixed use and economic variety in housing, so we must fight them. I’m not the sort of planner that does what the citizens dictate. We are not secretaries to the mob.… Our democracy is a representative form of government, there are elected officials and planning boards, and we should speak only to them. The citizens themselves are a distorting influence because they are specialists, just like traffic engineers are specialists. Their speciality is their own backyard, and only rarely the community as a whole.20
THEIR OWN BACKYARD
For all of the hoopla about the movement, there have been few opportunities to gauge how residents of New Urbanism do actually live in “their own backyard.” This was one of my reasons for coming to Celebration. Seaside, since it is a resort town mostly of second homes, is not a very good guide. Nor have other developments, like Kentlands, near Gaithersburg, grown sufficiently to deliver substantial results. Celebration already hosts the largest population of any neotraditional site in the country, yet New Urbanists are wary of accepting it as a bona fide member of the club. Initially, many feared the association with the Disney name—a byword for crass commercialism and blatant showmanship—would be damaging to the movement. Sardonic media commentary about “Mickey Mouse towns” would be unceasing. The Disney connection would bring unwanted baggage, charges of charlatanism, and a snicker behind every corner. Others believed that, far from being an embarrassment to the cause, Celebration might be the mainstream breakthrough for New Urbanism, spreading the good word far and wide and persuading businesspeople that such places are a proven investment. As Plater-Zyberg explained: “There was a segment of the development community that felt these ideas were too high-risk. Now Disney has mitigated some of that risk. These ideas are not radical anymore.”21
Much like Disney management, New Urbanists were willing to claim Celebration as one of their own if it performed well, but were careful to keep their distance in case it backfired on them. They were one of the many groups of Celebration-watchers that expected high scores from the town’s residents. I quickly realized that my own presence and likely findings in Celebration would be warily observed for signs of partisanship. Would my book hurt or help the New Urbanist cause? On occasion, when Duany was in town (Celebration serves as a good demonstration site for prospective regional clients) he would look me up, naturally hoping for a positive report, and always willing to recruit a strategic voice.
Officially, its developer does not promote Celebration as a New Urbanist town. TCC employees are quick to point out that the town does not correspond strictly to the New Urban purist’s profile. There are several cul-de-sacs, some curvilinear roads, and many departures from the preferred gridiron street pattern. Because of the wetlands conservation areas, the developable land on the site consists of squirrelly pockets, to be occupied by relatively isolated villages, and the overall housing density is a good deal lower than New Urbanists strive for.22 Nonetheless, Celebration would not have attained its current form without the persuasive example of New Urbanism.
DPZ were invited to submit ideas (“a continuous curved grid”) to Disney for the initial planning discussion in 1987, along with Gwathmey Siegel and Robert Stern Associates. Other firms included Skidmore, Owings and Merrill, and Cooper-Robertson. While the team of Stern and Robertson eventually emerged as the master planners, the New Urbanist modus operandi—borrowing the best ideas from old towns—became the signature mark of the planning process.23 Reprising the legendary DPZ road trip around southern towns that yielded the design ideas behind Seaside, the Disney development team visited the likes of Savannah, Beaufort, Mount Pleasant, Charleston, Forest Hills, Kentlands, Sea Pines, Seaside, Kiawah, Santa Barbara, and Coral Gables, and borrowed from a wide range of towns, from Mount Dora, locally, to East Hampton, New Orleans, and St. Louis, in addition to meeting with large community developers like James Rouse at Columbia and Charles Frazier at Hilton Head.
Until late in the game, however, other visions of the town were still being discussed. Indeed, when the Osceola plans were publicly announced in April 1991, the buzz was all about the blueprint for a 2-million-square-foot upscale shopping mall, to be designed by Helmut Jahn. One of the largest in Florida, it would have generated $10 million in sales taxes for the county. The residential component of town was to be built in four “themed villages,” three of which would be grouped conventionally around their own championship golf course.24 The 1994 development order issued to the company for a Development of Regional Impact approves the building and zoning of 8,065 dwelling units, 810 hotel rooms, 325 time shares, 3 million square feet of office space, over 2 million square feet for retail, and a 1.7-million-square-foot Industrial Workplace attraction for 15,000 daily visitors.
The approved application also made provision for what would become the Disney Institute, with a 5,000-seat performance center.25 One guiding concept for the town had envisaged it as a center of learning, modeled on the Chautauqua Institute, near Jamestown, New York, where Eisner’s wife, Jane, had grown up. Enormously popular in the nineteenth century for spreading arts education to the provinces (especially to women, excluded from most colleges), Chautauqua had become a cherished relic of small-town America, and so its revival, in the form of the Disney Institute, as the core element of a neotraditionalist community seemed appropriate. Indeed, Florida had its own well-preserved Chautauqua town, De Funiak Springs, in Walton County, which had been part of the charrette for Seaside. Over the next year or so, this and other plans were substantially altered. The Institute was moved to Disney World (too large-scale, too much traffic for Celebration, it was decided), the time share and golf-course resort concept was ditched, and plans for the shopping mall went on the back burner. An amended development order, reflecting these changes, also shows a slight decrease in retail, and an increase in office and hotel space.26
In all but the smaller details, the final conception for the town plan corresponds to the New Urbanist blueprint for a neotraditionalist community of permanent residence. What made Celebration so novel, for a New Urbanist community, was its prior establishment of a downtown retail core—a financial indulgence denied all other planned developments and one that eluded large-scale communities like Columbia and Reston for many years. Kentlands struggled with housing sales after its pedestrian mall plans fell through, and other developments like Haile Village Center, near Gainesville, are proceeding with great caution, one store at a time. If Disney could not sustain a downtown core—and the first several years would prove very rocky—then no one could. As Peter Rummell, former TCC chairman, acknowledged, “putting these stores in two miles from route 192 was always the biggest gamble.” Accordin
g to Eisner: “We were probably too aggressive. Our expectations were too Panglossian. It will work out eventually, though maybe not economically. Sometimes if your company is doing well, you can afford to take some risks.”
Eisner was shrewd to recognize that issues other than the bottom line were involved. Renting initially to stores and restaurants that catered primarily to tourist custom, rather than resident needs, inevitably created the perception that the downtown did not “belong” to the residents and was clearly Disney-controlled property. This perception was underscored by the fact that all stores (and the public golf course) were required to offer a discount to Disney employees but not to residents (though several did informally). On my first visit to Celebration in November 1996, when the downtown paint was barely dry, the new merchants were clearly skeptical about the town’s capacity to attract business, and were looking to Disney to funnel customers their way. Over the next two years, the shortage of custom, the high rents, and the long hours demanded by leasing contracts (merchants are fined by Disney if they close before 9 P.M.), took their toll on owners and managers struggling to break even. Two stores had already left town: New Generations, a children’s speciality store offering unrealistically priced toddlers clothing, moved out very early, and M Fashion, owned by a Tampa socialite who had privately acquired a dozen of Princess Diana’s cocktail dresses, stuck it out in a hostile sales environment until the spring of 1998. Neither was missed by townsfolk rooting for retail that would serve their practical needs. Several more merchants were on the verge of pulling out. The absence of Celebration from Disney’s tourist maps of the region, and the company’s withdrawal of its name from the town in the summer of 1997 (it was no longer “Disney’s Town of Celebration”), did not help matters. For Tom and Karen Zirbes, who had moved their business precipitously from Honololu, the predicament was clear enough: “Who would have come here without the Disney name? There’s not a businessman in his right mind who would move to a community with a thousand people in the middle of a swamp.”
The Celebration Chronicles Page 10
