The Decentralized Master Planning of Seaside, Florida
This is part of Reason‘s 2025 summer travel issue. Click here to read the rest of the issue.
You might not expect there to be much for libertarians to like about a town that boasts a master plan, where design conformity is rigorously enforced across virtually every building and street, and whose admirers wax poetic about a building code that covers “everything from building materials to roof pitch.”
But Seaside, Florida, often defies expectations. It’s a town built on political contradictions: Its surfaces are planned and regulated down to the last nail, but it boasts of individual freedom in its building designs. It was founded on neo-hippie environmental and communitarian ideals, but it was privately built on explicitly capitalist notions of urban development. It’s designed to feel like both a tiny town and a big city, with the comfortable intimacy of small village life and the walkable amenities of a major metro area. It’s a haven for structural conformity, but it played an important role in bringing more choice in education to one of America’s biggest states. It’s a utopian architectural vision that resists pure utopianism.
If you know one thing about Seaside, it’s probably that it was the principal filming location for the 1998 film The Truman Show—the story of a man living a life of seemingly idyllic ordinariness in what amounts to a fantasy of American small-town life. It turns out that every aspect of his life has been contrived and constructed for other people’s entertainment: He’s the sole nonactor in a television show about his life, and his perfect little town is actually a vast set on the world’s largest soundstage, with every detail, from tiny interactions with neighbors to the timing of the sunrise, stage-managed by a godlike producer character watching over his every move. (Amusingly, the house used in the movie is the childhood beach getaway of Matt Gaetz, the controversial former congressman whom Donald Trump nominated to be attorney general.)
The Truman Show is a story of liberatory self-awakening, in which a man must escape from a planned paradise that is also a prison. But in the real world, Seaside is the sort of place people want to escape to—precisely because of the meticulous planning.
Envisioned in the 1970s by a group of young, forward-thinking architects who saw themselves as holistic community planners rather than merely building designers, Seaside was meant to embody an ideal of un
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