Why is community always on a mood board? Seaside and the politics of selling belonging

Abstract

This commentary engages with Teresa Brock Moneo's analysis of Seaside, Florida, exploring how nostalgia, collective memory, and idealised visions of small-town America are carefully constructed within the New Urbanist imagination. It argues that Seaside functions not simply as a planning or architectural experiment, but as a curated spatial narrative in which community, belonging, and authenticity are transformed into aesthetic and emotional experiences. Drawing on debates surrounding symbolic economy, spatial justice, and cultural commodification, the commentary reflects on the politics of designing places intended to evoke familiarity, comfort, and collective attachment. Reading Seaside through my own research on Black Caribbean neighbourhoods in London, particularly Brixton and Harlesden, the piece examines how culturally resonant spaces are frequently celebrated, branded, and aestheticised at the precise moment when the material conditions sustaining long-standing communities become increasingly fragile. In doing so, the commentary questions what is lost when the image of community becomes more valuable than the social and material conditions required to sustain community itself.

Introduction: The porch is doing ideological work

Teresa Brock Moneo's ‘From Kansas to Oz’ is a sharp and stylish exploration of how urban design mobilises nostalgia through the commodification of collective memory, subtly proving that charm is never just charm. Through the case of Seaside, Florida, the article demonstrates that the built environment can be carefully curated to evoke an imagined small-town past, transforming memory and tradition into a marketable aesthetic within the New Urbanist project. As she writes, Seaside ‘was designed to feel’ familiar, nostalgic and reminiscent of an idealised American small town (Brock Moneo, 2025: 1). That line does a great deal of work: familiarity here is not incidental; it is planned, managed and sold.

This discussion matters far beyond Florida. Seaside is not just curated to be picturesque; it is politically legible. It shows what happens when planning stops at the level of atmosphere and starts mistaking the image of community for community itself (Zukin, 2010). The question is not simply whether the place is beautiful, coherent or even successful on its own terms. The deeper question is what kind of community is being imagined here, and who counts as its proper subject? This raises fundamental questions of spatial justice about who benefits from the organisation and representation of space (Lefebvre, 1968; Soja, 2010), especially space curated to elicit particular experiences (Zukin, 1995).

Read alongside research grounded in the community infrastructures that have sustained Black Caribbean life in London, Seaside raises questions that extend well beyond Florida nostalgia. Brock Moneo's article grapples with themes that sit close to this research terrain: the spatialisation of collective memory, the commodification of culture, the curation of community as image and the conversion of historically resonant places into marketable experiences. This framework is shaped in part by Zukin's (1995) symbolic economy, Pratt's (2004) scepticism about cultural governance, Evans’ (2009) work on culture as an urban strategy, Hyra's (2017) account of the polished violences of racialised upgrading, Beebeejaun's (2012) insistence that planning has never been neutral in relation to race and exclusion, and Soja's (2010) habit of asking who actually gets justice in space. Research on historically Black Caribbean neighbourhoods in London traces these processes, where infrastructures of survival and cultural continuity are increasingly aestheticised, branded and folded into wider logics of place marketing and redevelopment (Rex and Moore, 1967; Sutherland, 2006). From this perspective, Brock Moneo's reading of Seaside feels less like a random Floridian detour and more like a case whose implications travel remarkably well across the pond. Themes of curated belonging, selective memory and marketable authenticity overlap strikingly with broader concerns about how communal life is rendered legible, desirable and saleable, even when the material conditions that sustain it are often ignored or unacknowledged.

The small town as national identity

Brock Moneo (2025: 1) is especially persuasive when pointing out the depiction of the small town as a ‘nation form’, drawing on Poll's (2012) argument that this spatial imagery occupies a privileged place in American collective identity. This conceptual move is crucial because it shifts the discussion beyond planning and into the terrain of political and cultural representation. Krieger (2019) likewise treats the small town as an enduring ideal rather than a historical leftover. Read alongside these works, Seaside becomes more than a New Urbanist case study; it can be understood as a carefully constructed expression of a wider national mood.

The mood, of course, is doing political work. One of the article's most engaging elements is its use of earlier readings of Seaside to show how nostalgia operates discursively. Drawing on these earlier celebratory interpretations, Brock Moneo (2025) notes how Seaside is cast as a place that evokes a gentler, more innocent past, a framing that helps produce the town as a sanitised and selectively remembered landscape. But we must ask: gentler for whom? Innocent for whom? Nostalgia often functions by sanding the past down until hierarchy becomes atmosphere. Segregation is erased; labour disappears; conflict is treated as impolite. What remains is a polished scene of social reassurance, an old story retold very differently from how we remember it.

That is why the small-town ideal should not be treated as politically innocent. Homogeneity is often easiest to sell when it has been prettied up a little. Exclusion looks far less alarming once it has been painted in tasteful pastel tones and given a front porch.

Can community be curated?

My key takeaway from this paper is the question that anchors my commentary: Can community be curated, or can planners provide the stage set and hope that people will perform on cue?

This analysis shows that Seaside emerged from a recognisable New Urbanist faith in form. As the article highlights, Duany and Plater-Zyberk studied the ‘recipe for great American towns’ (Brock Moneo, 2025: 2) and hoped that, by recreating traditional morphology, they could guide human behaviour towards community. There is something faintly managerial about this. It assumes that social life is waiting patiently for the correct design code.

New Urbanism repeatedly suggests that social fragmentation can be corrected through urban form (e.g. Calthorpe, 1993; Katz, 1994), as if enough porches, pathways, narrow streets and neighbourly sightlines might bring community socialising back into order. Seaside is possibly one of the clearest expressions of this fantasy.

But community is not a design accessory. It is produced through history, conflict, reciprocity, repetition, obligation, kinship, frustration, dependency, survival mechanisms, care and sometimes sheer necessity (Arbaci, 2007; Keith, 2005; Kloosterman et al., 1999; Rex and Moore, 1967; Sutherland, 2006). Put plainly, communities are not nostalgic simply because they look coherent. Many of the spaces we later romanticise were forged through marginalisation, struggle and resistance, taking shape as cultural anchors that serve a community (Castells, 1983; Phillips, 1998). They were not curated for the enjoyment of external visitors; they were built because people had to make life possible under undesirable conditions.

This matters enormously for planning dialogues. It suggests that what Seaside produces is not the community itself but a visual shorthand for how community is imagined to look. The town offers a scenic version of social cohesion, packaging the mood of intimacy without requiring the historical legacies that produced it.

The invention of nostalgia and the sale of belonging

This is precisely why Macy's (1996) characterisation of Seaside as a manufactured nostalgia for everyday life remains so useful. Nostalgia here is not a spontaneous recollection; it is a fabrication with a warm tone of voice. LaFrank's (1997) title, ‘The New Town – The Old Ways’, captures the same move. The town's appeal lies in packaging the feeling of historical familiarity rather than any genuine return to the past.

One of the article's sharpest moves is its discussion of Seaside's ‘playful artificiality’ (Brock Moneo, 2025: 1), because it helps explain why the town's obvious contrivance does not weaken its authority. If anything, it strengthens it. Visitors reconcile this artificiality with the historic small-town ideal. Seaside feels true because it conforms to a visual grammar that people already know how to love.

This is precisely what commentary is for: to test how far an argument travels, and this one travels well. In London, Black Caribbean culture becomes publicly legible in similarly aestheticised ways. Neighbourhoods become desirable not because planners have developed a sudden moral investment in racial justice, but because music, food, street life and cultural style can be folded into a marketable narrative of local distinctiveness (Evans, 2009; Hyra, 2017; Pratt, 2004). What was once ignored, stigmatised or treated as a nuisance is suddenly ‘organic’, ‘grassroots’ or ‘community’. Planning procedures, in my experience, have a remarkable habit of noticing culture precisely when it becomes economically useful.

The good old days were not equally good

As I read, I kept returning to one uncomfortable truth: many of the spaces we later romanticise were never innocent to begin with. They were forged through racism, exclusion and resistance. This point matters because it is precisely where my own standpoint gives this commentary its bite. A great deal of planning discourse treats ‘tradition’ as though it floats above history. It does not. Tradition is made under particular social relations (Hobsbawm and Ranger, 1983; Smith, 2006). The good old days, more often than not, were good selectively.

What I appreciate in this discussion is that Brock Moneo does not allow Seaside's charm to obscure the exclusionary histories and selective memory embedded in the small-town ideal. The exploration of how uncomfortable histories are filtered through postmodern translation is one of the places where the article does its strongest critical work. Architectural and heritage practice persistently recovers the visual residue of unequal histories while misplacing the politics that produced them.

A perspective informed by Black Caribbean London has particular analytical purchase here. Planning debates about belonging, local character and heritage have often been dominated by voices that did not have to build community under duress. Ethnic voices are often marginal in these conversations, even when ethnic histories and cultural forms haunt the very places being romanticised (Beebeejaun, 2012). This is the most significant reason why Brock Moneo's piece resonates with me. Her analysis of Seaside is not only about what the town remembers but also about what its charm allows people to forget. It allows me to see that nostalgia does not merely select what gets remembered; it also determines who gets to tell the story and who gets written out of it.

Symbolic economy and the price of charm

From a planning and urban studies perspective, Seaside can be read as an exceptionally clear example of symbolic economy. Zukin (1995) shows that the built environment accrues value through image, selective authenticity and representation as much as through construction. The article notes that residential lots in Seaside initially sold for around $14,000, only for the real estate to later be worth millions (Brock Moneo, 2025). Those figures matter because they remind us that nostalgia is not merely cultural residue; it is economically generative.

Brock Moneo's (2025: 4) observation that the employees of Seaside's shops and restaurants ‘never could afford to live there’ is therefore one of the article's most devastating lines. It punctures the communitarian fantasy with admirable efficiency. The town may stage intimacy, but it cannot abolish class. How successfully, then, was this fantasy executed?

Conclusion: Community is not a mood board

One of the things I most appreciated throughout this reading is that Brock Moneo refuses to let Seaside remain merely cute. She takes the emotional and symbolic appeal of the town seriously while also revealing the politics embedded within it. Too often, charming places are treated as analytically soft, as though prettiness is somehow apolitical. This piece does the opposite; charm repeatedly serves as a vehicle through which selective histories are made lovable and exclusionary social orders are made to look like common sense.

These curated spaces habitually sell an experience rather than serve community use. They offer not just architecture, or even nostalgia, but a marketable experience of belonging. The image of community becomes valuable in its own right, detached from the histories, obligations and material conditions that make community possible.

Planning techniques are far too easily seduced by places that look coherent, rooted, neighbourly and ‘authentic’, especially once those qualities become economically valuable. But community is not a mood board; it is not a development aesthetic.

What Brock Moneo captures in her evaluation of Seaside resonates strongly with the core argument of this commentary. Hegemonic voices in planning discourse often admire community most when it can be packaged and priced, yet politely ignore what it takes to sustain it.