Abstract
The New Urbanist town of Seaside, Florida, was envisioned by developer Robert Davis and planned by architects Andres Duany and Elisabeth Plater-Zyberk in the early 1980s with the goal of fostering community by simulating the design of historical American towns. By examining periodicals and other news items reporting on Seaside in its early decades, I demonstrate how Seaside's landscape not only mimicked small towns but evoked the collective memory of small-town America in the minds of its beholders. My study of collective memory through Seaside upholds notions of the historical small town as a “nation form” in the American imagination as put forth by scholars like Ryan Poll. I then interrogate the inclusiveness of this nation form, engaging with scholarship denouncing Seaside's call for a simpler time. Finally, by examining how Seaside's visitors harmonize Seaside's playful artificiality with the historic small-town ideal, I point towards the growing role of Hollywood in influencing the representation of the small town in American collective memory.
Tourists driving on Highway 30A along the coast of the Florida Panhandle will describe how, somewhere between Panama City and Destin, an unusual town emerges in the distance (Buhasz, 1996; McChesney cited in Dixon, 2021). Its buildings are low and nestled together, and small towers pop out of almost every roof. As they draw closer, houses with generous front porches give way to a bustling town center right across from the beach. Tight-knit streets radiate in every direction, lined with trees and colorful houses. Though strangely pristine, the landscape may feel somehow familiar. Seaside, Florida, was designed to feel that way.
The idea for Seaside, developer Robert Davis told a reporter, came to him while “reverie daydreaming” (Carlton, 1989). In 1978, Davis inherited 80 acres of empty ocean-front land from his grandfather (Brooke, 2005: 13, 14). Rather than erect the profitable high-rise towers that lined the rest of Florida's northwestern coast, Davis decided to build an old-fashioned town instead (Guenther, 1985; Jackson, 2003: 72). He hired Andres Duany and Elisabeth Plater-Zyberk, a Miami-based husband and wife team of architects, and the three set out to study the recipe for great American towns, and particularly Southern towns (Brooke, 2005: 17). A cinematic scene of the visionaries touring the American South in a 1975 red Pontiac convertible soon became a staple of Seaside's lore (Kunstler, 2018: 45; Brooke, 2005: 17), but Plater-Zyberk has stressed how scientific the process truly was (1991: 83). From Georgetown to New Orleans, they measured street widths, timed walking distances, and studied crowds (Duany, 1991: 62, 63; Andersen, 1991). Although they surveyed eighteen and nineteenth-century towns, they were not looking to recreate a single period or style (Andersen, 1991); rather, Davis strived to recover a lost sense of community, “a way of life” (Davis, 1996, quoted in Jackson, 2003: 72).
The Seaside Style, one of the many boutiques along Seaside's central square, sells pastel SEASIDE sweatshirts with the words “The New Town, The Old Ways” printed on the back (The Seaside Style, 2024). The slogan has spearheaded Seaside's public image from its inception (Carlton, 1989) through its critical scrutiny and commercial triumph. By 1982, Davis had erected the town's first few buildings and sold its first lots for around $14,000 (Coletti, 1992; Brooke, 2005: 21). Ten years later, even non-beachfront properties were valued at $160,000 and today, Seaside real estate is worth millions (Coletti, 1992; Seaside, 2022b). In 1985, The Wall Street Journal lauded Davis's shrewd investment, noting “many developers would call it an invitation to disaster” (Guenther, 1985), and in 1990, TIME featured the town in its “Best of the Decade” entry for design (TIME, 1990). Seaside is hailed as the first American experiment in New Urbanism, an urban design movement set to combat the social and environmental damages of sprawl by building dense, walkable, communities instead (Poll, 2012: 141; Boehm and Corey, 2014: 311). “[…] We've invented nothing,” Duany insisted, “We have done it the old way, literally” (Duany, 1998). By recreating the morphology of “traditional” American towns, the planners hoped to show how landscapes could guide human behavior towards community (Jackson, 2003: 72; Davis quoted in Kay, 1989; Andersen, 1991: 44, 46). But Seaside did more than retrace old townscapes; in calling to mind a bygone friendly town, Seaside evoked the collective memory of small-town America.
Since New Urbanism's 1980s Seaside debut, the movement has hatched hundreds of new/old developments across the United States (Steuteville, 2009)—and drawn critics in near equal measure. Some argue that New Urbanism's prescriptiveness can stifle innovation (Moore, 2013: 2372; Hirt, 2009: 249, 267) and risks pursuing, through design, “a new moral and aesthetic order” (Saunders, 2005: 23). Others (Kelbaugh, 2015: 14; Grant, 2005: 27; Jackson, 2019: 81, 82) find New Urbanism unsuited for the radical demands of climate change and social justice, citing the movement's repeated failure to meet its own (Congress for the New Urbanism, 2024) targets of reducing car dependency and promoting economic and racial diversity. Still others contend its backward-looking mantra yields neotraditional architecture from stale to “kitsch” (see Ellis, 2002: 273). The debate remains: can tradition—the designs of the past—meet the challenges of the present and future?
This article steps away from the New Urbanism debate to explore its call for “tradition” in design altogether. In his chapter “Theoretical Foundations” in A research agenda for new urbanism, Cliff Ellis calls on researchers to unburden New Urbanism by “disentangl[ing]” “tradition” in urban design from “tradition” in the reactionary sense of the word (2019: 13, 14). But in a movement so concerned with the social fabric, is such a separation possible? I pose this not as a thesis to dis/prove, but as a point of departure from which to observe how the public reacted to the New Urbanists’ return to the “old ways” in their very first construction, Seaside. What do impressions of Seaside reveal about the collective memory of small-town America? And how does collective memory interact with design?
Collective memory, though “elusive” to define, can be characterized as memory that is “shared by a group” and often involved in its “identity project” (Wertsch and Roediger, 2008: 318, 319, 320). To explore collective memory through Seaside, I first outline how the planners recovered both the workings and memory of historic American towns in Seaside's design. I then build on a set of interpretations of small-town collective memory to observe different ways Seaside captured the public's imagination through media and criticism reporting on the new town in the 1980s and 90 s. I consider how Seaside's small-town landscape (1) embodies a form of American cultural identity, (2) displays the problems of invoking a bygone time in the American South, and (3) indicates the role of popular culture in shaping the mythical small town of American collective memory.
To be sure, commentators and reporters embellished their stories for narrative flair and to promote travel. I do not take these as accurate descriptions of Seaside but rather ask what their hyperbole sought to evoke. My exercise aims to open-endedly explore the intersection between cultural history and design through a small and incomplete selection of media examples, not to determine Seaside's socio/cultural standing. Finally, I limit my scope to Seaside's early decades to understand the national notions of small-town America that seeded New Urbanism, and to shed light on how the movement's self-described “radical” (Steuteville, 2001) call for tradition was in turn received.
Tracing tradition
Over the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, millions of rural Americans flocked to the country's crammed industrial cities, joining incoming immigrants to reshape the United States into an increasingly urban country (Boehm and Corey, 2014: 141, 144). Cities in response bled into their surroundings, and in the wake of World War II burgeoned into low-density suburbs bolstered by government subsidies and automobility (Boehm and Corey, 2014: 202, 253). By the 1980s, the damages of dispersed urban landscapes were painfully clear: sprawl encroached on local environments, isolated people in their homes, and turned every affair into a taxing and gas-guzzling commute (Montgomery, 2013: 56, 102; Boehm and Corey, 2015: 311). Some began to regard suburbs as threats to American culture (Grant, 2005: 5). David Mohney captured the New Urbanists’ sentiments towards sprawl when he described suburban landscapes as places where “single-mindedness turns to simple-mindedness, stretching on for mind-numbing mile after mile” (1991: 36).
To counter suburban anomie in Seaside, Duany and Plater-Zyberk set out to reinvigorate the lost sense of community of small-town America by guiding the new town's development through two design codes. The first, the urban code, constructed the “public realm” (Duany, 1991: 63). It paved pedestrian-friendly streets, assigned mixed-use areas to promote commercial activity, and drew lots close together (Plas and Lewis, 1996: 114, Carlton, 1989). It subordinated cars and made sure residents crossed paths enough that they would become neighborly (Plas and Lewis, 1996: 114, 116).
The second, architectural code dictated esthetics. It required designers use noble materials and construction methods native to Florida's “vernacular” architecture (Duany, 1991: 64). Seaside was to be authentic: houses had to use operable window shutters, not artificial ones, and grow native vegetation rather than the archetypal, water-intensive lawn (Mohney and Easterling, 1991: 261, 262). This created a consistent landscape without the repetitiveness of suburbia (Duany, 1991: 63, 64). For example, like any old-town streetscape, Seaside's roofs are all made from the same material, tin (Jackson, 2003: 86).
That the planners created an architectural code to make Seaside look—and feel—like a traditional town, and not just function like one, signals how important reproducing a sense of familiarity in the eyes of its beholders was to Seaside's urbanistic objectives (as remarked by architect Christine Macy, Seaside's design engaged the senses like a bite of Proust's madeleine. Macy, 1996: 437; Falconer Al-Hindi and Staddon, p. 351). But many architectural measures were also believed to promote sociability (Duany, 1991: 63, 64). For example, the code required all houses to have a front porch (Mohney and Easterling, 1991: 55). The porch holds a familiar place in the American imagination. “Welcome, it said. Rock a spell. Talk a while,” wrote columnist Jane Holtz Kay (1989) of the porch upon its fashionable revival. Besides summoning old Southern townscapes, the planners hoped porches would encourage locals to meet and linger (LaFrank, 1997: 120)
Seaside's code also included a “quirky rule” (Kunstler, 2018: 46): buildings could erect towers, such that every house may have a view of the ocean (Duany, 1991: 66). This feature, together with Seaside's medley of pastel-colored neotraditional buildings, produced a distinct landscape (Patton, 1991; Duany, 1991: 66). Seaside followed the patterns of dozens of historic towns, but did not quite resemble any one of them (Patton, 1991). Disappointed by the too “cute” buildings that the code's call for the vernacular had produced, Duany commented: “Somebody once said, I think it was Pat Pinnell, that we had designed Kansas, but were building Oz” (1991: 71). Not exactly: Seaside became the film set for the 1998 Hollywood classic The Truman Show, the story of an insurance salesman whose quaint life in the town of Seahaven reveals itself to be nothing but a staged television show (Cunningham, 2005: 109). The artificial town that to viewers may seem to intentionally look like a Hollywood movie-set, is, in truth, a real place (Moore, 1998). Seaside locals even appeared as extras in the film (Rogers, 2012).
Small town, America
That Seaside could take shape as Seahaven's eerily perfect community may be because Seaside's code accomplished many of its objectives. In 1992, The Florida Trend reported: “When Seaside's Ken and Rosemary Scoggins need their groceries, they give a list to their 6-year-old daughter and send her to Modica Market with her little red wagon”; adding, “try that anywhere else and you're asking to be featured in a future episode of ‘America's Most Wanted’” (Coletti). A few years earlier, the market's owner had suffered a stroke, but as happily reported by NBC News, he could still walk to work, as it was only four minutes away (Dotson, 1990). Some (LaFrank, 1997: 120) have questioned the porch's effectiveness at bringing people outside—its historic role as a cooling area undermined by air-conditioning—but, according to one Texan in 1991, his family had by then worn out a number of porch swings and rockers (Patton). Indeed, Seaside visitors and locals alike celebrate the town's sense of community to this day (Abrams, 2021; Ojdana, 2021b). But the employees of Seaside's shops and restaurants never could afford to live there (Jackson, 2003: 76). Despite Robert Davis’ efforts to make the town as “real” as possible (he finally opened a school in 1996, Jackson, 2003: 81, 82, 83), Seaside remains at present an expensive vacation resort, a privately owned, unincorporated community (Krieger, 2019: 77). And yet, spectators cherish Seaside as “an All-American town” (Rogers, 2012). “They're paying triple to come here,” a marketing specialist told the Florida Trend in 1992, “to buy an idea” (Coletti).
ABC News anchor Forrest Sawyer captured that idea in 1998: By now it's settled into American myth, that wonderful town we grew up in, even if we never really did. There's Main Street, maybe a town square, and a great old movie house. And after the movie, we walked to the drug store to see all our friends and enjoy the perfect milkshake (Sawyer & McQueen, 1998).
In his study of American urban idealism, Alex Krieger (2019) traces the mythical small town to its Puritan roots. Originally places of kinship that secured the group's survival, small New England towns were first hailed as “model communities” by nineteenth-century Transcendentalists and only grew more idealized in response to the country's urbanization in the second half of the 1800s (Krieger, 2019: 81, 82). Today, the small town is considered an American idealized symbol of the past (Krieger, 2019: 70; Poll, 2012: 5). To Ryan Poll the small town embodies not only an ideal form of the past, but a “nation form” (2012: 8; see also Orvell, 2012: 1–2). According to Poll, “The small town ideologically stages an authentic and autonomous American space, culture, history, and identity” (2012: 8.)
Seaside Avenue, said Davis in 1989, “should be experienced,” for example, “cruising slowly with the top down in a ‘57 Chevy’” (Davis, 1989, cited in Falconer Al-Hindi and Staddon, 1997: 360). Early public perceptions of Seaside mirror Davis's nostalgia. His reminiscence for lazy leisure is shared in Kay's (1989) column on the front porch—“[…] for those daydreaming on idle summer days or looking for a sense of neighborhood,” she writes, “where better than on this ample perch?”—and by the Boston Globe's Robert Campbell (1987), who compared driving into Seaside to “stepping out of a madhouse onto a cool breezy lawn” (lawns were illegal in Seaside save for the town's central square; Brooke, 2005: 46). A 1989 travel columnist awed at the friendliness of Seaside, including “the strangers who wave and invite you onto their porch for lemonade” (Carlton). And when listing the contents of his rental house's refrigerator, he added after Coca-Cola, “the Classic kind, of course” (Carlton, 1989). The implication: at Seaside, nothing but the original American drink. References to the particularly American nature of Seaside include one writer describing Seaside as a town planned “on the idea of those built in 1776” (year of the Declaration of Independence) (Anderson, 1989), and another proclaiming “a sense of almost frontier-town vigor” on observing Seaside's sprouting constructions (Patton, 1991.)
In an effort to parse the nuances of collective memory, James Wertsch and Henry Roediger compare “collective remembering” (collective memory as “process”) to “history”; they write, “[… ] history is willing to change a narrative in order to be loyal to facts, whereas collective remembering is willing to change information (even facts) in order to be loyal to a narrative” (2008: 319, 324). In this light, the nostalgia with which reporters describe the brand-new town of Seaside indicates how small towns symbolized the past in late-twentieth century American collective memory regardless of when they were actually erected in time. Moreover, the utopian familiarity surrounding Seaside—a peaceful place where strangers offer lemonade —and its evocation of national symbols—the classic Coca-Cola, the heroic frontier—portray an idealized version of American identity, as put forth by Krieger and Poll. The way the public projected this identity onto Seaside speaks to both the planner's success at evoking the memory of small-town America and to the ubiquity of the remembered small-town ideal in the late-twentieth century American mind.
The silence in Seaside
Seaside was, as one commentator put it, “a brand-spanking-new replica of an idealized past” (Patton, 1991), and it captured the public. But from its earliest days, Seaside abounded in criticism. The architecture academia rejected its outdated designs (Ellis, 2002: 274; Kelbaugh, 2015: 8), anti-sprawl activists saw it as just a walkable suburb (Crittenden, 1998), and skeptics proved off-put by its portrayal in The Truman Show (Moore, 1998) or unconvinced by its imitation (Coletti, 1992). When it came to collective memory, some also raised the danger in nostalgically calling upon “the good old days” (a phrase used by Sawyer & McQueen, 1998, and Andersen, 1991: 46), particularly in relation to the American South.
Encountering in Seaside a site for nostalgia, many of the town's new owners and their architects erected retrograde buildings, from neo-Victorian to Greek Revival (Plater-Zyberk, 1991: 78). In a 1997 article, Kathleen LaFrank noted that architectural revivals can express reactionism (she cites the work of A. Wallace, LaFrank, 1997: 113), referencing the American Colonial Revival Movement, which emerged in response to the immigration and industrialization that followed the Civil War. That same year, Karen Falconer Al-Hindi and Caedmon Staddon attributed Seaside's neo-traditionalism in part to “reactionary identity politics” (1997: 264), and with LaFrank interrogated Seaside for drawing directly from the memory of the ante and postbellum (LaFrank, 1997: 116–119; Al-Hindi and Staddon, 1997: 363).
Seaside's code dictates a building's design by Type depending on its use, lot size, and location. In the town's early decades, Duany and Plater-Zyberk referred to the typology of Seaside's largest houses as “antebellum mansion” (Duany, 1991: 65) after the Greek Revival mansion (or what LaFrank calls “plantation house,” 1997: 118) that inspired its code (Duany and Plater-Zyberk, 1991: 102). The code for the more modest dwellings, meanwhile, produced refashioned versions of “dogtrots and shotgun shacks,” the latter once home to sharecroppers in the American South (Al-Hindi and Staddon, 1997: 363; LaFrank, 1997: 188, 119; see also “shotgun” in Vogel, 1989 and “dogtrot” in Mohney and Easterling, 1991: 110). Regarding the antebellum mansion and its inherit stratification, LaFrank suggested that, “in the transfer of this object from the pre-Civil War South to the postmodern Panhandle, certain less pleasant associations were left behind […]” (1997: 118.)
The idealization of small towns, scholars contend, exists in relative opposition to modernity (Poll, 2012: 11, 93; Orvell, 2012: 103). Duany and Plater-Zyberk did not outwardly reject modernity, merely modern urban planning; while the couple was intentional in “invent[ing] nothing” (Duany, 1998), this to them meant recovering a sense of community that could exist in the present and pave a new future for urban design (Duany and Plater-Zyberk, 1991: 86; Macy, 1996: 436). But ideals of community hold a complicated place in the collective memory of small-town America (Poll, 2012: 93). To Poll, the imagined small-town community embodies a “fascist aesthetics,” a homogenous and ahistorical space (2012: 88, see also Orvell, 2012: 130–131). Mainstream American culture has historically excluded Black and other minority populations from representations of American identity, he explains, and points to the telling case of Middletown, a 1929 sociological study of the town of Muncie, Indiana, meant to embody a “microcosm of the nation” (2012: 92, 95, 98). It was later found to have excluded the town's Black residents to achieve a narrative of homogeneity (Poll, 2012: 97; see also Orvell 2012: 139)
Applying this reading to descriptions of Seaside's landscape suggests that the collective memory of small towns could discursively construct Seaside as an ahistorical and homogenous space when engaging with romanticized nostalgia for a bygone past, or South. Architectural Record described Seaside as “a winsome reminder of another, easier era” (Dunlop, 1989) and Architectural Digest as “quaint and sweet,” reminiscent of “a more innocent era in architecture” (Dunlop, 1995). In 1991, a TIME feature harnessed the New Urbanist's wistful spirit towards the decade ahead, calling for a “return to hearth and home, a redoubled environmental concern, humbler, simpler” (Andersen, 1991). And in 1989, after listing some of the 18th and nineteenth-century towns that inspired Seaside's planners, the Atlanta Journal and Constitution noted, “all Florida towns born of another gentler time” (Carlton).
To be sure, these voices do not individually invoke reactionism in their one-sided memories of a “gentle” past (a plaint often leveled against New Urbanists, which they emphatically refute; see Ellis, 2002: 268). Yet when Seaside's many authors deployed collective memory—in the language of tradition and neotraditional architecture—to work alongside the physical layout of historic towns towards fostering community, they invited a Southern imaginary whose violent shadow they arguably overlooked. This at a time when the Florida Panhandle was dubbed the “Redneck Riviera” (Jackson, 2003: 73), and where a Vancouver Sun columnist observed: “The stars and bars, the banner of the old Confederacy, still fly here. In the Panhandle, they ain't just whistlin’ Dixie” (Corbett, 1994).
If collective memories are to inspire design, it is important to question who they serve. By the end of the twentieth century, Seaside had evolved into an exclusive resort of second homes and rentals for overwhelmingly white dwellers (Plas and Lewis, 1996: 117, 118). And while Seaside's luxurious “idiosyncrasies” (Talen, 2019: 1) far from represent the average New Urbanist town, contemporary New Urbanist projects mostly fail to reach their coveted economic, racial, and cultural diversity objectives (Jackson, 2019: 81, 82, 102; Orvell, 2012: 208).
A town in technicolor
Somewhat paradoxically, Seaside's early critics were also quick to identify how the mythical small town that Seaside embodied transcended historical boundaries. As Canadian architect Jack Diamond told a reporter, “The New Urbanism is a nostalgia for a past that never existed—for a small town that Hollywood recreated […]” (Crittenden, 1998). According to Poll, literature has been instrumental in disseminating the small-town ideal by using small towns as stages for American life (2012: 2, 7). This may be why, when Forrest Sawyer described “that wonderful town we grew up in,” he could assume his audience would recognize it immediately even though by 1950 most Americans lived in “urban areas” (“U.S. Cities Factsheet,” 2024) with populations greater than 50,000 (“History: Urban and Rural Areas,” 2022), meaning most adults in the 1990s had not grown up in small towns. By evoking the memories of “a privileged few, diffused through cinema and television re-runs,” wrote Macy in 1996, “Seaside is a gamble that America's adult children have adopted America's remembered childhood as their own” (p. 436.)
If popular culture helped elevate the small town as a recognizable albeit artificial symbol of a shared American identity, then responses to Seaside's uniquely unnatural and rather whimsical landscape reveal how fiction may have not just embedded the ideal town of the past into collective memory—but seeped into its representation.
Although Davis had set out to create an authentic, old-fashioned town, reviewers rendered a much more interesting picture. Seaside was described as a “pastel vision” (Pelzman, 1990) that appeared in the distance like a “mirage” (Buhasz, 1996). One writer found Seaside “a reincarnation of the toy-like resorts of the past” (Campbell, 1987), another stopped to admire what looked like “a slightly oversized doll house” (Yenckel, 1991). Michael Carlton (1989), the reporter happy to find a classic Coca-Cola in his refrigerator, also painted the following scene: On a recent morning in Seaside, I walked through fog as thick as heavy cream in a muted light that painted the sky lemon. As I walked along the brick streets or cut through side yards on a sand path, I found magic. Houses colored my way - pink, salmon, purple, turquoise, red, blue. As I walked past houses with wonderful names - Dollhouse, Casablanca, Treetops, Dragon's Lair, Villa Whimsey - I was transported to another time and place.
If that place sounds more like Disneyland than a time in American history, it may be because there are several similarities between Seaside and “The Happiest Place On Earth.” The entrance street to Disney's theme parks, “Main Street USA,” intentionally resembles small-town America, and Disney went on to open its own New Urbanist town in the nineties, Celebration, Florida (Cunningham, 2005: 119, 110). The likeness fueled Seaside's critics (Cunningham, 2005: 119) and dismayed its designers (Duany, 1998). Duany insisted Seaside's fantastical aura would dissolve once the town wore in (Kunstler, 2018: 44). But even Duany (1991: 72) recognized that the public enjoyed what Vogue called Seaside's “unsettling” perfection (Reed, 1993). As Vogue's reporter explained: "it's easy to get used to – I once saw a broken finial on one of the ornate Victorian walkways to the beach, and I recoiled in horror. It was, of course, repaired within the hour” (Reed, 1993). She and Carlton, both travel writers, drew on Seaside's too-pristine atmosphere in their praise.
The appeal of the small town as a fantastical space may indicate a late-twentieth century shift, where the historical small-town ideal, as circulated in fiction, gives way to a new American utopian landscape shaped less by history as by fiction itself (see also Poll, 2012: 99, 145; Orvell, 2012: 23, 240)
In fact, one could stretch the imagination to tease a thread of fiction out from Seaside's social fabric. In a 1996 survey of Seaside's community, Jeanne Plas and Susan Lewis found that 66 percent of respondents knew of Seaside's design “philosophy” and moreover attested to the code's success: “[…] it makes us friendly” (Plas and Lewis, 1996: 134). “How can you not feel like this is your town,” said a respondent, “when 15 min after you get here a new next door neighbor is asking you to come on over for a glass of tea on the porch?” (Plas and Lewis, 1996: 137). Such was also Carlton's (1989) experience (with lemonade), and even the survey's first author disclosed being offered tea on an earlier, unrelated trip to Seaside (Plas and Lewis, 1996: 124). If small towns staged American life, were Seaside's residents, in some form, performing?
Conclusion: Truman rebranded
Today, “every corner offers the perfect backdrop for a dreamy Insta-worthy shot,” influencer Ellen Flowers Dickenson told The Seaside Times (2021), “so it's no surprise influencers are flocking to Seaside […]”. If in the 1980s and 90 s, Seaside straddled between romantic Southern get-away and Hollywood wonderland, today, its playful atmosphere prevails. Of course, not everyone goes to Seaside for the photo ops. Seaside's blog The Seaside Times brims with stories of people moving to Seaside from New York or London to experience the sense of community that New Urbanism has to offer. But allusions to the past have given way to remarks like “On 30A, the attitude feels more California than California” (Kate Amber in Ojdana, 2021a). When The Truman Show premiered in theatres, Robert Davis saw the need to write a letter defending the town to the public (published in The Seaside Times, according to Jackson, 2003: 82). A quarter of a century later, its Hollywood feature is a major attraction (“20 Years After The Truman Show,” 2018). As Dickenson explains: “For those who haven't heard of Seaside, as soon as we mention The Truman Show, everyone starts booking a flight to experience this picture-perfect getaway!” (2021). With the film's dystopian message now completely submerged, what remains is a dreamy Hollywood movie-set.
When Duany and Plater-Zyberk set out to design Seaside in the early 1980s, they strove to create a town more authentic than its high-rise surroundings. But in its backward-looking vision, Seaside was held as anything from a “Potemkin Village” (Coletti, 1992) to “a splendid and improbable little utopia” (Andersen, 2005). The nostalgia with which audiences met Seaside exemplifies how small towns existed in the American collective memory as objects of the past regardless of their historical standing; after all, Seaside was brand-new. The utopian narratives around Seaside's small-town promise illustrate the small town's position as an idealized form of national identity. The allusions to the antebellum South in Seaside help expose the problems with the archetypal small town's idealization of the past. Finally, the familiarity with which the public embraced Seaside's curiously unnatural character points to a shift in the small-town ideal from one of the past, to one of popular culture.
Creatively interrogating how designs, and the language and stories around them, interact with cultural constructs can guide and explain their reception, ramifications, and successes. To this day, Seaside encapsulates a picturesque Hollywood memory/fantasy and makes it a reality for those who can afford it. In a 2021 essay for The Seaside Times, a mother contemplated her family's recent move to Seaside from London with the reflection, “It's safe to say that I envy my children's childhood (Ojdana, 2021b).
