| John |
Jan 15th, 2001 04:46 PM |
Em, I think you deserve a little more on the topic of Celebration. It's a fascinating place, in a sort of ominous way. <BR>The town is a planned community (adjacent to Kissimmee) which purports (or at least purported) to represent current thinking in design and community development. As I understand it (we spent only a few hours there before it creeped us out, too) the Celebration corporation itself (or private developers going by the script) developed the town, according to strict design and what I guess you'd call social engineering standards, which initially, I believe, also included running the schools and health care systems, all overseen by various university types from several colleges, including some Ivy leage ones, watching and noting... Top-named architects, like Pei or Graves, designed elements in the town, and all the neighborhoods were crafted to look like traditional "American" environments, be it Smallville or Beacon Hill. But underneath the faux antiquity were fiber optic cables and T-1 connections to your kitchen and school board meetings on closed circuit TV, etc., all aimed at creating an "ideal community," 21st century-style. The Disney company was the mover behind the Celebration town/corporation, and our personal (not-far-off-the-mark?) assessment of the marketing idea was, "You've visited Main Street at Disney World...now live there!" <BR>I understand things have not gone entirely to script regarding the social success of the town (damn pesky humans) but I gather that there is still demand for the product. It's weird, though, driving down the road past the picket fence lining the town drive toward the State highway, ending at the crossroads where strip-mall Florida begins again, without benefit of the spiffy systems engineering or immaculate vacuumed-looking streets. <BR>The marketing material we picked up had lots of pictures of smiling children with balloons and rolling hoops, but none of the faces were of color. Like I said, creepy.
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