Witold Rybcynski, the writer and scholar of architecture, really likes Celebration, the Disney-built planned town in Florida that raked in controversy for its venture into privatized civic life.
Rybcynski visit and admires the comforting, human-scale houses, streets and sidewalks…
and the thoughtfully laid out parks
and considers it the honest heir to classic garden suburb development in the early 1900s.
The worry about Disney’s Celebration wasn’t about the buildings and streets (which seem genuinely humane), but about the civic structure — Disney’s attempt to build resort-level quality control over the road, school, and social hall fabric of life.
My question about Celebration, a decade later, is how and whether it is evolving from a housing development into a town.