The true test of a planned community is the quality of its residential neighborhoods. Celebration is the first comprehensively planned new town of any size since Columbia, Md., and Reston, Va., which were built 40 years ago.* However, Robert A.M. Stern and Jaquelin Robertson, who planned Celebration, didn't look to these projects for inspiration. Instead, they took their cue from the classic garden suburbs of the early 1900s. This wasn't nostalgia. The garden suburb represents the acme of suburban planning: compact, townlike, both individualistic and comfortably civic. It is one of our great design achievements, right up there with the 19^th-century urban park and the skyscraper. The white clapboard, verandas, and garden fences along the street are as unmistakably American as the rocker on the porch.