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1. A Theme Park Built for One: The New Urbanism vs. Disney
Design in The Truman Show
DOUGLAS A. CUNNINGHAM
Mr. Hammond: The lesson of The Truman Show is not that
Seaside is cute or oppressive, but that there are ... lots of
chumps in this world who believe that what they see in films
is actually real. Please try to not be one of them.
-Andres Duany, Co-Founder of the New Urbanist
Movement and Co-Designer of Seaside, Florida,
responding to a ListServ Posting'
There's so much that we share
That it's time we're aware
It's a small world after all.
- Lyrics, 'It's a Small World After All'
In the summer of 1996, director Peter Weir and his location managers
visited a small town on Florida's Gulf Coast to scout locations for
their new film. The Truman Show, the tale of a young man, Truman
Burbank, who literally (and unwittingly) lives inside a television
program. Everything Truman knows or has known in his entire life -
friends, family, even the town in which he lives or the sky he sees at
night - has been fabricated solely to perpetuate Truman's ignorance
about the fact that billions worldwide view his existence daily. The
screenwriter, Andrew Niccol (whose eye for visionary architecture
had inspired him to shoot much of his own film, Gattaca, in Frank
Lloyd Wright's Marin County Community Center the previous year),
had planned to use Manhattan as the setting for this newfilm.^Weir,
however, felt, the story might benefit from a more unknown,
'idealized' location, and the crew finally settled on Seaside, an
experiment in 'neotraditionalist' community design.^ The result of
this decision provided the world with its first 'big-screen' exposure to
a New Urbanist community.
© CS 2005

2. 110 Critical Survey, Volume 17, Number I
The first of its kind, Seaside had debuted onto the American urban
design scene some 16 years earlier. The brainchild of
architects/planners Andres Duany, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, and
developer Robert Davis (who had inherited the 80-acre property).
Seaside drew international attention almost immediately; after all, the
town sported a slew of innovative (and in many cases retro) city-
planning ideas.'' For example, pedestrians rule in Seaside, not cars -
most any site in the town can be reached after afive-minutewalk, and
garages do not dominate housing designs. Also, in an effort to
promote interaction among residents, most homes in Seaside feature
front porches only a few steps from sidewalks. Features such as these
(and many others) have made Seaside the model of success for the
New Urbanism, a growing urban design movement dedicated to
curbing sprawl, fighting car dependencies, and restoring richness and
diversity to neighbourhood life.
In 1997, however, the Walt Disney Company opened the gates to its
own New Urbanist village - Celebration - located just southwest of
the Walt Disney World Resort near Orlando. The premiere of
Celebration caused reasons for joy and concern among proponents of
the New Urbanism; for while the movement was sure to gain even
more publicity and momentum as a result of Disney's effort, the
association of the New Urbanism with Disney's trademark brand of
'manufactured happiness' was sure to raise some eyebrows. Indeed,
when The Truman Show opened a mere two years after Celebration,
commentator Reed Kroloff wrote the following for an editorial in the
magazine Architecture:
[The Truman Show is an] indictment of Disney's town of Celebration and
its calculated conftation of nostalgia-marketing and urban design. When
questioned about Truman Burbank's diorama-quality environment, one of
the film's characters suggests that the town 'isn't fake, it's just controlled.'
Chillingly, that's the same argument used by the Disnoids who are paid to
defend Celebration against similar charges.^
Like Celebration, Seahaven (the name of the city Seaside becomes
within the diegesis of The Truman Show), has its flashy downsides; in
fact, the town becomes yet one more in a long list of panopticonic
oppressions suffered by its hero. The false cheeriness of Truman's
environment not only disguises his prison but also makes him
complicit in his own detention. Perhaps more importantly, however,
like the theme parks in which Disney specializes, the mere spectacle

3. A Theme Park Builtfor One 111
of Seahaven serves to disavow threats of racial and class difference.
Certainly New Urbanism has sometimes fallen victim to similar
accusations - but are such accusations justified? As Duany asserts,
after all, Seahaven is not Seaside - a statement that raises an
interesting question: Does The Truman Show seek to criticize New
Urbanism, or does the film seek instead to indict the disavowal and
'whitewashing' of American class and racial confiict (an agenda very
much at odds with the tenets of New Urbanism)?
In this paper, I contend that The Truman Show presents its dystopic
setting of Seahaven as a nightmarish 'theme-park-built-for-one', a
socially produced space (ala Disneyland) that seeks to erase the
historical record of race and class antagonism within America. I will
begin with a discussion of postwar suburbanization and 'white fiight,'
noting how the negative legacies of these interrelated phenomena
inspired the advent of the New Urbanism. Next, I will explore the
differences between New Urbanism and Disney's 'architecture of
reassurance', focusing specifically on how the respective inner-city
revitalization projects of these two design movements bring their
sometimes blurry distinctions into sharp focus. Finally, I will
demonstrate how The Truman Show takes advantage of those same
blurry distinctions, substantially altering a New Urbanist community
in order to criticize the erasure of race/class difference inherent to
Disney theme-park aesthetics.
'Whitewashing' the Postwar American Suburb
The New Urbanism emerged in America as a potential remedy for
decades of inadequately planned suburbanization. The period in which
this suburbanization actually began raises debate. Herbert Gans, for
example, cites the latter half of the nineteenth century as the advent of
suburbia, when development in major metropolitan areas began to
move into circles outside the city limits.^ Eric Avila, on the other hand,
claims that '[a]lthough the suburbanization of the United States began
in the 1920s, it was not until the postwar era that the process gave way
to white fiight through the collusion of public policy and private
practice' (57). This project will limit its scope to the period mentioned
by Avila (especially the suburban boom of the postwar era and
beyond), primarily because this period gave birth to most of the
community-planning problems New Urbanism later hoped to address.

4. 112 Critical Survey, Volume 17, Number 1
The twentieth century roots of the suburban movement began
innocently enough. Architectural Modernists such as Tony Garnier
and Le Corbusier championed principles of town planning that would
include 'segregation of use, love of the auto and dominance of private
over public space'. Even the visionary Frank Lloyd Wright bought
into Modernist plans for the decentralization of cities.^ When the
stock market crash of 1929 left millions of Americans in poverty,
Wright felt inspired. He and his apprentices began designs for a
community - Broadacre City - that would include all the essential
components of a major metropolis. Wright planned to locate
Broadacre City in a rural region far from metropolitan areas, and he
also hoped to employ his Usonian designs (noteworthy for their cost-
effectiveness and affordability) as the architectural basis for
Broadacre City's homes. Other projects came to dominate Wright's
time, however, and no aspect of Broadacre City itself (save for a few
Usonian homes scattered throughout the nation) ever became a
reality. * Still, Wright's vision of a suburban future - including easily
replicated low-cost housing and sprawling urban design concepts
based on the automobile - meshed well with the ways in which later
planners would draw out the suburban future.
Prior to World War II, major cities in the cosmopolitan east and the
industrialized Midwest laid claim to most of America's population,
although numbers in Los Angeles grew substantially in thefirstquarter
of the twentieth century. The racial character of New York, Chicago,
and Los Angeles changed dramatically in the postwar years, however.
Ingrid Gould Ellen cites as an example one neighbourhood in Boston
(Mattapan) which transitioned from a 99.9 per cent white population in
1960 to 48 per cent black in 1970 to 85 per cent black in 1976.^
Similarly, Avila states that the black population of NewYork increased
250 per cent between 1945 and 1960, while the black population of
Los Angeles increased by 800 per cent.'*'
What caused this postwar 'exodus' (as Gans calls it) of blacks from
the South to the cities and of whites from the cities to the suburbs?
Certainly, as Ellen notes, new jobs, deaths, marriages, births, and
general longing for home ownership or more space play major roles
in all decisions to move - factors that World War II and its baby-
boom aftermath injected heavily into postwar America. Ellen
acknowledges, however, that 'white flight' also played its part in post-
World War II suburbanization." Although the United States had
entered that war as a respectably industrialized nation, increased

5. A Theme Park Builtfor One 113
production during the war years solidified America's place as one of
the world's two leading superpowers (both militarily and
economically) in the postwar era. As industrialization increased in the
South during the two decades following the war (the invention ofthe
mechanical cotton picker played a role here), many African-
Americans found themselves either out of work or pushed oif rural
land and forced to move. In fact, over 4 million African-Americans
from the South migrated to northern or western cities between 1940
and 1970. Partially in response to this mass influx of blacks, whites
fled the cities by the droves, heading into newly developed areas
outside the metropolitan congestion. These new suburbs became sites
of refuge, places to begin (whiteness) again, far away from the
compounding racial threats ofthe cities.
And yet, as the next 50 years would show, the promises of the
American suburbs brought their own share of special problems. Long
commutes, traffic jams, pollution, careless city planning, destructive
disregard for built heritage, ecological ignorance, lack of adequate
recreational space, and mind-numbing public and private architecture
all contributed to the general malaise and cynicism of suburban life in
the late twentieth century. In many ways, postwar suburbanites
essentially exchanged one set of problems for another. While they
may have escaped the mounting 'black scare' ofthe inner city, these
perpetrators of white fiight, in the process, created for their
grandchildren a legacy of banality, boredom, cultural homogeneity,
and familial/personal dysfunctionality. Philip Langdon mentions one
example of such dysfunctionality: 'In a modern suburb,' he says,
'adolescents can go few places under their own power. They need
wheels - four of them ... At the very moment when adolescents are
trying to establish a degree of independence from their parents, they
are made dependent on them for a car or the money to operate it'.
Along these same lines, journalist John Fraim cites the tragedy of
1999's Columbine High School shootings in an attempt to diagnose
the ills of suburbia:
... it seems to me that the finger of blame should be pointed back at us and
the places where we live - the tract housing developments like Littleton,
Colorado .., [Respected] critics of modem suburbia see the area we live in
as a powerfij medium, influencing our lives to a much greater extent than the
television shows we watch, the video games our children play, the hours we
spend on the Internet, the products we buy. In an era of equality of
homogenized experience, it may be the commonality ofthe dull architecture

6. 114 Critical Survey, Volume 17, Number 1
of everyday life - rather than the electronic medium of the Internet - that is
the real 'culprit' in creating our increasingly virtual world.'^
The list of disenchantments with suburbia extends about as far as the
commute from Palmdale to downtown Los Angeles, but as any
American with a driver's license can attest, most new construction
continues along the same lines as that of the last half-century. And
while by 1990 neighbourhood integration in the United States had
increased significantly, approximately four-fifths of the nation's
neighbourhoods remained racially homogenous.'^ Proponents of the
New Urbanism seek to counter these neighbourhood trends by
employing neotraditionalist principles of community design.
But what does the New Urbanism truly advocate and how does it
hope to achieve its goals? As stated in its 1993 charter, the Congress
for the New Urbanism (CNU) '... views disinvestment in central
cities, the spread of placeless sprawl, increasing separation by race
and income, environmental deterioration, loss of agricultural lands
and wilderness, and the erosion of society's built heritage as one
interrelated community-building challenge.' In this short preamble,
the CNU confirms its commitment to tackling most of the
aforementioned issues facing America's inner city and suburban
neighbourhoods. The charter goes on:
We advocate the restructuring ofpublic policy and development practices
to support the following principles: neighborhoods should be diverse in
use and population; communities should be designed for the pedestrian
and transit as well as the car; cities and towns should be shaped by
physically defined and universally accessible public spaces and community
institutions; urban places should be framed by architecture and landscape
design that celebrate local history, climate, ecology, and building practice.
In Other words, by employing some of the most useful and successful
design principles of pre-Modemist communities, the New Urbanist
planners hope to create more efficient living spaces while, at the same
time, fostering a greater sense of community. For example, in^ Better
Place to Live, Langdon closely examines street patterns in an effort to
identify why certain communities (such as Oak Park, Illinois) possess
a sense of place and identity differentfi-omthe typical postwar suburb.
Planners of Oak Park designed their community for people rather than
cars, Langdon concludes, and this fact makes all the difference.
Shorter blocks, pleasing views, and interesting architecture encourage

7. A Theme Park Builtfor One 115
residents and visitors to walk in the neighbourhood and meet one
another. Commercial business districts (no chains) integrate into the
town's easy to follow grid of streets, and the residents frequent these
businesses."* Similarly, Duany and Plater-Zyberk's ideas for Seaside
came about as a result of their own driving tour of small towns in the
South. These towns featured a number of neighbourhoods branching
off from a public square where civic and commercial buildings stood
side by side to mark the centre ofthe community. On a more regional
scale. New Urbanists envision a number of these small towns
connected by mass transit (such as lite rail) to carry residents to the
nearest metropolis where infill and revitalization projects will have
once again made the urban centre active and economically viable.
(Portland, Oregon, stands as the current poster child for the success of
such an effort; although the innovations in that city technically predate
the New Urbanist movement, the principles used in the revitalization
have literally resurrected the downtown area. Portland authorities also
established the concept of the Urban Growth Boundary, a measure
designed to aggressively plan for growth while preserving the natural
surroundings ofthe area.)'^
Without a doubt, the New Urbanism can claim its share of success
stories. Seaside, Laguna West, and Kentlands - as well as dozens of
other such projects around the nation - have inspired the American
design community and the general public in ways no one could have
imagined (even if some such communities suffer financially in their
early years). Many major officials, including governors. Secretaries of
Housing and Urban Development, and even Al Gore, have expressed
support for the ideas of this design movement. Many critics, however,
contend that the New Urbanism cannot deliver all it promises. For
example, they charge that the 'big box' architectural style of major
merchant chains (Wal-Mart, Target, etc.) and factories will never fit in
to New Urbanist designs. Critics also charge that New Urbanists will
always have a number of difficulties to overcome with zoning laws
and local safety codes, and that the forecasted reductions in traffic
congestion have yet to prove themselves empirically. Perhaps the
greatest cdticism ofthe New Urbanism, however, concerns its goal of
neighbourhood diversity. Have New Urbanist communities developed
into places representative of different social and economic strata, as
outlined by the CNU charter? As William Fulton points out,'... many
ofthe early New Urbanist communities have actually been targeted to
high-income homebuyers, leading to charges that New Urbanism is

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9. A Theme Park Builtfor One 117
elitist in nature'.'^ As Table 1 demonstrates, the residents in certain
New Urbanist suburban developments reflect a white majority, and in
two cases, the percentage of non-whites in the communities falls
significantly below the percentage of non-whites in the surrounding
county. Laguna West, however, boasts a percentage of non-white
residents slightly above that of Sacramento County.
How do such figures compare with those of the types of traditional
communities on which New Urbanists supposedly based their ideals?
See Table 2. Langdon cites Oak Park, Illinois, and Upland, California,
as two places worthy of emulation. Similarly, Hawkinsville, Georgia,
represents the type of 'town square' community Duany and Plater-
Zyberk might have seen on their pre-Seaside travels through the
South, and Marceline, Missouri - Walt Disney's hometown - served
as the basis for the design of Main Street, USA at Disneyland.
The greatest disparity between percentages of non-whites in the
community and percentages in the surrounding county actually occurs
in Hawkinsville, which holds a 24-percentage point difference in favour
of the percentage of non-whites occupying the actual community. The
next highest disparity occurs in Oak Park, which holds a 14.7-
percentage point difference in favour of the percentage of non-whites in
the surrounding county. The New Urbanism's Wellington follows Oak
Park with a 12-percentage point difference in favour of the non-whites
in the surrounding county, but Upland is not far behind with an 11.1
percentage-point difference. While these figures certainly do not
encompass the number of communities. New Urbanist and otherwise,
necessary to establish empirical fact or draw any major conclusions,
they nevertheless provide a snapshot glimpse of how varied the results
of diversification efforts can be in a New Urbanist suburban
development and their predecessors. The whiteness of certain New
Urbanist suburban communities should not, however, reflect on the
ideals of the New Urbanism as a whole; after all, as the next section will
show, the New Urbanism's commitment to diversity, mixed-income
neighbourhoods, and the revitalization of public housing help to set the
movement apartfi-omDisney's 'architecture of reassurance.'
Disney vs. the New Urbanism
The 'Disney-esque' nature of the New Urbanism surfaces again and
again as one of the most common criticisms of neotraditionalism.

10. 118 Critical Survey, Volume 17, Number 1
Complaints that New Urbanist communities look 'fake' or seem too
'deliberately nostalgic' commonly surface, although many of these
same critics cannot help but admire the rich colours, pleasing views,
and clean streets such towns offer. Places like Disneyland's Main
Street, USA, and Walt Disney World's Liberty Square inspire many
ofthe same feelings one experiences in a New Urbanist community.
'Americans love Disney World,' James Howard Kunstler writes^
'because the everyday places where they live and go about their
business are so dismal that Disney World seems splendid in
comparison'.'^ The Canadian Centre for Architecture describes
Disney theme park design as the 'architecture of reassurance,' an
idea the Centre expounded upon for a travelling exhibit ofthe same
name. As that exhibit's accompanying brochure points out, 'Disney
saw the park as a tacit critique of the chaotic American city and the
meandering post-war suburbs that were ruled by the automobile.'
Without a doubt, the New Urbanism and Disney's 'architecture of
reassurance' share a number of common goals: Both seek to modify
behaviour and feeling through design. Both advocate pedestrian-
friendly communities serviced by mass-transportation systems.
Both see the town square as the centre of civic, retail, and
recreational life. Both see cleanliness as a neighbourhood virtue.
Both use colour and varied architectural schemes to create a feeling
of local identity, character, and history. Indeed, many of the
elements currently championed by the New Urbanism have some
roots in visions championed earlier - and introduced to the general
public on a mass scale - by Walt Disney himself (Canadian Centre
for Architecture).
Disneyland, of course, had its own roots firmly planted in the
expositions and world fairs ofthe late nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries. Such fairs served as the recognized sites for exhibitions and
demonstrations of innovative Modernist ideas, and the ideas for
Disneyland and many of its characteristic elements drew inspiration
from just such events.'^ The fairs, of course, also prepared the masses
for the fetishistic power of spectacle, a phenomenon that Walter
Benjamin understood well in his studies ofthe Paris arcades:
The international fairs were the origins of the 'pleasure industry'
[Vergnugungindustrie],' which '[...] refined and multiplied the varieties
of reactive behavior of the masses. It thereby prepares the masses for
adapting to advertisements. The connection between the advertising

11. A Theme Park Builtfor One 119
industry and world expositions is thus well-founded.' At the fairs, the
crowds were coordinated to the principle of advertisements: 'Look, but
don't touch,' and taught to derive pleasure from the spectacle
(The next section will demonstrate how Benjamin felt this fetishistic
derivation of pleasure from spectacle contributed to the numbing of
the revolutionary impulse of the masses.) Later, Disneyland and its
offspring took the place of the very events that had inspired them. As
Neil Harris observes, 'Disney was able to retain the exposition's
moralism without harnessing himself to its heavy didacticism. He did
so, in large part, by harnessing childhood nostalgia for his own
creations to the historical myths and fiiturist conceits that fairs had
employed'.^' This same dedication to nostalgia would serve Disney
designers well in planning the 'gateway' to Disneyland.
Perhaps no single aspect of Disney urban design influenced
neotraditionalism more than Main Street, USA. Complete with a
town square, juxtaposed civic and retail buildings, and ready access to
public transportation. Main Street, USA, was - like Seaside - based
on a traditional, tum-of-the-century community (in this case, Disney's
hometown of Marceline, Missouri - see census figures in Table 2).^^
The Disney designers built Main Street, USA, on a 'toytown' scale,
constructing the buildings (above the first floor) to five-eighths their
normal size - thereby giving 'adults the same feeling of mastery and
control that children feel when playing with dollhouses or miniature
villages or a model-train layout'." Although the New Urbanism
dispenses with the scale reduction, the movement nevertheless owes
much to the precedents set by Disney - right down to the red-coloured
streets Seaside shares with Disneyland.
No wonder, then, that utterances about the New Urbanism often
include Disney in the same breath. Yet, despite the influences and the
similarities, one fundamental difference exists between the two design
movements: While Disney design seeks to 'reassure' through the
compartmentalization or erasure of difference, the New Urbanism
strives to promote and enable diversity of class and race. Nowhere
does this point become clearer than through an examination of two
separate urban renewal projects, Disney's renovation of New York's
Times Square and the New Urbanism's involvement with HOPE VI.
Disney's mid-1990s makeover of the famously decadent Times
Square brought a much-welcomed capitalist broom to sweep up the
filth of the area. The area - home to hordes of 'pimps, hustlers, and

12. 120 Critical Survey, Volume 17, Number 1
drug dealers who by the 1970s had replaced sailors as perhaps the
area's most emblematic citizens' - got a major facelift when Disney
purchased the dilapidated New Amsterdam Theater as a venue for
Broadway adaptations of its films. In addition to the theater, Disney
brought in a Disney Store, an ESPN-themed restaurant, and
countless other retailers and merchants eager to follow in Disney's
footsteps.^'' While no one seems to mind the safer, cleaner Times
Square, some residents - as The New York Times points out - miss the
unique character of the former place: 'Times Square has always
changed every 20 years,' [Nik] Cohn says. 'But this time it's changed
to a corporate, generic American city that doesn't particularly
express the uniqueness of New York'. Most of the most
'questionable' elements of the area were evicted (only two businesses
from the pre-Disney days had survived the turnover as of 1997), and
little media attention seems to have been paid to exactly where the
former occupants of Times Square ended up. Perhaps no asks
because no one wants to know - thereby making Disney's erasure of
the racial and class differences in Times Square a resounding
success. The event, in fact, is not unlike a similar slum-clearing
described by Lawrence Vale in From the Puritans to the Projects.
Vale describes how the Boston Housing Authority's plans to
redevelop the waterfront slums of West End for luxury housing and
highbrow retailers forced the relocation of 1,731 low-income
families between 1958 and 1959:
The new West End, like many other subsequent downtown redevelopment
efforts, could be wholeheartedly championed by city hall, the city's major
newspapers, and the Boston business community as 'a strategic way of
bringing middle-in-come families - 'quality shoppers' - back to the heart
of the city.'... With non-productive people marginalized, the center city
could be both rebuilt and repopulated, turned into 'a bright, shiny new
environment for the type of people who would patronize downtown
department stores, dine at expensive restaurants, and make purchases at
fashionable boutiques.'^^
Granted, no one wants prostitutes, pimps, or drug dealers inhabiting
a community. After reading and witnessing all the laudits for Disney's
work in Times Square, however, one cannot help but wonder how
much of an effort was made by the local housing and zoning
authorities to determine exactly what residents of the area fell into the
'denizen' category and what residents did not. With one stroke of the

13. A Theme Park Builtfor One 121
eraser, they all disappeared - as did the historical record of race and
class conflict in Times Square.
The New Urbanism attempts to deal with such conflicts differently.
Although New Urbanists grant that many of their properties have
become mere Meccas for upper-middle-class whites (see Table 1),
members of the CNU continue to experiment with different methods
of integrating racial and class difference into neotraditionalist
communities. The Kentlands in Gaithersburg, Maryland, for example,
builds townhomes and 'granny flats' (apartments above the detached
garages of residents) to provide housing opportunities for less well-
to-do buyers or renters. Such innovations do not, however, address the
needs of truly lower-income families. To address these needs, the
CNU and its members have attempted to integrate permanently
affordable housing into many of their new projects. Permanently
affordable housing uses government subsidies to ensure such homes
remain within a price range affordable to lower-income families.
Although the residents may own the property, regulations limit the
amount of profit they can make from the selling of the home.^^ Such
programs seek to introduce race and class difference into otherwise
homogenous neighbourhoods, granting diversity to community life
and breaking up collective pockets of poverty (Fulton 20).^^
In addition, since 1993, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban
Development (HUD) has employed the principles of the New Urbanism
in HOPE VI, a major grant program (fiinded by mixed public/private
financing) dedicated to refurbishing or demolishing then rebuilding
areas with severely 'distressed' public housing ('What Is HOPE VI?').
Such grants enable neighbourhoods to not only acquire better housing
conditions, but the money also works to secure additional jobs in the
area and to resurrect local businesses, as this summary of a grant
awarded to the Oakland Housing Authority demonstrates:
The Oakland Housing Authority will receive a HOPE VI Revitalization
Grant in the amount of$10,053,254 that will enable the redevelopment of
the Westwood Gardens public housing development. A total of46 severely
distressed units will be demolished and replaced by 37 units of public
housing, 106 tax credit units, 9 affordable home ownership units, and 10
market rate homes for sale ... In addition, the revitalization plan includes
14,000 square feet of retail, community, and civic space. Westwood
Gardens is strategically located next to an important node of the Bay Area
Rapid Transit system ... A one-stop employment and training center will
be located in the new development as well as a day care center. The rich

14. 122 CritiealSurvey, Volume 17, Number 1
transportation network and support services will be used to link residents
with job opportunities in nearby Oakland and San Francisco.
According to Roma Campanielle, HUD's Architecture Specialist for
HOPE VI, HUD has awarded 165 grants since the program's inception
in 1993. Campanielle points out that HOPE VI implements many
neotraditioanalist principles: the restoration of a traditional, easily
navigated street pattern; the use of architecture in scale and in
historical context with the local neighbourhoods; and the commitment
to creating mixed-income, mixed-use communities. When asked
about how the locals - both the public housing residents and their
higher-income neighbours - feel about HOPE VI efforts to create
mixed-income neighbourhoods, Campanielle states that like other
New Urbanist projects, HOPE VI places a 'strong emphasis on
engaging' both types of residents. Through the use of charettes
(brainstorming, feedback, and information sessions similar to the
types employed by Duany and Plater-Zyberk during the development
of Seaside), HOPE VI ensures all parties get a voice in the process.
And because the New Urbanism seeks to weave new homes into the
existing architectural and historical urban fabric, lower-income
residents no longer need feel stigmatised by living in the traditional
public housing high-rises - rather than being ghettoised, lower-
income residents become part of the community. Although
Campanielle admits that HOPE VI is still waiting for 'that historical
perspective,' she nevertheless feels that the program has provided
great results so far: 'You're not just putting public housing back on
site,' she asserts, 'you're putting community back on site.'^*
Although they share many of the same roots and goals, then, the
differences between Disney's 'architecture of reassurance' and the
New Urbanism become quite clear in the context of urban
revitalization efforts. Disney's nostalgia and larger-than-life presence
in Times Square seeks to erase difference and promote consumption.
The New Urbanist efforts of HOPE VI, however, seek to celebrate
difference by weaving people of varied income and race into existing
communities. Despite these differences, however, a cynical equating
of the New Urbanism with Disney design continues to loom. The
Truman Show uses this cynicism to inform its creation of the town of
Seahaven, a literal 'theme-park-built-for-one' where the principles of
the New Urbanism get twisted in an effort to criticize Disney theme-
park aesthetics.

15. A Theme Park Builtfor One 123
TVuman Burbank or Burbank Studios?
As noted earlier, perhaps the most important question to ask about the
depiction of the New Urbanism within The Truman Show is this: Does
Weir mean to present Seahaven as a New Urbanist community, or
does he merely intend to evoke the 'feel' of a Leave-It-to-Beaver
suburb with a little bit of cartoon wackiness thrown in? In interviews,
both Weir and Niccol have surprisingly little to say on the subject, and
the critics (whether popular or academic) concentrate instead on the
film's indictments of the panopticonic, all-consuming media. Perhaps
appropriately, only architectural journalist Reed Kroloff manages to
address the use of the New Urbanism in The Truman Show to any
degree of genuine depth:
Architects and even modest admirers of New Urbanism's goals can laugh
at Hollywood's deadpan rendition of Seaside's most persistent criticism,
that it is too perfect; marvel at the real town's willingness to serve as the
butt of its own jokes; and enjoy the movie as a devilish send-up of New
Urbanism's preening self-righteousness ... Ultimately, Seahaven, Seaside,
Celebration, and their New Urbanist kin are like movies in that they ask
us to suspend disbelief, to accept their nostalgic premise uncritically. And
it's tempting to comply. ^'
Kroloff springboards these comments from a headline that reads,
'Suspending Disbelief: The Truman Show poses the uneasy question,
"At what price New Urbanism?'" Clearly, Kroloff sees the film as a
commentary (if not outright satire) on the neotraditionalist movement.
On the flip side, when approached about the ties between the New
Urbanism and The Truman Show, neotraditionalists (including Duany
and the Communications Director of the CNU) quickly point out that
Weir and crew altered Seaside substantially prior to filming.^''
Perhaps the truth about The Truman Show's use of the New
Urbanism to tell its story lies somewhere between these two opinions.
As mentioned previously, KroloflF suggests that the film criticizes the
'calculated conflation of nostalgia-marketing and urban design' found
in the town of Celebration (11). Kroloff feels this criticism of
Celebration can co-exist with a criticism of the New Urbanism. I,
however, feel that The Truman Show - rather than satirizing the New
Urbanism or even Celebration - actually intends to criticize the
erasure of class and race difference so common to Disney urban
design. In order to do this, the film presents the audience with

16. 124 Critical Survey, Volume 17, Number 1
Seahaven, a 'theme-park-built-for-one' where every item is for sale
and where innovative, New Urbanist design concepts get warped into
cartoonish caricatures ofthe suburban homes televised in 1950s
family comedies.
The fact that all items featured in Seahaven are for sale to viewers
of 'The Truman Show' holds a special significance - one that is
grounded in Marx's concept of commodity fetishism.^' This
phenomenon, wherein the labour used to produce a commodity gets
'mystified' or veiled by the desire for the product itself, serves as tool
of erasure in Seahaven, just as it does in a Disneyland theme park -
or a world exposition.^^ Susan Buck-Morss agrees:
A phantasmagoria of politics had its source in the world expositions no
less than a phantasmagoria of merchandise, wherein industry and
technology were presented as mythic powers capable of producing out of
themselves a future world of peace, class harmony, and abundance. The
message ofthe world exhibitions as fairylands was the promise of social
progress for the masses without revolution. Indeed, the fairs denied the
very existence of class antagonisms.^^
Like a phantasmagorified and permanent resident of just such a
world exposition, Truman lives in relative (although not complete)
ignorance of class and racial confiict. Undoubtedly, OmniCom (the
corporation that 'adopted' Truman at birth for its program) not only
hopes to 'mystify'Truman, but also the billions of viewers worldwide
who, as Christof (the creator of 'The Truman Show') proudly claims,
leave the television tuned to the program all night as they sleep - 'for
comfort.' What 'comfort' would such masses find in the depiction of
race and class difference?
Truman's world - like Main Street, USA, Tomorrowland, or some
strange combination of the two - seems to suggest that although
groundskeepers, newsstand operators, and bus drivers may live in
Seahaven as neighbours alongside white-collar workers, none of these
individuals suffersfi-omof any kind of financial disadvantage. At one
point in the film, Truman's best friend, Marlon - a vending machine
ioader - admits that he envies Truman's 'great' desk job as an
insurance salesman, but 'The Truman Show' never stoops to a
depiction ofthe kind of life Marlon's blue-collar status might provide.
(And anyway, what would be the point? Marlon is actually Louis
Coltrane, a well-paid actor on the most popular television show in
history. Viewers already know that any 'working class' status

17. A Theme Park Builtfor One 125
possessed by Marlon is fake.) Similarly, when Truman's 'father' (a
man Truman believed to have drowned 22 years earlier) breaks onto
the set in an attempt to weasel his way back into the show's narrative,
he comes dressed as a destitute vagrant. When Truman thinks he
recognizes this man, the father gets swept conveniently away by the
trained multitude of actors (including a gaggle of marathoners and a
small dog, all of which seem to emerge from nowhere). Later, Truman
confronts his mother about the incident, claiming to have seen his
father dressed as a 'homeless man'. His mother merely replies, 'It's
about time they cleaned up the trash downtown'. The next day,
Truman sees a newspaper headline that reads, 'CRACKDOWN ON
HOMELESS: Seahaven Island City Fathers say 'Enough Is Enough!'
Officials Respond to Public Outcry over Nagging Problem'. While
Seahaven apparently (at least, according to Truman's mother) has a
'history' of indigents downtown, no depiction of these less fortunate
ever seems to appear on 'The Truman Show'. The viewers see only
the predominantly upper-middle class citizens of Seahaven going
about their business (which, of course, is really Truman's business). In
all likelihood, Truman's only real exposure to poverty and those it
affects probably comes from his own television viewing. 'The
Truman Show', then, only confronts issues of class when pressured
by external events, and even then, the coverage takes the shape of a
co-optation, a ready excuse to explain away the sudden re-appearance
of Truman's dead father. Ironically, however- even within the context
of the 'ready excuse', Seahaven demonstrates its eagerness to erase
the problem of class difference by 'cracking down' on the homeless.
Seahaven seems equally devoid of racial antagonisms, not so much
because such antagonisms do not exist, but rather because too few
minorities 'live' in the town for any conflicts to arise. While a young,
African-American family are the fost neighbours Truman greets as he
emerges from his home on 'Day 10,909', Seahaven finds itself hard
pressed to produce many more people of colour for the 5,000 cameras
scattered throughout the town. With the exception of an African-
American bus driver, what appears to be a pair of Spanish-speaking
(Cuban?) tourists, and a few scattered extras interspersed throughout
the town, Seahaven has been wiped clean of minorities. Extra-
diegetically, such a fact comes as no surprise; after all. The Truman
Show is a Hollywood film aimed at a white audience. The fact
becomes more troubling within the diegesis, however. At one point in
the film, Christof tells Sylvia (a former actress on the show who now

18. 126 Critical Survey, Volume 17, Number 1
lobbies to 'fi-ee' Truman), 'The world, the place you live in, is the sick
place. Seahaven is the way it should be. I think what upsets you ... is
the fact that ultimately, Truman prefers his cell'. When speaking of
Truman's cell, Christof not only refers to Seahaven, designed to keep
Truman 'in'; he also refers to a more intangible and figurative cell
designed to keep the real world (including its threats of racial
difference) 'out.' In this sense, the cell created for Truman becomes in
many ways similar to the 'protective cell of comfort' created at a
Disney theme park where, 'You are emboldened and soothed by clean
streets, smiling faces, happy colors, and the implicit promise that
here, at least, everything will be OK. It will be fun, you won't get lost,
and there are plenty of benches in case your feet get tired'.^'' You
won't be accosted by the homeless. You will never experience white
guilt over imperialism or genocide (the savages are kept at bay in
Adventureland while the Native Americans dare not step foot out of
Frontierland).^^ And on no occasion will you be reminded that
America (and by extension, the park in which you stand) rests on a
historical foundation of slavery.
Truman eventually escapes his cell, of course, but Weir refuses to
reveal the true nature ofthe real world (the 'sick place') into which
his hero emerges. (Weir says he and Niccol struggled with this
decision, but that they ultimately decided the audience would imagine
greater things with this ending than the film itself could possibly
produce on its own.) Perhaps Weir knows us better than we know
ourselves. We do not need to see the 'sick place' - we live there. But
a question remains: What truly makes a place - a neighbourhood, a
community, or a theme park - 'sick'? Is erasure of class and race
difference any more sick than the antagonisms erasure seeks to hide
(especially when that same erasure uses the spectacle of commodity
to help achieve its effect)?
Is It a Small World After All?
Indeed, Truman Burbank does come from a very small world - in fact,
his world is a mere theme-park-built-for-one. And just as the lyrics of
the famous Disney song espouse, Seahaven shines as a place where
race and class antagonisms pose no threat (unless, of course, some
former cast member breaks onto the set dressed as a homeless man).
In this paper, I have argued that The Truman Show portrays its fictional

19. A Theme Park Builtfor One 127
setting of Seahaven as a theme-park-built-for-one, a place where
Disney's 'architecture of reassurance' facilitates the disavowal of race
and class difference. In support of this argument, I have discussed
postwar suburbanization of America and its associated 'white flight',
the sometimes-blurry distinctions between the New Urbanism and the
Disney's theme-park aesthetic, and the ways in which The Truman
Show criticizes that theme-park aesthetic. In a future project, I hope to
examine cinematic representations of neighbourhood, community and
public housing issues as a whole, focussing specifically on the ways in
which Hollywood couches such issues politically. Until then, I can
only hope that the good intentions of the New Urbanism (a movement
still in its infancy and still attempting to prove its worth as a producer
of racial and class diversity) do not get thrown out with the proverbial
bath water - despite the criticisms of cynical naysayers.
Acknowledgements
My thanks to Laurel Eddington, Beretta Smith-Shomade, and other
University of Arizona colleagues for their assistance with this paper.
I am also thankful for the encouragement of Tom Bonner.
Notes
1. My thanks to Steven Bodzin, Communications Director for the Congress of the
New Urbanism, for forwarding this posting to me via e-mail, 6 December 2001.
2. Richard Corliss, and Jeanne McDowell. 'Smile! Your Life's on TV Rev. of The
Truman Show, dir. Peter Weir. Time 1 June 1998: 76.
3. Michael Bliss, Dreams Within a Dream: The Films of Peter Weir (Carbondale:
Southern Illinois University Press, 2000), 186.
4. Peter Katz, The New Urbanism: Toward an Architecture of Community (New York:
McGrawhill, Inc., 1994), 3.
5. Reed Kroloff, 'Suspending Disbelief, Review of The Truman Show. dir. Peter Weir,
Architecture(kxxgwii 1998), II.
6. Herbert J. Gans, 'The White Exodus to Suburbia Steps Up', in Cities in Trouble, ed.,
Nathan Glazer (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1970), p. 40.
7. Peter Calthorpe, 'The Region', in The New Urbanism: Toward an Architecture of
Community, ed., Peter Katz. (New York: McGrawhill, Inc., 1994), xv.
8. David Larkin, and Bruce Brooks Pfeiffer, Frank Lloyd Wright: Master Builder (New
York: Universe Publishing and The Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation, 1997), 102.
9. Ingrid Gould Ellen, Sharing America's Neighborhoods: The Prospects for Stable
Racial Integration (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000), 36.

20. 128 Critical Survey, Volume 17, Number 1
10. Eric Avila, 'Dark City: White Flight and the Urban Science Fiction Film in Postwar
America', in ed., Daniel Bernardi, Classic Hollywood, Classic Whiteness (New York:
University of Minnesota Press, 2001), 164.
11. Interestingly, Ellen distinguishes in her book between 'white flight' (the white
practice of fleeing a community after the increase in black population has 'tipped' over a
certain level) and 'white avoidance' ('the decisions of whites living in all-white
neighborhoods not to move into an integrated neighborhood'). Ellen does not feel 'white
flight' always accounts for today's neighbourhoods that are devoid of whites. Instead, she
feels that today, 'white avoidance' plays a major role in the neighbourhood 'entry' decision
of whites, noting that 'racial composition does matter more in 'entry' decisions than in 'exit'
decisions; thus white avoidance plays a considerably more important role in neighbourhood
racial change than does 'white flight'. See Ellen, 2,104-5.
12. Philip Langdon, A Better Place to Live: Reshaping theAmerican Suburb (Amherst:
University of Massachusetts Press, 1994), 45, 28-29.
13. Ellen states that in 1990, 15 per cent of non-Hispanic whites and one third of all
blacks lived in the one fifth of the nation's neighborhoods that were racially integrated at that
time.
14. Langdon, A Better Place to Live, 50-53.
15. Calthorpe, 'The Region', xi-xvi.
16. William Fulton, The New Urbanism: Hope or Hype for American Communities!
(Cambridge: Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, 1995), 20, & 13-27.
17. Most New Urbanist communities (including some of the older and more notable
communities such as Seaside and Kenttands) do not appear as entries in the 2000 Census
because they are not incorporated. (My thanks to Eric Soder of the City of Gaithersburg,
Maryland, for clarifying this point for me.) Figures shown represent (with the exception of
Hispanics) people claiming only one racial affiliation.
18. James Howard Kunstler, Homefrom Nowhere: Remaking Our Everyday Worldfor
the Twenty-First Cen/ury (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996), 35.
19. Karal Ann Marling, 'Imagineering the Disney Theme Parks', in Karal Ann Marling,
ed.. Designing Disney's Theme Parks: The Architecture of Reassurance (New York:
Flammarion, 1997), 35-38.
20. Quoted in Susan Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the
Arcades Project (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1999), 85.
21. Neil Harris, 'Expository Expositions: Preparing for the Theme Parks,' in Karla Ann
Marling, ed.. Designing Disney's Theme Parks: The Architecture of Reassurance, 11.
22. Alice Potter, 'Hometown U.S.A.', Disney Magazine, Fall 2001, pp. 26-34.
23. Marling, 83-85.
24. Bruce Handy and Daniel S. Levy. 'Miracle on 42nd Street.' Time 7 April 1997, 68.
See also Janet Wasko, Understanding Disney (Maiden, MA: Polity, 2001), 47.
25. Lawrence Vale, From the Puritans to the Projects: Public Housing and Public
Neighbors (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000), 276-79.
26. My thanks again to Steven Bodzin for bringing to my attention and explaining the
practice of permanently affordable housing. Steven Bodzin, Personal Interview, 6 Dec. 2001.
27. Fulton, 20.
28. Roma Campanielle, Personal interview, 10 Dec. 2001.
29. Kroloff, 11.

21. A Theme Park Builtfor One 129
30. In a personal interview I conducted with Beth Folta, Vice President of the Seaside
Community Development Corporation (and principal liaison between Paramount Studios
and Seaside), Folta stated that most of the changes made to Seaside had to do with the
construction of facades for the office buildings that make up Seahaven's downtown area.
Many interiors of Truman's home were actually shot within the actual Seaside home the
character occupies, but many others were shot on a mock-up in a local warehouse in Panama
City.
31. From this point in the paper on, I will use quotation marks to identify the television
program 'The Truman Show' within the film.
32. Karl Marx, 'Capital,' The Marx-Engels Reader, Robert C. Tucker, ed., (New York:
W.W. Norton and Company, 1978), 319-29.
33. Buck-Morss, 86.
34. Marling, 83.
35. An interesting side note here (based on my own personal observation during a trip
to Disneyland in September 2001): While riding the Disneyland Railroad during the 1970s
and 1980s (and probably earlier), park visitors could witness (after passing New Orleans
Station and Critter Country) an animatronic Native American atop a horse. This figure
(wearing the full feather headdress of a Midwestern plains tribe - Cherokee?) looks across
the lake to Tom Sawyer Island, where a log cabin bums. The implication of this set-up, of
course, was that the Native American or his tribe had set fire to the cabin. I believe the
narrative on the train speakers even mentioned something along the lines of an 'Uh-oh!' as
the train passed this scene.) Today, however, the cabin on Tom Sawyer island no longer bums.
Did the park respond to postcolonial complaints about negative representations of Native
Americans? Little has changed in Adventureland, however; this area of the park remains the
site of colonial and imperialist romance and intrigue - perhaps even more so. In addition to
the ever-present racisms of the Jungle Cruise (where kitsch renditions of lost civilizations
stand side-by-side with stereotypical depictions of'warlike' natives and the 'coolies' of white
explorers), Adventureland now also features Indiana Jones and the Temple of the Forbidden
Eye, where visitors join the whip-toting hero as he plunders yet another ancient artifact - and
all in the name of Western archaeology.
Other Works Cited
'1999 HOPE VI Grants.'HOPE yi. U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development 10
Dec 2001 <http://www.hud.gov/offices/pih/programs /ph/hope6/grants/revitalization/
99gtes.pdf>.
'Census 2000.' Bureau of the Census, 6 Dec. 2001 <http://www.census.gov>.
Canadian Centre for Architecture. Brochure for U.S. National Building Museum Exhibit:
'The Architecture of Reassurance: Designing the Disney Theme Parks.' Montreal:
Canadian Centre for Architecture, 2001.
Congress for the New Urbanism. 'Charter of the New Urbanism.' CNU, 31 Jan 2004.
http://www.cnu.org/aboutcnu/index.cfm?formAction=charter&CFID=552l850&
CFTOKEN=660I6830>.
Folta, Beth. Personal interview. 10 Dec 2001.
Fraim, John. 'Landscape and Light', Adbusters, Spring 2000.

22. 130 Critical Survey, Volume 17, Number 1
'What is HOPE VI?' HOPE VI. U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. 10
Dec. 2001 <http://www.hud.gov/offices/pih/programs/ph/hope6/>.
Soder, Eric. Peronal interview, 10 Dec. 2001.
The Truman Show. Dir. Peter Weir, Paramount, 1998.
Understanding Urban Sprawl, Dir.' David Suzuki. Films for the Humanities, 1999.
Wright, Frank Lloyd. An Autobiography. New York: Bames and Noble Books, 1998.