Celebration, FL

For a field trip during our long weekend in Disney, Heather and I spent Saturday morning in Celebration, Florida. Celebration is a master-planned community developed by Disney a few miles away from the theme parks, and includes a mixed use downtown and approximately 4,000 homes. The downtown features shops, town hall, Michael-Graves-designed post office, movie theater, restaurants, offices, condos - basically everything is mixed up in an ideal New Urbanist configuration.



The downtown is centered around this beautiful gathering spot, viewed here from the walking trail around the lake.


The town's residential areas radiate from the town center, and several of the narrow streets have wide center medians that accommodate parks. In general, Celebration's parks are vastly oversized, although this center median with a stream is incredibly landscaped and very interesting.


There are townhouse style condos near the town center:


and in addition to many monstrous houses, there are plenty of more modestly sized homes, which I find much more attractive:




Despite the variation of housing sizes and architectural type within the town as a whole, homes of similar size seem to be grouped together into homogeneous neighborhoods, which is unfortunate.

Most homes have alleys in the back for garages, trash pickup, etc., but interestingly, in Celebration the alleys are overutilized at the expense of street life. Cars are parked in either 3-car garages or in a mish-mash way in the alleys, and in some cases driveways are constructed in place of backyards:


Painful:


The result in some cases is a complete lack of cars parked on the street, which when combined with the oversized median parks makes some of the streets seem overly wide and barren of energy:


Some streets work out well and with the additional benefit of mature street trees feel like a more comprehensive public realm:


After spending an hour or two exploring Celebration, Heather and I sat in rocking chairs by the lake to wait for our cab. We ended up chatting with Steve and Beth, who just moved to Celebration from Ludlow, MA in December and were raving about the town. They hadn't heard of New Urbanism, but were glowing about all the design features incorporated in their town.

They ended up showing us their house:


and giving us a ride to Epcot. I think this spontaneous meeting is partly due to the New Urbanist physical town layout, which facilitates interaction within the public realm, and also the simple fact that a majority of Celebration's residents chose to live there because they are friendly people interested in community and interaction with others.

Thank you to Steve & Beth!