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Q&A: What Disney can teach us about urban planning

To paraphrase Lloyd Bentson, "Mr. Gray, I knew Disneyland (in 1955), and you don't seem to have been there." For us kids, it was the next step beyond Knotts Berry Farm--incremental as you say. But the television channels is academic gobbledygook--why do we do that? It was experienced as a way for Disney to package their entertainment stories (unless you have memos or something, I would drop the TV channels theory--if it is true it went right over our heads!).

The criticism about fake diversity, no competition on Main Street, etc. I guess, but none of us ever expected anything different. Even as kids we knew that this was an amusement park, not a recreation a la Colonial Williamsburg or some critical commentary on how we should be as a society. As to the underground activity--the Atlantic City casinos do not have legal prostitution or drugs, and it is not legal on Main Street either, which is not to say that they are not available if you know how to look for such things (even a teenager willing to leave the marked paths can come across such things).

The real lessons of Disneyland are not about the veracity of style, they concern crowd control and keeping the masses happy. Set you critical insights toward what Disneyland's design has to say about post-9/11 America and we might all learn something important.

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.

Like zooeyjfp, I grew up in Southern California just 30 miles from Disneyland. I was born in the mid-50s around the time it opened. Like most people in Southern California who had relatives living outside of the state, we often got visits to see us when most of the time they really wanted to see Disneyland. So there were many summers when I went at least two or three times.

Look, Disneyland was just a gussied-up amusement park. Everybody knew that. It was an artificial environment, but what made it special was the attention to detail. The rides were always several notches above what you got at other amusement parks. Did Disney work hard to keep the real world outside of the park? Sure. So what? It was just a place to have a fun day. Nobody wanted to live there, and I can tell you that by the third or fourth visit of the summer I really didn't want to go.

For most visitors to Southern California, Disneyland took up a day or two of a visit that also included the beach, mountains, and many other tourist attractions. Most of these were in the "real world", and you saw humanity without any Disneyfication. So how was a day or two at Disneyland culturally destructive?

While some may see Disneyland as the forerunner of artificial environments, I see it as a forerunner of modern "human-centered" developments that mix retail with residential in a small area where everybody can walk to every destination. Disneyland proved you can provide a complex, stimulating environment in a very small space. It got people thinking differently.

Disneyland is particularly instructive in its ability to create an imminently walkable experience that can demonstrate to generations who have lived under the domination of cars that movement on foot in public or semi-public places can be extremely valuable.

One of the reasons that the Disneyland annual passport has grown in its popularity in recent decades is because so many people are starving for high-quality public spaces and walkable environments.

Dear Jennifer and Rachel,
Have how you ever waited in lines with millions spending a small fortune to ride on or see whatever-it-is at Disneyland? I wait in long lines in Walmart and pay a smaller fortune. Isn't it all, basically, a shopping experience? One more entertaining than the other?
And speaking of crowd control and delusion remember the big sponser of this web site (IBM) was BFF with the Nazis (see edwin Black's research) and Walt was more than a closet anti-semite and Negro hater. On the other hand, we're best buddies with the Saudis whose greatest export ain't oil; it's called Wahabism.
Cheers.

Would you like someone making such ridiculous and baseless accusations about yourself decades after you die? Did you know him? Were you in the closet with him? Do you know anyone who knew him? Do you have any evidence whatsoever to spread vile rumors about someone over the Internet?

Incidentally, in the above picture showing Walt Disney dedicating Disneyland, a rabbi is standing out of frame next to the guy on the left. The clergyman, along with a Catholic priest and a Protestant minister, were all invited to speak at the ceremony, and they did. Unlike yourself, I can point to a multitude of real examples that show Disney's appreciation for cultural pluralism and his respect for other human beings.

But there are also limits to this vision and danger in suppressing conflict and difference in order to create sanitized, controlled, consumer-based experiences. Celebration operates like a gated community its population self-selects by income. This fosters intolerance or indifference to the ongoing challenges of living in real-world, democratic communities.

Is it really fostering "intolerance or indifference" or merely a reaction to "intolerance or indifference"?

They know how to turn an otherwise inhospitable landscape into a paradise that people will pay large sums of money to come to. They know how to develop infrastructure from scratch. They know how to build to high standards and within a budget. They know what is technologically possible, and how to integrate that technology. They know how to feed tens-of-thousands of people daily, and cater to their every practical, and even impractical need. And they know security. There are probably few places safer than a Disney property.

Six Flags offer taller and faster coasters at the expense of the well crafted "artificial" experience that Disney offers. In city design, one would be like a giant round building complete with all the infrastructure, necessary stores and outlets, perhaps the epitimy of efficiency, whilst the other would be more like beautiful architecturally crafted buildings... complete with all the needs.
Either way, we need to envision a combination and a way to "grow" these planned spaces such that residents can enjoy, on a planet that otherwise would not be able to support tens of billions of people.
No cars (in the usual sense) needed, transport will be far more efficient, by use of vertical cable cars from say, 156th street "down" to the food store, walking and biking via pathways and even an occasional coaster. Being that hundreds of thousands of people could live comfortably in a single square mile (and highrise buildings), there would be no need for stop lights and congestion.
The two dimensional transport system of today shall be obsolete in Tomorrowland!