National Geographic has an interesting story this month by T.D. Allman on Orlando as the model of the new American city.

Walt Disney's utopian dream forever changed Orlando, Florida, and laid the blueprint for the new American metropolis. Everything happening to America today is happening here, and it's far removed from the cookie-cutter suburbanization of life a generation ago. The Orlando region has become Exhibit A for the ascendant power of our cities' exurbs: blobby coalescences of look-alike, overnight, amoeba-like concentrations of population far from city centers. These huge, sprawling communities are where more and more Americans choose to be, the place where job growth is fastest, home building is briskest, and malls and megachurches are multiplying as newcomers keep on coming...

In this place of exurban, postmodern pioneers, the range of choices is vast even when the choices themselves are illusory. Here life is truly a style: You don't want to live in a mass-produced, instant "community"? No problem. Orlando's developers, like the producers of instant coffee, offer you a variety of flavors, including one called Tradition. Structurally it may seem identical to all the others. Only instead of vaguely Mediterranean ornamental details, the condos at Tradition have old colonial finishes. In Orlando's lively downtown, it's possible to live in a loft just as you would in Chicago or New York. But these lofts are brand-new buildings constructed for those who want the postindustrial lifestyle in a place that never was industrial...

All over Orlando you see forces at work that are changing America from Fairbanks to Little Rock. This, truly, is a 21st-century paradigm: It is growth built on consumption, not production; a society founded not on natural resources, but upon the dissipation of capital accumulated elsewhere; a place of infinite possibilities, somehow held together, to the extent it is held together at all, by a shared recognition of highway signs, brand names, TV shows, and personalities, rather than any shared history. Nowhere else is the juxtaposition of what America actually is and the conventional idea of what America should be more vivid and revealing.

Welcome to the theme-park nation.

Personally, I find this a terrifying vision of an American future, yet if you travel in many of the ex-urbs of the US, this is the future you find. But as Allman points out, Orlando is based on the distribution of capital generated elsewhere. So where is the capital coming from? Economist Richard Florida suggests that the largest economic engine in the US is no longer agriculture or manufacturing but in creative industries such as technology, media, bio-med, etc.

Orlando rates high in service industries but low in creative industries and is likely to not attract a significant creative core because of the cities urban design. Florida argues that Creative industries are collecting in particular regions of the US such as Seattle, San Francisco, Boston, Minneapolis, and Austin. These cities boast dynamic urban arts cultures and good neighborhood life attractive to creative workers and industry rather than the sprawling developments of Orlando. As Florida contends, we are on course for a situation of two Americas; one that is doing well in the new creative economy and the other that is losing out. While Orlando-esque cities seem to be very much in the future for the US, we should also not count out Creative industry centers as another possible future for the new American city.