As I boy I remember visiting Disney World for the first time. It was a magical place with friendly waving mascots, exciting rides, and an adventure around each corner. I remember walking down Disney’s Main Street with its pleasant shops, cobble stone pavement, and delightful pastry aromas floating from a local bakery. The whole experience was created as an ode to the wholesome past of Small Town America. Main Street was a taste of a bygone era, a simpler time where neighbours waved at each other, and suggested that with just the right amount of hard work, we can all return there again.
However, this picture-perfect Disney main street may never have actually existed, except perhaps in the movies. Author Colin Ellard says that Disney main streets are “complete fiction.” He says that the real old world main streets of small town America were “jumbled, disorganized, unpaved, dusty, and likely littered with horse manure.” It does not sound like the kind of community most of us would hope to re-create.
In 1994 Disney decided to take their Main Street concept and develop an entire picture-perfect city. Celebration, Florida, was to be an ideal city with every detail highly regulated. Today, if you do not look too closely, the city is as perfect as you would expect from the Walt Disney brand. In an effort to capture that ever-elusive ‘small-town feel’ residents are told when to put up seasonal decorations, and when to take them down. Tree-lined streets have pastel homes, certain neighbourhoods require white picket fences, and residents receive a 166 page booklet outlining the expectations of citizens. In the winter they put up plastic Christmas trees, a plastic skating rink, and even foam snow which flutters down every hour (residents call it ‘snoap’). Some visitors say that in October they blow paper leaves down main street and music from the 1950’s gently plays through parts of downtown. Everything was made to be perfect.
Yet for all the effort to make the perfect community, the city still suffers from crime, murders, foreclosures, and marital breakdown reportedly is so pervasive some have called the phenomenon “Celebration separation.” Celebration, Florida, may not be the perfect utopia that Disney imagined it could be.
Community seldom emerges naturally in these kinds of environments. Neighbourhoods are not places where we regulate the details of our neighbour’s life or where we look or talk the same. We were never meant to hide behind a veneer and try our best to cover up our messiness. Rather neighbourhoods are places where we live alongside one another, quirks and all, and stand with each other along the way.
Utopia does not allow for unpredictability and tempers our curiosity. In real communities we expect that our relationships will be unusual and unexpected, and we allow for the adventure that comes with meeting others. We may never recover the ‘small-town-feel’ that may be more the stuff of movies, than real life. Rather we hold onto the belief that the good life is found in meaningful connections, honest conversations, true generosity, and over shared meals. Somewhere along the way we may even look back and wonder if what we had was maybe even better than utopia, because what we have is something Disney can never truly recreate. What we have is real.
