Abstract
Five miles south of Disney World lies Celebration, Florida — the real town imagineered by the Disney Company.2 Celebration is billed as a hybrid of Walt Disney’s futuristic, high-tech experimental prototype community of tomorrow (EPCOT) and a pre-Second World War American small town. As a promotional sign reads: ‘Imagine how great it would have been … to live fifty years ago with all the neat gear you have today’ (Flower 1996: 33–6). Imagineering — Disney’s unique brand of combining high-tech ‘neat gear’ with magical imagination — creates social/cultural/historical spaces as either fantasy (Disneyland) or reality (Celebration). For example, while the hypermodern neat gear in Celebration includes total interactive linkages between residences, healthcare facilities, schools, community facilities and retail establishments, it is a nostalgia for the recent past — for an imagineered sense of history — that sells Celebration.3 The aim of Celebration is ‘to recreate the kind of small towns middle-aged Americans remember’ (Katz 1996). ‘This is a return to our childhood, to the neighborhoods we remember,’ one Celebration resident remarked. This is consistent with a Celebration promotional video which locates Celebration in ‘a time of innocence, where the biggest decision is whether to play Kick the Can or King of the Hill’.
Communities are to be distinguished, not by their falsity/genuineness, but by the style in which they are imagined.
(Anderson 1991: 6)
It’s not a theme park, it’s a real town.
(Wilson 1995)
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Weber, C. (2000). Imagineering Value: Good Neighbourliness in an Era of Disney. In: Youngs, G. (eds) Political Economy, Power and the Body. International Political Economy Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780333983904_6
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