Page 57 - The Disneyization of Society

THE DISNEYIZATION OF SOCIETY

terms. Urry also observes that many hotel chains in the United Kingdom offer
‘various themed weekends [including] arts and antiques, bridge, watercolour
48 painting, archery, clay pigeon shooting, fly fishing, golf and pony-trekking’. 134
These themed weekends can similarly be interpreted in terms of the growing ten-
dency for the theming of tourism. In Japan, there has been a growth in package
tours themed in terms of such motifs as honeymoons, sex, gourmet cooking,
urban life, and the countryside. 135

Towns

In the United States, the rise of what is often referred to as New Urbanism provides
a further example of the spread of the theming principle. New Urbanism is asso-
ciated with neo-traditional residential developments that are designed along the
lines of a nostalgic representation of small town life as it used to be. In practice,
this means: restricting the influence of the automobile in public spaces; encour-
aging people to walk by having shops and entertainment amenities close to
homes; stimulating a sense of community by having central civic amenities; and
restricting the amount of variability in the external and interior design of homes
so that individualist impulses are moderated. New Urbanist towns place an
emphasis on the pedestrian rather than on the driver and seek to re-create the
sense of a public space in which all residents have an investment as citizens.
The New Urbanism movement, which is mainly associated with the architects
Andres Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, has gradually made inroads through
the design of small towns using its underlying principles, which have gradually
taken root in various parts of the United States. Until fairly recently, its best
known monument was Seaside in Florida, which began life in December 1981 and
was was the setting for the Jim Carrey film, The Truman Show.
However, in 1996 an even more high-profile New Urbanist town admitted its
first citizens – Celebration, which was built for Disney and is located next to
Disney World in Florida (although in January 2004 it was announced that Disney
had sold the downtown core to a real estate company). According to two jour-
nalists who lived in Celebration for over a year, the New Urbanist principles are
apparent in the following way:

A sense of place was reflected in the post-neotraditional planning and the attempt to create a pleas-
ant, workable physical environment: the public parks, the easy walk to shops, the distinctive archi-
tecture, and its hoped-for front-porch culture. The intention was to provide the safe neighborhoods
and opportunities for social interaction that surveys showed most people wanted. 136

It is widely expected that the publicity and popularity of Celebration will result
in further developments of this kind, even though the town has received quite a
lot of adverse publicity, primarily associated with Disney’s tight control over
residents and their houses (about which more will be said in Chapter 6) and with