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Volume 1, Issue 1
  • ISSN: 29767911
  • E-ISSN: 2976792X
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Abstract

In 2015, the Walt Disney World Resort rebranded their property’s 40-year-old shopping, dining and entertainment complex into ‘Disney Springs’. Since 1975, the property has served as a mixed-use shopping centre for tourists and locals visiting the 27,000-acre Walt Disney World Resort in Central Florida. Alongside a significant expansion, the name change signalled a new unifying theme for the 120-acre shopping centre taking inspiration from Florida’s past. This article argues the redeveloped aesthetic of Disney Springs leverages a selective interpretation of Florida history to create an immersive experience conveying a layered past and transitioning space over time. Theming deploys multiple architectural styles distinct to different eras of Florida history to chronologically intertwine the themed space into Florida’s past and present. Disney ‘Imagineers’ utilized locally inspired vernacular architecture, design features and a fictionalized historic narrative to present Disney Springs as a repurposed Florida town originally established in 1850. The shopping centre’s manufactured spring marks a fictionalized point of origin surrounded by four districts, referred to as ‘neighborhoods’, representing distinct time periods of Florida’s past. The result places consumers in a portrayal of Florida history as an immersive theme and interweaves Disney Springs’s fictional past into an ordered conception of the state.

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2024-11-30
2025-03-15
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Making history at Disney Springs: Florida’s past as themed tourism
International Journal of Disney Studies 1, 71 (2025); https://doi.org/10.1386/ijds_00005_1
/content/journals/10.1386/ijds_00005_1
/content/journals/10.1386/ijds_00005_1
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  • Article Type: Article
Keyword(s): architecture; consumerism; memory; Old Florida; settler colonialism; theme park; tourism; Walt Disney World
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