Searching for a New Brand: Reimagining a More Diverse Orlando

Introduction

It is now well-documented that, in these increasingly globalizing and post-industrial times, urban authorities must pay close attention to the images their cities project in order to attract increasingly footloose capital and highly-educated professionals (Amen et al. 2006; Florida 2003). Constructing a positive image is a crucial part of packaging the city as a place to be consumed. In this context, Orlando, Florida (Figure 1) seemingly has led a charmed life since the arrival of Disney company in the early 1970s, as the overwhelming image projected by this place-partner is one fitted to the needs of post-industrial firms and professionals alike (Bartling 2007; Foglesong 2001). The Disney image of good, clean, down-home fun and ultimate safe escape from the vicissitudes of normal street-life provided the growing metropolis of Orlando just what was needed as advanced economies began restructuring toward increasingly post-industrial pursuits.

This sanitized image of Orlando was reinforced by the city's own history. A small agricultural and transportation crossroads town in the middle of a wide swath of equally agricultural central Florida, Orlando had not experienced the growth of industry and the rapid urbanization that this generally entails by the time Disney arrived. As a result, there was no built or social sediment of industrialism that needed to be re-imagineered for the new post-industrial times. This has proven to be a distinct advantage. Neighboring Tampa, for example, has had a difficult time attempting to smother a previous built and social past of manufacturing, heavy industrial port facilities, working class neighborhoods of color, and other industrial remainders in order to project an image more suited to the times (Archer 1996). Indeed, Tampa's trouble in doing this—most recently exemplified by the unevenly successful attempt to bury the city of Tampa within the more blanched, leisurely evoked image of "Tampa Bay" which includes coastal St. Petersburg and Clearwater—serves to underscore Orlando's post-industrial advantage. Orlando, in this respect, can be considered a thoroughly post-industrial metropolitan area arising, as it has, on a virtually featureless pre-industrial plain.

This, in itself, would be a reason for urbanists to study Orlando closely. In this piece, we will focus specifically on emerging problems maintaining the hitherto successful Disneyesque image of the place. The metropolitan area has grown extremely

Figure 1.

Orlando and central Florida.

rapidly in the last four decades as a result of this success, taking up a much larger swath of central Florida territory in its wake (Archer 2006; Hiaasen 1998). With this rapid growth, however, has come the problem of extending the Disney veneer over an increasingly un-Disney-like built and social environment. It is not just the territorial spread of ever-more kitchy, non-Disney roadside attractions that is cracking this veneer, but also the rapid growth in the numbers of the very people who help construct and maintain it or otherwise live and work beneath its hegemonic surface. As Disney has greatly expanded its own attractions within its vast territory, and as it has been joined in the area by many other tourist attractions both major (like Sea World and Universal Studios) and minor (all the various other "worlds" dotting the metropolitan area), there has been an explosion of mostly low-wage tourist-related jobs both at the attractions themselves and in the myriad hotels and restaurants that cater to visitors. As discussed below, while it might have been relatively simple early on—in what one commentator has called the marriage between Orlando and "the Mouse"—to imagineer (a Disney term meaning the combination of imagination and engineering) a safe, delightful image of the metropolitan area, this is no longer possible precisely because of this early success (Foglesong 2001). Indeed, as the metropolitan population has exploded and ethnically diversified it has become increasingly impossible for local authorities, both public and private, simply to "engineer" such a Disneyesque "image" of the place.

Overall, the increasing commodification of city-space has resulted in vigorous...