Disney's 'Storyliving' and the rise of Residential Worlding

All over the news this week are accounts of Disney’s new residential development ‘Storyliving’. Storyliving is a purpose built, Disney themed community that will be constructed in California’s Coachella Valley in the Palm Desert.

Through partnerships with developers, Disney will build a full-size town with a range of residential properties and a commercial centre on the edge of a newly constructed artificial ‘oasis’ and beach. Residents (and visitors who can enter on a day pass) will be able to visit shops, restaurants and promenade around the oasis.’ A ‘voluntary membership’ (which presumably comes at an additional cost) will give access to a waterfront club house, beach area, recreational water activities, Disney entertainment and ‘curated experiences’.

The town will be designed by Disney’s creative team of ‘Disney imagineers’ as a place where residents can ‘write the next exciting chapter of their lives’ within this immersive, Disney branded environment. Disney describe the purpose-built community as a ‘living painting’ in the ‘unique climate’ and ‘boundless beauty’ of the Palm Desert, a landscape that they say has ‘inspired generations of makers, from original inhabitant Cahuilla basket-weavers and storytellers, to contemporary artists and innovators’. As Disney describe it ‘This brilliant living painting is not only fuelled by its own dynamic energy, but empowers all who live here, creating a vibrant atmosphere that encourages residents to keep dreaming and keep doing.’  

The marketing of Storyliving locates it firmly within a culture of immersive experiences. Immersive experiences submerge people into a performative, alternative reality and invite them to interact within it ‘in character’, bringing their own agency and creativity to fantastical worlds. In recent years immersive entertainment has become a popular feature of urban culture and night life. From Secret Cinema– who stage immersive versions of film worlds for spectators to explore before watching the film- to bars themed around TV shows like Breaking Bad, a broad array of immersive activities is now available in major cities. I explored this phenomenon and its socio-political stakes in urban settings in my book Rebranding Precarity.

Disney’s Storyliving goes a step further, inviting people to live their whole lives within an immersive environment where Disney’s fictional worlds and fantasy ethos are infused into day-to-day activities. You can brush your teeth, make your lunch, and handle your water bill all within the ‘dynamic energy’ of this ‘living painting.’

Just as immersive urban entertainment puts a focus on interactivity and agency, Disney’s Storyliving promises residents the opportunity to ‘write the next exciting chapter of their lives.’ Storyliving, they suggest, is an extension of ‘storytelling’. The implication is that residents can extend the imaginative storytelling talents of the Disney industry to craft their own, real life fairy tales - in a ‘my life is my art’ kind of way.

Yet, while Storyliving puts an emphasis on self-authorship, the autonomous creativity it invites will take place within an imaginative world pre-designed by Disney and pre-loaded with all that the Disney industry represents. The residents are the writers, but the scene is already set.

This seems somewhat insane. Who would want to build their life in a themed world? Who would want their home and their day-to-day activities branded by a major entertainment industry? Where is the authenticity in this? How can you genuinely feel like you’re writing your own life story if the parameters of it are so pre-defined? It feels like opting knowingly into The Truman Show.

And yet, to a lesser extent (or maybe just in a more normalised way) this is what we all do, all the time. The term ‘worlding’ has been used to refer to the imaginative world building that goes along with production and consumption. When we buy a coat, some perfume, a book even, we don’t just buy the thing, we buy into the imaginative world around it, we buy the ability to feel part of that world.

This can be true of housing too. While many have little choice about where they live, for those with the financial freedom to make decisions about where to rent or buy, choosing between a semi-detached, picket-fenced, front and back gardened suburban property, a swanky, high rise, inner city apartment, or a crumbling but austerely atmospheric period property is a choice about what imaginative world to buy into, about what stories we want to feel part of.

Worlding has always been part of residential property development, but recent phenomenon like commercial co-living spaces or tiny homes make it even more blatant by offering well developed imaginative worlds of creative, urban sociality (co-living) or off-grid, alternative independence (tiny homes) along with the with physical housing. For example, the co-living space The Collective advertises itself as a community where you might meet your ‘next friend, lover or mentor’ at one of their ‘boundary-pushing cultural events’ in the shared living spaces. The strong imaginative world around tiny housing is illustrated by the amount of ‘I love my tiny home’ t-shirts available on Etsy and by the existence of shows like Tiny Home Nation where hosts help potential Tiny Homers downsize in order to focus on family rather than work and/or or getting ‘back to nature’.

We have always built our lives within imaginative worlds that pre-exist us and are constructed, at least to some extent, by others. There is, of course, a spectrum of worlding-intensity that moves between Disney branded communities at one end, through phenomenon like tiny homes, to the subtle worlding of preferring original floorboards because they make you feel bohemian. There is also a spectrum of how far this worlding is deliberately enacted by developers, or in this case media franchises. Along this spectrum, there’s room to debate where the line is between an immersive, fantasy experience and the affective infrastructures and imagined communities that define everyone’s life.

Storyliving, and its emergence at a time when worlding is so strong in other residential communities, begs an interesting question of why there is an appetite for these kinds of residential ‘experience’ at this particular junction in history.

The political scientist Benedict Anderson argued that we live, primarily in ‘imagined communities’ where what constitutes a community is not so much actual interactions but a shared belief in an imaginative world constructed through media, politicians, mega-events, etc. To feel British, for example, is to buy into that imaginary, to see yourself as part of that story - an imaginative feat assisted by news reportingand spectacles like the 2012 Olympic ceremony, the royal wedding, etc. 

So does the rise of aggressive worlding around residential properties suggest that we no longer feel held by the ‘imagined communities’ of cities and nations that Anderson describes? Are they dissipating, leading us to seek stronger, more deliberate imaginaries to inhabit? Or are they all too present? Do we need escapism from them? Are we looking for fantasy worlds to inhabit that feel lighter than the oppressive, depressive, imaginative communities of national states or of cities where vibrancy has been dimmed by Covid? I'm not sure, but I think tracing the development of these kinds of immersive residential communities can help us to find out.