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.

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.

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

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 (see article). 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.

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. 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. 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. 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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.