Orlando Magic

One of my favorite things about the holidays is having time for things that I never have time to do otherwise—fold the laundry, call old friends, catch up on the back issues of magazines stacking up in the hall. So as the snow tumbled down and piled up here in Vermont, I settled in with the March, 2007 National Geographic: elephants, cosmic explosions, sharks in the Bahamas, and sunny, lush, alluring, enchanting Orlando.

At least that’s how I remember Orlando from the first and only time I visited—as a four year old, when my parents took me on that magical pilgrimage to meet Mickey and Cinderella. But that’s not exactly how Orlando comes across in T.D. Allman’s article, “The Theme-Parking, Megachurching, Franchising, Exurbing, McMansioning of America: How Walt Disney Changed Everything,” and it's sadly not how it looks to me today through the lens of planning and community building.

There’s plenty of magic in the Magic Kingdom, but it’s not the fairy godmother kind. It’s the kind that transforms swamps and sinkholes and citrus groves into sprawling gold-plated palaces. It’s the kind that grows a stop on the Interstate into a gangly metropolis visible from outer space. It’s the kind that transforms a place into a brand name, a market, a mirage. It’s the kind that allowed Walt Disney to purchase 25,000+ acres in 1963 for practically nothing, to push through a legislative deal detaching the Magic Kingdom from Florida and allowing it to operate “above and outside the law,” and to build an empire from scratch in the span of decades. Orlando magic, as Allman sums it up, is about self-fulfillment. It’s “wanting something so badly that your dreams really do come true.”

This magic actually backfired for Disney. Today’s Epcot theme park grew out of the Disney’s EPCOT (Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow) concept, which he envisioned as a Utopian city of the future. EPCOT would house 20,000 residents and serve as an experimental site for urban planning, development and technology; there would be no slums, no cars, no unemployment (and no land ownership or voting to complicate governance). Disney died before he could build EPCOT and the Walt Disney Company nixed the plan, though some point to Celebration, Florida as a near-equivalent.

Ironically, Orlando itself has become that prototype city, and a wildly successful one—a test case for sprawling suburbs, megachurches, cookie cutter developments, anonymous chain stores, bland strip malls, and nearly every other structural element of community gone awry. “Everything happening to America today is happening here,” writes Allman, “The Orlando region has become Exhibit A for the ascendant power of our cities’ exurbs.” And it may even be Disney’s fault: “By trying to create a Magic Kingdom immune from squalor and complexity, Disney touched off an orgy of uncontrolled growth that still shows no signs of abating.”

If there’s ever an argument for democracy and citizen engagement, Orlando is it. It’s nearly impossible to untangle the reasons why Orlando did what it did and is what it is: the growth of the Interstate highway system, immigration, rising incomes and consumerism, technology and TV, political maneuvering of all shapes and sizes, and probably a dash of luck and pixie dust. But it must certainly be, in part, the very insistence on power and control that Walt believed was key to creating his Utopian community. Removing his 25,000 acres from the local and state jurisdictions eliminates all government oversight, control and planning (even the rides are exempt from state inspections). Preventing people from owning land in the Disney resorts prevents them from having votes or voices in development and governance. Disney’s culture of franchises and facades and free-market consumerism spawned drive-in restaurants and drive-up churches, but it also spawned what former Orange County Commissioner Linda Chapin calls “drive-by citizens” who feel no loyalty, no responsibility and no sense of place. “In such a situation of psychological rootlessness and moral detachment,” says Allman, “the question isn’t whether the problems arising from unchecked growth can be solved. It’s whether there is any chance of them being addressed at all.”

Given that diagnosis, it’s hard to find much of anything magical in Orlando’s future, or in the myriad other communities that have followed in Orlando’s Disney-fied footsteps. But it is still there, in the unrelenting optimism of people like Linda Chapin, who refuse to give up on their communities. “Just because we’ve ruined 90 percent of everything doesn’t mean we can’t do wonderful things with the remaining ten percent!” Every community has people like Linda. They may never be able to convert parking lots back to mangrove swamps or pull small town culture out of mass-market suburbs. But they do have a chance of waking up their neighbors and fellow citizens, of holding onto the nuggets of authenticity that remain, and of helping to ensure that other communities don’t go down the same path. It won’t be easy, but there is no shortage of stars to wish on.