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[1] OUTSIDE the white fence is all strip malls, motels and resort villages. Come off the six-lane highway at the spaghetti junction where Interstate 4 meets Highway 192, go past the ornamental water tower, and you are in Celebration, a town of the sort that America stopped building in the 1950s. Most of its 4,000 homes are small by suburban standards, jutting up against narrow streets. Children walk to school. The small downtown has no chains, apart from an obligatory Starbucks. Its 10,000-odd residents are mostly white, white-collar and Republican. In some ways it is a vision of America’s past. Yet Celebration is only 20 years old.
fence [fens]
n. 围墙; 栅栏，篱笆; 防护物; 剑术;
vt. 用篱笆围住; 防护; 练习剑术;
vi. 练习击剑; 搪塞; 围以栅栏; 跳过栅栏;
[例句]Villagers say the fence would restrict public access to the hills.
村民们说这个围栏将限制公众进入山区。
strip [strɪp]
vi. 剥光; 表演脱衣舞; 剥除;
vt. 除去，剥去; 剥夺; 删除; 清除，拆除;
n. 长条，条板; 带状地带（或森林、湖面等）; （足球队员的） 运动服;
[例句]The simplest rag-rugs are made with strips of fabric plaited together
最简单的碎布地毯是由碎布条编在一起制成的。
resort [rɪˈzɔ:t]
vi. 求助于或诉诸某事物，采取某手段或方法应急或作为对策;
n. 求助，凭借，诉诸; 热闹场所，娱乐场，度假胜地; 常去; 采用的办法，求助[凭借]的对象;
[例句]His punishing work schedule had made him resort to drugs
异常紧张的工作安排使他开始吸毒。
spaghetti [spəˈgeti]
n. 意大利面条; [电] 漆布绝缘管;
[例句]Nicholas ate a dish of spaghetti.
尼古拉斯吃了一盘意大利面条。
interstate [ˈɪntəsteɪt]
adj. <美>洲际的;
n. 洲际公路;
[例句]We were driving along Interstate 280, toward my home in Woodside.
我们正驾车沿280号州际公路往我在伍德赛德的家行驶。
ornamental [ˌɔ:nəˈmentl]
adj. 装饰的，装饰用的;
n. 观赏植物; 装饰物;
[例句]There was a highly ornamental, dark brown carved bench on a raised platform.
在高起来的讲坛上，放着一张很精细的，雕花的淡褐色案桌。
jutting
v. 伸出; （使） 突出( jut的现在分词 ); （从…） 突出; 高出;
[例句]He had clear blue eyes and a jutting chin.
他有一双清澈的蓝眼睛和凸出的下巴。长难句：
OUTSIDE the white fence is all strip malls, motels and resort villages.
这个句子不长，理解也不难，但是其句式架构比较值得学习，这就是传说中的倒装句。OUTSIDE the white fence介词短语是修饰语，is是谓语动词，主语是后面的all strip malls, motels and resort villages，分析到这里的时候我们不禁就会发现这个句子是存在语法错误的，因为主语是复数形式，所以谓语动词应该使用are。
恢复正常语序All strip malls, motels and resort villages are OUTSIDE the white fence.是不是读起来就很普通，无法彰显出对语言拿捏的那种感觉了？
大意：远远望着，白色的篱笆外，是繁华的购物中心，旅馆，度假村。Come off the six-lane highway at the spaghetti junction where Interstate 4 meets Highway 192, go past the ornamental water tower, and you are in Celebration, a town of the sort that America stopped building in the 1950s.
这个句子有些长，我们分析一下，首先spaghetti junction，是什么，spaghetti是意大利面哦，在这里呢就是指立交桥啦，无比形象。这句话的句子主干是啥，有的同学一看，崩溃了。唯一一个看着像是句子主干就是：you are in Celebration。前面的算啥~首先看，前面是不是有一个and，and之前我们讲过，并列的是平行结构，后面是个句子，那前面一定也是句子。其实呢，前面是两个祈使句，把这句话的架构简化一下呢，就是come off A, go pass B and you are in Celebration。定语从句和同位语都是起修饰以及补充说明的作用。
大意：驾车到洲际4号公路与192号交汇处的立交桥，沿着六车道高速路向前行进，就来到了在20世纪50年代就停止建造的庆典小镇。
[2] The town was developed by Disney as an antidote to the isolation of the suburbs. By the 1970s more Americans lived in suburbs than either in cities or in rural areas. Two decades later there were more cars than drivers in America. By the turn of the century, SUV-driving suburbanites became the majority, outnumbering rural and city folk combined. The wholesale shift to the suburbs, ever-longer commutes and the rise of shopping malls and big-box stores fractured community life, as downtowns emptied and commerce shifted to the edges of highways.
antidote [ˈæntidəʊt]
n. 解药，解毒剂; 矫正方法，对抗手段;
[例句]When he returned, he noticed their sickness and prepared an antidote.
他回来后注意到了他们的病状，于是配制了解毒剂。
[3] Disney offered Celebration as an antidote to all this, selling the development on nostalgia for an old-timey America where, as its adverts read, “neighbours greeted neighbours in the quiet of summer twilight”. It would be built around five cornerstones: in addition to “a sense of place” and “a sense of community”, the small town, which was planned to grow to 20,000 residents, would also offer progressive education, world-class health facilities and cutting-edge technology. Michael Eisner, who ran Disney at the time, believed it would be a “community of tomorrow”.
nostalgia [nɒˈstældʒə]
n. 怀旧; 乡愁; 对往事的怀恋; 怀乡病;
[例句]He might be influenced by nostalgia for his happy youth
也许是对年轻时幸福时光的怀恋影响了他。
House mouse
[4] Disney’s interest in town development started with its founder. In a filmed appearance on October 27th 1966, Walt Disney laid out his vision for the 27,400 acres of land he had secretly acquired in central Florida. It would include a theme park, an industrial park and an airport. At its heart would be an “experimental prototype community of tomorrow”, or EPCOT. This community would have 20,000 residents, a central business district and futuristic public transport. Cars and lorries would be hidden away underground. It was planned as a showcase of modern technology and “the ingenuity and imagination of American free enterprise”. Two months later Disney died of lung cancer. The plan was shelved.
acres ['eɪkəs]
n. 英亩( acre的名词复数 );
[例句]He had nearly a thousand acres of grazing and arable land.
他有将近1,000公顷的草场和耕地。
futuristic [ˌfju:tʃəˈrɪstɪk]
adj. 未来的; 未来主义的; 未来派的;
[例句]The theatre is a futuristic steel and glass structure.
这家剧院是钢筋和玻璃结构的未来派建筑。
lorries ['lɒrɪz]
n. 运货汽车，卡车( lorry的名词复数 );
[例句]Tractors and container lorries have completely obstructed the road.
拖拉机和集装箱货车已经将这条路完全堵死了。
Ingenuity [ˌɪndʒəˈnju:əti]
n. 独创性; 足智多谋，心灵手巧; 独出心裁，设计新颖; 巧妙，精巧;
[例句]Inspecting the nest may require some ingenuity.
探查鸟巢是需要些技巧的。
[5] In 1971 Walt Disney World opened on the land. By 1985 it was home to two theme parks with a third under construction (a fourth was added later), hundreds of hotel rooms and plenty of land to spare. But changes in Florida’s environmental laws had Disney executives worried that the state would reclaim some of their property unless it was put to use. The contentious land was an alligator-infested swamp, cut off from Disney World by a highway and unsuitable for another theme park. It seemed a shame to waste it. Executives approached Mr Eisner, who was keen on urban planning, with the idea of building a town. He agreed—but only once he was convinced that it would not be yet another suburban tract of homes attached to a golf course, with the Disney logo slapped on it.
reclaim [rɪˈkleɪm]
vt. 取回; 开拓，开垦; 感化; 沙化;
n. 改造，感化; 教化; 回收再利用; 收回，取回;
[例句]In 1986, they got the right to reclaim South African citizenship
1986年，他们取得了恢复南非公民身份的权利。
contentious [kənˈtenʃəs]
adj. 引起争论的，有争论的; 爱争论的; 爱议论的; 矫情;
[例句]Sanctions are expected to be among the most contentious issues.
制裁可能会是争议最大的问题之一。
alligator [ˈælɪgeɪtə(r)]
n. 短吻鳄; 短吻鳄皮革; 鳄口式工具;
[例句]He was grappling with an alligator in a lagoon
他正在环礁湖里与一只短吻鳄搏斗。
infested
adj. 为患的，大批滋生的（常与with搭配）;
v. 害虫、野兽大批出没于( infest的过去式和过去分词 ); 遍布于;
[例句]The town used to be infested with bandits in the old days.
这个镇从前常遭到匪帮的骚扰。
swamp [swɒmp]
n. 湿地; 沼泽（地）;
vt. 淹没; 使沉没; 使陷入困难; 忙得不可开交;
vi. 淹没，沉没;
[例句]A rogue wave swamped the boat
凶猛的海浪淹没了船只。
tract [trækt]
n. 大片土地; （神经纤维的） 束; 小册子; <古>一段时间，长时间;
[例句]A vast tract of land is ready for development
一大片广阔的土地可待开发。长难句：
changes in Florida’s environmental laws had Disney executives worried that the state would reclaim some of their property unless it was put to use.
提取句子的主干：changes had Disney executives worried sth。什么改变，in Florida’s environmental laws修饰changes，弗罗里达州环境法规的变化，迪士尼高层担心什么，that从句中的内容吧，that the state would reclaim some of their property unless it was put to use土地如果不投入使用，州政府可能会收回。
大意：弗罗里达州环境法规的变化让迪士尼高层担心如果土地不投入使用，州政府可能会收回。
[6] Around the time that Disney started working on its town-building project, a movement called new urbanism was taking off. Its big success came with the development of Seaside, Florida, a picturesque resort village which many years later became the setting for “The Truman Show”, a dystopian film set in a perfect town. New urbanism advocated building on a human scale, planning for walking and mixing residential and commercial zoning. Celebration’s developers set out to adapt that ethos to their town. Though brand new, the town would look like a charming mid-Atlantic city, such as Savannah, Georgia or Charleston, South Carolina.
picturesque [ˌpɪktʃəˈresk]
adj. 别致的; 美丽的; 生动的; 奇特的，独创的;
[例句]Alte, in the hills northwest of Loule, is the Algarve's most picturesque village.
位于洛莱西北部山区的阿尔特，是阿尔加维风景最美丽的村庄。
dystopian [dɪs'tɒpiən]
adj. 反面乌托邦的，反面假想国的;
n. 反面乌托邦的鼓吹者（或描写者）;
[例句]You can find classic examples of dystopian fiction in comics, short stories, novels, cartoons and movies.
在漫画，长短篇小说，卡通动画以及电影中，你都可以找到反乌托邦式小说的典型代表。
ethos [ˈi:θɒs]
n. 气质; 民族精神; 社会思潮;
[例句]The whole ethos of the hotel is effortless service.
该酒店的全部理念就是提供轻松的服务。
savannah [sə'vænə]
n. （热带和亚热带） 无树大草原;
[例句]I picked up the phone and dialed my parents 'home in Savannah.
我拿起电话，拨通了萨凡纳市我父母的家。
[7] Judged as an investment, Celebration was a blockbuster. Demand for the first set of lots was so high that Disney had to hold a lottery. Prices started at $120,000 for the smallest homes and at $300,000 for bigger ones; the median house price in the surrounding area was $80,000. Disney invested $100m in the project but it had bought the land for next to nothing. Construction was left to contractors, and money for roads and lighting came from municipal bonds that were paid back by residents.
blockbuster [ˈblɒkbʌstə(r)]
n. 大片; 重磅炸弹，了不起的人或事; 风靡一时的事物;
[例句]There is no point reviewing a blockbuster as you might review a serious novel.
为一部大片写影评时，没必要像为一部严肃小说写书评那样认真谨慎。
[8] Judged as an attempt to recreate a quasi-mythical past, things did not go so smoothly. Part of Celebration’s appeal was that it would offer a public school with a private education. “What was promised was a revolution in education,” says Lawrence Haber, whose family was the first to move into Celebration, on June 18th 1996. Disney gathered experts from Harvard and Johns Hopkins universities, among others, to design the curriculum. There would be no grades. Classes would be mixed, with children of different age groups studying together. It proved a disaster. Kids slacked off. Without test scores, parents were unable to track their children’s progress. Arguments and fist-fights broke out between parents. The school eventually separated into two more conventional public schools. Mr Haber says he might not have moved to Celebration were it not for the school. Many early settlers felt the same way. Some left.
quasi ['kweɪsaɪ]
adj. 类似的，准的;
[例句]The two basic formulas of electron quasi motion are given.
给出了电子准经典运动的两个基本关系式。
slacked
v. 放松; 偷懒( slack的过去式和过去分词 ); 减速;
[例句]The offensive has slacked off.
攻势已经衰弱。
Town Cat
[9] The promises of high technology fared little better. The original vision involved fibre-optic cables to every home. It never happened. Neither did elaborate plans that resembled an ambitious early Netflix or those for community services online. A scheme in which residents got free computers in exchange for allowing their browsing activities to be tracked fizzled out once AT&T, Disney’s corporate partner for technology in the town, realised it had no use for the data, write Douglas Frantz and Catherine Collins in “Celebration, USA”, an account of their first year living in the town in the late 1990s. Only the health centre was an unequivocal hit. The hospital, run as a non-profit by the Seventh-Day Adventist church, feels like a resort hotel. It includes a gym and a spa.
fare [feə(r)]
n. 票价; 费; 食物; 乘客;
vi. 吃; 进食; 进展; 遭遇;
[例句]He could barely afford the railway fare.
他几乎买不起火车票。
fibreoptic [faɪb'əi:ptɪk]
[词典] [医] 光导纤维的，纤维光学;
[例句]The use of ultrasonic aerosol spraying anesthesia in fibreoptic bronchoscopy
超声雾化麻醉法在纤维支气管镜中的应用
fizzled
v. 发嘶嘶声，失败( fizzle的过去式和过去分词 );
[例句]Our relationship fizzled into nothing.
我们的关系无果而终了。
unequivocal [ˌʌnɪˈkwɪvəkl]
adj. 明确的; 毫不含糊; 不含糊的;
[例句]Yesterday, the message to him was unequivocal: 'Get out.'
昨天，给他的信息很明确：“滚开。”长难句：
A scheme in which residents got free computers in exchange for allowing their browsing activities to be tracked fizzled out once AT&T, Disney’s corporate partner for technology in the town, realised it had no use for the data, write Douglas Frantz and Catherine Collins in “Celebration, USA”, an account of their first year living in the town in the late 1990s.
看这句，hin长，hin吓人~我们还是和之前一样，首先剥离出句子的主干~主干暴简单，A scheme fizzled out。阴谋失败了，接下里你需要搞清楚的就是什么阴谋，为什么会失败。首先是什么阴谋呢，后面的定语从句in which residents got free computers in exchange for allowing their browsing activities to be tracked指出居民用自己的浏览记录交换免费网络的使用权，为什么会失败呢，once AT&T realized sth，一旦美国电话电报（类似天朝联通）意识到那些浏览记录并没有什么鬼用，这前面的言论是谁说的，是曾经在庆典小镇居住过的DF和CC，记录在自己的账户（类似大天朝的博客）中的。
大意：曾经在庆典小镇居住过的DF和CC，在自己的账户（类似大天朝的博客）中记录说：一旦美国电话电报（类似天朝联通）意识到那些浏览记录并没有什么鬼用
，居民用自己的浏览记录交换免费网络的使用权的阴谋就失败了。
[10] Some of the early shortcomings could be put down to teething troubles. But at Celebration’s core was nostalgia, making the last two cornerstones, “sense of place” and “sense of community”, the most important. Celebration certainly feels different from the rest of American suburbia. Disney invested in building the downtown area so it would be open the day the first families moved in. It commissioned famous architects to build the town hall, the post office, the cinema and other communal buildings. It invited doctors to live in the town so there would be, for example, an optometrist. It located the town centre, quaintly, in the centre of town even though putting it by the highway would have made more economic sense.
teething 英['ti:ðɪŋ]
n. 出牙，出牙期;
v. 出牙，生乳牙( teethe的现在分词 );
[例句]Emma broke off a bit of rusk and gave it to Jacinta, who was teething
埃玛掰了一块脆饼干给正在出牙的贾辛塔。
optometrist[ɒpˈtɒmətrɪst]
n. 验光师，视力测定者;
[例句]So he decides to go into town to see if he can find an optometrist.
于是，他决定进入镇看到，如果他能找到一个验光师。
[11] Yet the cinema, a towering faux-art-deco edifice designed by César Pelli has been closed for several years. Locals complained that the downtown lacked basic necessities such as a hardware store or a hairdresser. The small town-centre grocery store shut too, replaced by a big-box supermarket by the highway. The downtown area, which was sold by Disney in 2004, is in poor repair. One block of flats is being entirely renovated, another is held up by wooden support columns, a third is covered with tarpaulin to prevent leaks. Residents of the downtown condominiums complain that they face huge extra fees for repairs despite having paid for maintenance. A lawsuit is in the works.
faux [fəʊ]
adj. 人造的; <法>假的; 伪的; 人工的;
[例句]It was not long before I realised the enormity of my faux pas.
没过多久，我就意识到自己有多么失态。
deco [ˈdekəu]
n. 装饰，装饰品;
[例句]Art Deco designers embraced machinery and power.
装饰艺术的设计者们接受了机械和动力带来的灵感。
edifice [ˈedɪfɪs]
n. 大建筑物; 知识的结构;
[例句]The American consulate was a magnificent edifice in the centre of Bordeaux.
美国领事馆是位于波尔多市中心的一座宏伟的大厦。
tarpaulin [tɑ:ˈpɔ:lɪn]
n. 防水帆布，防水帆布罩;
[例句]When it rained I rigged up a partial shelter with a tarpaulin
下雨的时候，我用油布草草搭了一个能简单避雨的棚子。
Condominium [ˌkɒndəˈmɪniəm]
n. 公寓; 一套公寓住房; 公寓的单元;
[例句]They bought a condominium in new jersey.
他们在新泽西买了间公寓。
[12] To the extent that Celebration can boast of a sense of place, it is opposition to Osceola county, of which it forms a part, where median incomes are about half as big. Celebration voted for Donald Trump; both the district and county it is in voted Democrat. Celebration is cute and orderly; the surrounding areas are covered in strip malls and fast-food chains. The median house price in Celebration is $345,700, more than twice that of the nearest town and far higher than any other settlement in the county, according to Zillow, a real-estate company.
median [ˈmi:diən]
adj. 中间的; 中央的; [数] 中值的;
n. 中位数; 中线; [数] 中值;
[例句]This is our learning digital image processing, the field average and median filtering the code.
这是我们在学习数字图像处理过程中，对领域平均法和中值滤波的程序代码。长难句：
To the extent that Celebration can boast of a sense of place, it is opposition to Osceola county, of which it forms a part, where median incomes are about half as big.
句子的主干是，中间的那个短句，it is opposition to Osceola county，前面是介词短语修饰，后面是两个非限定从修饰Osceola county。这句话也不难理解，大家如果知道Celebration是Osceola county的一部分的话
大意：庆典小镇吹嘘其社区归属感，但事实上，作为Osceola county的一部分，小镇的中位数收入是O城的两倍，如何来的归属感。O城的居民表示，不和你们一起玩。
[13] The disparity has tugged away at the communal ethos Disney hoped to foster. Old-timers talk up shared experiences, the town foundation that helps out the poor, the many community groups. Newer residents are less enthused. Many parents send their children to private schools elsewhere, blaming an influx of kids from outside Celebration. A quarter of pupils at Celebration School and two-thirds at Celebration High School qualify for free or subsidised lunches, a proxy for poverty. Many of them come from the nearby Highway 192, where motels have turned into rent-by-the-week homes for transient minimum-wage workers.
n. 悬殊; 不同; 不等; 不一致;
[例句]The increasing income distribution disparity between residents is a striking problem in china's current economic development.
摘要居民之间收入分配差距的不断扩大，是当前我国经济发展中的突出问题。
tug [tʌg]
vt. 用力拉，使劲拉; 使劲，挣扎; [航海] 用拖船拖曳; 竞争;
n. 猛拉，推力; 绳索链条; [航海] 拖船; 竞争，斗争;
[例句]A little boy came running up and tugged at his sleeve excitedly
一个小男孩跑上来，非常激动地拽着他的袖子。
communal [kəˈmju:nl]
adj. 公用; 公共的; 公社的; 公民的;
[例句]Communal violence broke out in different parts of the country.
在该国不同的地区发生了群体暴力事件。
influx [ˈɪnflʌks]
n. 流入，注入; 汇集〔指人或物〕，充斥; 注入口，河口;
[例句]The country simply cannot absorb this influx of refugees.
这个国家实在不能接纳这么多涌入的难民。
[14] The well-intentioned hope to recreate some version of America’s past has been defeated by the country’s present. The parks, pools and playgrounds in Celebration belong to the residents’ association and are off-limits to non-residents. Sitting on a park bench is considered trespassing. Residents complain about tourists peeking over their fences or the thousands of children from neighbouring areas who descend on them at Halloween. Celebration was founded by Disney on the principle of openness—the school and utilities are public, and the county sheriff’s office provides police patrols. Yet it has become a gated community, just without the gates.
trespassing
n. [法] 非法入侵;
[例句]You're trespassing!
你这是非法侵入！
In Disneyworld
[15] Yet for all its failings, Celebration has changed America. It provided a prototype for mixed-use development that encouraged more permissive zoning laws, says Robert Steuteville of the Congress for the New Urbanism. Baldwin Park, a successful residential development with a commercial heart, in nearby Orlando, was a refinement of the idea. Celebration demonstrated that suburban cities could market themselves to house-buyers by evoking urbanity. These days almost all suburban developers talk about “place-making” and “urban-style” living, and fostering a sense of community. Celebration got them talking that way.
refinement [rɪˈfaɪnmənt]
n. 精炼，提纯，净化; 改良品; 细微的改良，极致; 优雅，高贵的动作;
[例句]Older cars inevitably lack the latest safety refinements.
老款的汽车难免缺少经过改进的最新安全保护装置。
[16] A big part of Celebration’s success came from its association with Disney. “People had an impression that if they moved their kids to a Disney town, their lawns would never get any weeds and their children would never get anything but ‘A’s,” says Peter Rummell, who led the development for Disney. Mike Harford, until November’s election the county commissioner for the district that includes Celebration, grew up in Osceola county when “there was nothing but cows.” “If it had stayed that way, I would have had to go somewhere else,” he says. In the land of fresh starts, nostalgia can be the most effective marketing pitch for a new future, in property development as in politics.
lawns['lɔ:nz]
n. 草地，草坪( lawn的名词复数 ); 上等细棉布（或麻布）;
[例句]They had landscaped their property with trees, shrubs, and lawns.
他们用树木、灌木丛和草坪将房产装点了一番。
来源:
[1] OUTSIDE the white fence is all strip malls, motels and resort villages. Come off the six-lane highway at the spaghetti junction where Interstate 4 meets Highway 192, go past the ornamental water tower, and you are in Celebration, a town of the sort that America stopped building in the 1950s. Most of its 4,000 homes are small by suburban standards, jutting up against narrow streets. Children walk to school. The small downtown has no chains, apart from an obligatory Starbucks. Its 10,000-odd residents are mostly white, white-collar and Republican. In some ways it is a vision of America’s past. Yet Celebration is only 20 years old.
[2] The town was developed by Disney as an antidote to the isolation of the suburbs. By the 1970s more Americans lived in suburbs than either in cities or in rural areas. Two decades later there were more cars than drivers in America. By the turn of the century, SUV-driving suburbanites became the majority, outnumbering rural and city folk combined. The wholesale shift to the suburbs, ever-longer commutes and the rise of shopping malls and big-box stores fractured community life, as downtowns emptied and commerce shifted to the edges of highways.
[3] Disney offered Celebration as an antidote to all this, selling the development on nostalgia for an old-timey America where, as its adverts read, “neighbours greeted neighbours in the quiet of summer twilight”. It would be built around five cornerstones: in addition to “a sense of place” and “a sense of community”, the small town, which was planned to grow to 20,000 residents, would also offer progressive education, world-class health facilities and cutting-edge technology. Michael Eisner, who ran Disney at the time, believed it would be a “community of tomorrow”.
House mouse
[4] Disney’s interest in town development started with its founder. In a filmed appearance on October 27th 1966, Walt Disney laid out his vision for the 27,400 acres of land he had secretly acquired in central Florida. It would include a theme park, an industrial park and an airport. At its heart would be an “experimental prototype community of tomorrow”, or EPCOT. This community would have 20,000 residents, a central business district and futuristic public transport. Cars and lorries would be hidden away underground. It was planned as a showcase of modern technology and “the ingenuity and imagination of American free enterprise”. Two months later Disney died of lung cancer. The plan was shelved.
[5] In 1971 Walt Disney World opened on the land. By 1985 it was home to two theme parks with a third under construction (a fourth was added later), hundreds of hotel rooms and plenty of land to spare. But changes in Florida’s environmental laws had Disney executives worried that the state would reclaim some of their property unless it was put to use. The contentious land was an alligator-infested swamp, cut off from Disney World by a highway and unsuitable for another theme park. It seemed a shame to waste it. Executives approached Mr Eisner, who was keen on urban planning, with the idea of building a town. He agreed—but only once he was convinced that it would not be yet another suburban tract of homes attached to a golf course, with the Disney logo slapped on it.
[6] Around the time that Disney started working on its town-building project, a movement called new urbanism was taking off. Its big success came with the development of Seaside, Florida, a picturesque resort village which many years later became the setting for “The Truman Show”, a dystopian film set in a perfect town. New urbanism advocated building on a human scale, planning for walking and mixing residential and commercial zoning. Celebration’s developers set out to adapt that ethos to their town. Though brand new, the town would look like a charming mid-Atlantic city, such as Savannah, Georgia or Charleston, South Carolina.
[7] Judged as an investment, Celebration was a blockbuster. Demand for the first set of lots was so high that Disney had to hold a lottery. Prices started at $120,000 for the smallest homes and at $300,000 for bigger ones; the median house price in the surrounding area was $80,000. Disney invested $100m in the project but it had bought the land for next to nothing. Construction was left to contractors, and money for roads and lighting came from municipal bonds that were paid back by residents.
[8] Judged as an attempt to recreate a quasi-mythical past, things did not go so smoothly. Part of Celebration’s appeal was that it would offer a public school with a private education. “What was promised was a revolution in education,” says Lawrence Haber, whose family was the first to move into Celebration, on June 18th 1996. Disney gathered experts from Harvard and Johns Hopkins universities, among others, to design the curriculum. There would be no grades. Classes would be mixed, with children of different age groups studying together. It proved a disaster. Kids slacked off. Without test scores, parents were unable to track their children’s progress. Arguments and fist-fights broke out between parents. The school eventually separated into two more conventional public schools. Mr Haber says he might not have moved to Celebration were it not for the school. Many early settlers felt the same way. Some left.
Town Cat
[9] The promises of high technology fared little better. The original vision involved fibre-optic cables to every home. It never happened. Neither did elaborate plans that resembled an ambitious early Netflix or those for community services online. A scheme in which residents got free computers in exchange for allowing their browsing activities to be tracked fizzled out once AT&T, Disney’s corporate partner for technology in the town, realised it had no use for the data, write Douglas Frantz and Catherine Collins in “Celebration, USA”, an account of their first year living in the town in the late 1990s. Only the health centre was an unequivocal hit. The hospital, run as a non-profit by the Seventh-Day Adventist church, feels like a resort hotel. It includes a gym and a spa.
[10] Some of the early shortcomings could be put down to teething troubles. But at Celebration’s core was nostalgia, making the last two cornerstones, “sense of place” and “sense of community”, the most important. Celebration certainly feels different from the rest of American suburbia. Disney invested in building the downtown area so it would be open the day the first families moved in. It commissioned famous architects to build the town hall, the post office, the cinema and other communal buildings. It invited doctors to live in the town so there would be, for example, an optometrist. It located the town centre, quaintly, in the centre of town even though putting it by the highway would have made more economic sense.
[11] Yet the cinema, a towering faux-art-deco edifice designed by César Pelli has been closed for several years. Locals complained that the downtown lacked basic necessities such as a hardware store or a hairdresser. The small town-centre grocery store shut too, replaced by a big-box supermarket by the highway. The downtown area, which was sold by Disney in 2004, is in poor repair. One block of flats is being entirely renovated, another is held up by wooden support columns, a third is covered with tarpaulin to prevent leaks. Residents of the downtown condominiums complain that they face huge extra fees for repairs despite having paid for maintenance. A lawsuit is in the works.
[12] To the extent that Celebration can boast of a sense of place, it is opposition to Osceola county, of which it forms a part, where median incomes are about half as big. Celebration voted for Donald Trump; both the district and county it is in voted Democrat. Celebration is cute and orderly; the surrounding areas are covered in strip malls and fast-food chains. The median house price in Celebration is $345,700, more than twice that of the nearest town and far higher than any other settlement in the county, according to Zillow, a real-estate company.
[13] The disparity has tugged away at the communal ethos Disney hoped to foster. Old-timers talk up shared experiences, the town foundation that helps out the poor, the many community groups. Newer residents are less enthused. Many parents send their children to private schools elsewhere, blaming an influx of kids from outside Celebration. A quarter of pupils at Celebration School and two-thirds at Celebration High School qualify for free or subsidised lunches, a proxy for poverty. Many of them come from the nearby Highway 192, where motels have turned into rent-by-the-week homes for transient minimum-wage workers.
[14] The well-intentioned hope to recreate some version of America’s past has been defeated by the country’s present. The parks, pools and playgrounds in Celebration belong to the residents’ association and are off-limits to non-residents. Sitting on a park bench is considered trespassing. Residents complain about tourists peeking over their fences or the thousands of children from neighbouring areas who descend on them at Halloween. Celebration was founded by Disney on the principle of openness—the school and utilities are public, and the county sheriff’s office provides police patrols. Yet it has become a gated community, just without the gates.
In Disneyworld
[15] Yet for all its failings, Celebration has changed America. It provided a prototype for mixed-use development that encouraged more permissive zoning laws, says Robert Steuteville of the Congress for the New Urbanism. Baldwin Park, a successful residential development with a commercial heart, in nearby Orlando, was a refinement of the idea. Celebration demonstrated that suburban cities could market themselves to house-buyers by evoking urbanity. These days almost all suburban developers talk about “place-making” and “urban-style” living, and fostering a sense of community. Celebration got them talking that way.
[16] A big part of Celebration’s success came from its association with Disney. “People had an impression that if they moved their kids to a Disney town, their lawns would never get any weeds and their children would never get anything but ‘A’s,” says Peter Rummell, who led the development for Disney. Mike Harford, until November’s election the county commissioner for the district that includes Celebration, grew up in Osceola county when “there was nothing but cows.” “If it had stayed that way, I would have had to go somewhere else,” he says. In the land of fresh starts, nostalgia can be the most effective marketing pitch for a new future, in property development as in politics.