Before there was a theme park called EPCOT, there was a concept: Walt Disney's Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow, a functioning city where 20,000 people would live surrounded by cutting-edge technology and progressive urban design. Walt died in 1966 before it could be realized, and the company turned the idea into a theme park instead. But the dream of a Disney-built community never quite disappeared. In the early 1990s, the Disney Development Company carved out land in the southern portion of the Reedy Creek Improvement District and established the Celebration Company. CEO Michael Eisner pushed his executives to "make history" and build a town worthy of the Disney brand. The total investment would reach an estimated $2.5 billion. Two Driehaus Prize-winning architects, Jacquelin T. Robertson and Robert A. M. Stern, drew the master plan, while San Francisco firm EDAW designed the parks, trails, and pathways. Pittsburgh's Urban Design Associates created the architectural pattern book that would govern every new building's appearance.

Walk through downtown Celebration and you are strolling through a catalog of late-20th-century architectural celebrity. Michael Graves designed the post office. Philip Johnson designed the Welcome Center next door. Robert A. M. Stern shaped the Celebration Health building. The movie theater came from Cesar Pelli. The Preview Center was a Charles Moore creation. Graham Gund contributed the Bohemian Hotel. Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown designed the SunTrust Bank. Even the street signs, manhole covers, fountains, and golf course graphics were the work of a noted designer: Michael Bierut, hired by Disney to give every detail a coherent aesthetic. The result is a town center that feels both deliberately charming and slightly surreal, its New Classical and early-20th-century styles carefully calibrated to evoke nostalgia for an American small-town life that may never have quite existed.

Celebration is organized into villages, each with its own character. The main village sits closest to downtown, where the first homes went up in 1996. North Village houses Georgetown condos and Acadia estate homes near U.S. 192. Lake Evalyn offers a small lake where residents spot ducks, alligators, and the occasional river otter. South Village features Spring Park Loop estates and Heritage Hall. Artisan Park, at the far end of Celebration Avenue, mixes condos, townhomes, and single-family residences around a clubhouse with pool, gym, and restaurant. The town hosts an annual calendar of events that lean hard into its name: the Great American Pie Festival (televised on the Food Network), an exotic car show, Oktoberfest, and holiday celebrations where soap flakes drift through the Town Center as artificial snow, with manufactured autumn leaves tumbling alongside them. Over 500 businesses now operate in the community's plazas and office complexes.

Celebration is not, technically, a city. It remains an unincorporated census-designated place in Osceola County, governed as a community development district under Florida law. The largest landowners are still entities controlled by the Walt Disney Company. The town uses a Kissimmee ZIP code, 34747, and its 11,178 residents (per the 2020 census) live in a legal gray zone: not quite a subdivision, not quite an independent municipality. Disney divested most direct control years ago, but the company's office buildings still anchor the commercial district, and World Drive still connects the town directly to the Magic Kingdom. It is a community designed from the ground up to embody a particular American ideal, dropped into the swampland of central Florida beside the most visited tourist destination on Earth, a place where the boundary between aspiration and artifice remains, by design, difficult to locate.