The Celebration Chronicles: Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Property Value in Disney's New Town - Softcover

Ross Ph.D., Andrew

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0345417526 ISBN 13: 9780345417527

Publisher: Ballantine Books, 2000

Synopsis

Scholar and iconoclast Andrew Ross spent a year living in the much scrutinized, and often demonized, Celebration--the picture-perfect town that Disney is building for 20,000 people in the swamp and scrub of central Florida. Lavishly planned with a downtown center and newly minted antique homes, and front-loaded with an ultraprogressive school, hospital, and high-tech infrastructure, Celebration was to offer a fresh start in a world gone wrong. Yet behind the picket fences, gleaming facades, and "Kodak moment" streetscapes, Ross discovered a real place with real problems, and not a theme park village cooked up by the Imagineers. Compelling and wide-ranging in its analysis, The Celebration Chronicles provides a startlingly fresh perspective on the link between contemporary urban planning and corporate bottom lines.

About this title

Review:

In The Celebration Chronicles, Andrew Ross has written a moving and subtle account of his yearlong stay at Disney's glistening suburban development in Celebration, Florida. Readers might expect that Ross, the director of American studies at New York University and a devoted urbanite, would contribute to both the fashionable sport of Disney bashing and the tired genre of suburban reproof. But, like an anthropologist gone native, Ross immersed himself in the community, interviewing dozens of the 20,000 residents, volunteering at the local school, and finding himself pleasantly surprised when his subjects had christened him an honorary Celebrationite.

Celebration, Ross argues, is the latest in a long line of utopian communities built to realize the American dream. Many wealthy and eager romantics flocked to the town with a faith that Disney magic would fulfill their hopes for a perfect community (and increase their property values). When the majority of these people found their dreams dashed against the corporation's bottom line, however, they engaged in grass roots activism that did more to bring their community together than any of the schemes from Disney "imagineers." Moving from a cogent analysis of the town to a multifaceted consideration of the environmental implications of American liberty, The Celebration Chronicles is a masterpiece of American studies scholarship. As astute as it is readable, Ross's book shows how Celebration's high-octane pursuit of happiness resulted in a limited civic culture and contributed to an overall ecological catastrophe that continues to worsen with each new drive toward the American dream. --James Highfill

From the Back Cover:

Our first astronaut-in-residence on Planet Disney returns with astonishing tales of its strange life-forms and customs. As an explorer of brave new worlds, Ross is a shrewd cross between Jonathan Swift and C. Wright Mills. --MIKE DAVIS, Bestselling author of Ecology of Fear and City of Quartz

About this edition

• Publisher: Ballantine Books
• Publication date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 0345417526
• ISBN 13: 9780345417527
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 352