Celebration: Disney's Experiment in Utopian Town-Building

Walt Disney had always wanted to build a city, not just a park. His original vision for the Florida property included an Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow, a real functioning city he called EPCOT, where residents would live and work under a climate-controlled dome. He died in nineteen sixty-six before it could be built. The theme park that carries the name is the company's substitute.

But in nineteen ninety-four, Disney quietly began planning the town of Celebration on land it had held since the secret acquisitions of the nineteen sixties. Designed by a roster of notable architects including Philip Johnson and Aldo Rossi, Celebration opened its first residents in nineteen ninety-six. It was built around New Urbanist principles: narrow streets, front porches, a walkable downtown, houses close together. Disney sold its stake in the town in two thousand four. Celebration is now home to about ten thousand people, though it remains an unincorporated community administered through Osceola County and a community development district rather than its own city government. Whether it achieved anything like the utopia Disney imagined depends on who you ask, but as American planned communities go, it is one of the most architecturally ambitious experiments of the late twentieth century.