Living with the mouse - a report from Celebration, Florida

by Beverley Else

Internationally known cultural critic and theorist, Andrew Ross will deliver the Wendy Michener Lecture at York University on Wednesday, Feb. 24, at 7:30 pm, in Curtis Lecture Hall L.

Ross will talk about the year he spent as a resident of the ultimate planned community: Celebration, the "real-life small town" created by the Walt Disney Corporation in 1996.

In the late summer of 1997, Ross took up residence in Celebration, and for the next year he lived and participated in the activities of the most scrutinized new community on the face of the earth. Named in the hopeful American tradition of towns like Harmony, Eden, Experiment and Amity, this was a place where Disney's deep pockets had left little to chance. Lavishly planned with a downtown centre and newly-minted antique homes, and front-loaded with an ultra-progressive school, hospital and high-tech infrastructure, Celebration would be yet another fresh start in a world gone wrong.

Many of the pioneers who flocked to the new settlement were plainly charmed by the prospect of living, and dying on Disney land. Yet they would spend a good part of their fledgling years here trying to prove to themselves and to the outside world that this was a real place, with "real problems", and not a theme park village, cooked up by the Imagineers.

In this report of his year as a Celebrationite, based on his personal encounters and on several hundred hours of interviews with residents, employees and county locals, Ross will discuss what went right and what went wrong in our consumer society's latest version of the American Dream.

Diverse in background, the Celebration pioneers were united by a desire to escape the cheerless isolation of suburbia and reconnect with their neighbours. They expected much more than they got.

Ross' book on his experiences, The Celebration Chronicles, will be published later this year. In it he recounts their often unruly struggles to build a community in the face of adversity: shoddy construction, typecasting by the media, Disney's skittishness about sour publicity, and friction with the working class county of Osceola.

An active observer of the controversial town school (grades K-12), Ross draws especially valuable conclusions from several super-heated battles of will. At one point, a large contingent of parents staged a rebellion against some of the school policies. They were concerned about the absence of a written curriculum, textbooks and a clear assessment of students' performance in the form of grades. In response, grades were instituted for the upper classes and other changes were made to restrain what may people regarded as a runaway experiment.

How can we entrust the public interest to giant beneficiaries of the marketplace, like Disney? Ross brilliantly places this planned community within the context of the New Urbanist movement to combat suburban sprawl and restore public life to America's increasingly privatized landscape. In the first eye-witness account of life in a New Urbanist town, he assesses the accomplishments and the pitfalls of a movement that preaches better living through sheer urban design. As a result of this provocative study, the lessons of Celebration will be debated for many years to come.

Andrew Ross is a professor of comparative literature and director of the American Studies Program at New York University. He is the author of Real Love: In Pursuit of Cultural Justice (1998), The Chicago Gangster Theory of Life: Nature's Debt to Society (1994) and Strange Weather: Culture, Science and Technology in an Age of Limits (1991); editor of Science Wars (1996); and co-editor of Microphone Fiends: Youth Music and Youth Culture (1994), Technoculture (1991), and the journal Social Text.

The Wendy Michener Symposium was established in the Faculty of Fine Arts at York University in honour of noted Canadian arts critic and journalist Wendy Roland Michener, to mark her contribution towards the promotion of cultural awareness and excellence in journalism and the arts in Canada. The Symposium provides a forum for discussion of issues and developments in the cultural scene, past and present.

These annual lectures are made possible by the Wendy Michener Memorial Fund, instituted at York University in 1986 by the Right Honourable Roland Michener and Mrs. Norah Michener in memory of their daughter.