Hackery
This analysis is wrongheaded, simpleminded, and insulting, frankly. Disneyland was and is theatre-in-the-round on the grandest scale imaginable. Fictitious settings are realized in physical permanence, and the audience is able to pass through the metaphorical proscenium arch or fourth wall to step onto that stage and to interact with the players.
Of all the storytelling media that human beings have used throughout the millennia, the "theme park" from the mind of Walt Disney was and is the most elaborate, and the sheer audacity of the concept is as radical as anything anyone had done previously or has done since.
The duality of Disneyland is that it is, at once: Main Street, Disneyland, U.S.A., everyone's hometown (but mostly that of Walt Disney, himself); and, The Magic Kingdom of Disneyland, which is comprised of The Four Cardinal Realms of the Imagination (Adventureland; Frontierland; Fantasyland; and, Tomorrowland).
The reality-based and semi-autobiographical, albeit universalized and archetypal, turn-of-the-19th Century Main Street, U.S.A. leads to a storybook castle representing the human imagination as exemplified by the centuries-old timeless fairy tales that were transmitted across the eras and the oceans in an oral tradition, and, like the cardinal points of the compass, The Four Cardinal Realms of the Imagination radiate from Central Plaza as four distinct and quintessential places that were and are exactly the opposite of a "fragmented, discontinuous narrative." In fact, each of them unites individual narrative experiences as attractions that hold common themes and that occupy a common imaginary universe. And, the entrance to each Realm, from the stockade of Frontierland to the drawbridge of Fantasyland, serves as its own proscenium arch.
Examinations of the influence of Disneyland on urban design in the real world are worthwhile, but this interview clearly did not even begin to discuss this complex topic, which is the heart of the emerging discipline of collaborative and creative placemaking that achieves in the built environment both a Utopian and a romantic idealism, which may be characterized as Disneyesque, while promoting the authentic expression of community.
