That is a part of Cause‘s 2025 summer season journey problem. Click on right here to learn the remainder of the problem.
You may not count on there to be a lot for libertarians to love a few city that boasts a grasp plan, the place design conformity is rigorously enforced throughout nearly each constructing and avenue, and whose admirers wax poetic a few constructing code that covers “the whole lot from constructing supplies to roof pitch.”
However Seaside, Florida, typically defies expectations. It is a city constructed on political contradictions: Its surfaces are deliberate and controlled all the way down to the final nail, however it boasts of particular person freedom in its constructing designs. It was based on neo-hippie environmental and communitarian beliefs, however it was privately constructed on explicitly capitalist notions of city improvement. It is designed to really feel like each a tiny city and an enormous metropolis, with the comfy intimacy of small village life and the walkable facilities of a significant metro space. It is a haven for structural conformity, however it performed an vital function in bringing extra selection in training to one in all America’s greatest states. It is a utopian architectural imaginative and prescient that resists pure utopianism.
If one factor about Seaside, it is most likely that it was the principal filming location for the 1998 movie The Truman Present—the story of a person dwelling a lifetime of seemingly idyllic ordinariness in what quantities to a fantasy of American small-town life. It seems that each facet of his life has been contrived and constructed for different folks’s leisure: He is the only nonactor in a tv present about his life, and his excellent little city is definitely an enormous set on the world’s largest soundstage, with each element, from tiny interactions with neighbors to the timing of the dawn, stage-managed by a godlike producer character watching over his each transfer. (Amusingly, the home used within the film is the childhood seashore getaway of Matt Gaetz, the controversial former congressman whom Donald Trump nominated to be legal professional normal.)
The Truman Present is a narrative of liberatory self-awakening, during which a person should escape from a deliberate paradise that can also be a jail. However in the actual world, Seaside is the type of place folks need to escape to—exactly as a result of of the meticulous planning.
Envisioned within the Nineteen Seventies by a bunch of younger, forward-thinking architects who noticed themselves as holistic group planners quite than merely constructing designers, Seaside was meant to embody a perfect of unhurried, beachside life, away from each the stress of the large cities and the cookie-cutter isolation of the suburbs. Through the years, it has turn into floor zero for a preferred and influential imaginative and prescient of American metropolis planning referred to as New Urbanism.
Constructing started in 1981 with what town’s founder Robert Davis has described as a “conservative marketing strategy and a progressive, even perhaps radical, social plan.” Within the 2013 e book Visions of Seaside, a set of essays in town’s architectural historical past and beliefs edited by Dhiru A. Thadani, Seaside’s planners and residents write expansively in regards to the alleged evils of suburban sprawl and necessity of “liberating” folks from vehicles. However additionally they place the city’s improvement throughout the context of “the particular, distinctly, if not fairly uniquely, American custom of capitalist-sponsored city improvement, a practice that existed for 100 years earlier than World Warfare II.”
Seaside is not a film set, however even aside from its connection to The Truman Present, it may possibly really feel like one. The city employs a particular shade scheme of weathered whites and beachy pastels, with wooden slat dwelling building and group buildings that exhibit stately columns meant to evoke a nostalgic Americana. On sunny spring days, the streets are crowded with vacationers, lots of whom come merely for the city’s ambiance.
If you happen to’re planning your individual journey to Seaside, be sure that to e book a number of hours only for strolling round. The city sits on a few of Florida’s most beautiful beachside actual property, with delicate sand that’s almost snow white and Gulf waves that sparkle emerald inexperienced in the appropriate gentle.
Past the pure facilities, commerce is central to the city’s imaginative and prescient of itself. Stroll in from the seashore and you will find a boardwalk speckled with cute, quaint retailers, promoting beachy garments and ice cream. Stroll throughout the road and you will encounter the grand garden, surrounded by retailers which have turn into a central a part of the city’s character, together with Sundog Books and Modica Market, a deli and specialty grocery market that was featured in The Truman Present. And should you’re staying for a meal, make sure you cease in at Bud and Alley’s, a Seaside establishment that has been in enterprise since 1986, and which was named after two of the city’s earliest residents, a canine (Bud) and a cat (Alley).
Mixed with the tidy meticulousness of the townscape, the throngs of flip-flop–sporting vacationers could make Seaside really feel a bit like Disneyland. It is no shock, then, that Seaside’s closest analog—and, maybe, competitor—is the central Florida city of Celebration, a master-planned group based within the Nineteen Nineties by The Walt Disney Firm.
The buildings could also be tightly managed, however exterior of the huge essential garden the landscaping isn’t: One of many early guidelines was that dwelling builders may solely clear a small buffer across the building zone. The remainder of the unique foliage needed to be left in place, unkempt and wild, which implies that at the moment the city’s residential streets are marked by overgrown bushes and bushes, giving the roads a lush, inexperienced, pleasantly shaggy character.
Even the city’s zoning guidelines are derived from a extra propertarian, decentralized understanding of metropolis constructing codes: Seaside was an innovator in “form-based” constructing codes centered on aesthetics and beliefs. This method leaves particular person property house owners with way more flexibility to construct customized, individualized areas, notably with regards to dwelling interiors, than they’ve beneath extra conventional zoning guidelines that focus extra on strict land-use regulation.
Constructed on an preliminary plot of 80 acres that Davis’ father bought within the Nineteen Forties, Seaside is a grand imaginative and prescient of intimate small-town life, organized round an enormous, grassy city heart that options a mixture of retailers and group buildings, together with a tiny put up workplace. Serendipitous group engagement is a part of the design schema: Many Seaside homes characteristic expansive screened-in porches meant to attract folks out of their properties, initially constructed with out air con, on heat evenings. The design was meant to facilitate free-range childhoods: In Visions of Seaside, longtime resident Isaac Stein writes of strolling and biking to high school on his personal as he grew up. “I assumed it was regular for youths to be free after college to discover,” he writes. “I felt extra like an grownup. I used to be in a position to mature at a younger age, operate alone.”
The town’s method to training additionally has extra room than most locations for innovation and native management. Within the Nineteen Nineties, a bunch of Seaside dad and mom needed to create a small, native college. The end result was the Seaside Neighborhood Faculty, which was constructed with funds raised from the filming of The Truman Present and went on to turn into one in all Florida’s earliest and most profitable experiments with constitution education. It helped kick-start Florida’s training reform motion, and is now the oldest energetic constitution college within the state.
The master-planned aesthetic order of Seaside will not be for everybody, and the management it exerts over its streets and homes will irk these freedom lovers preferring a extra anarchic city disjunction. However the pleasures of Seaside—and even its critics are likely to admit that it’s exceptionally, even perhaps eerily, nice—have arisen primarily from personal entrepreneurship and native efforts, from contractual controls and decentralized improvement, from the best way it has balanced communal norms with personal preferences. Essentially the most sudden factor about Seaside is that it one way or the other channels all of those impulses concurrently, pulling collectively disparate worldviews and ideologies right into a coherent entire. It is restrictive. It is liberating. It is each—and that is what makes it so particular.
This text initially appeared in print beneath the headline “In Seaside, Dwelling Is a Means of Life.”
