Seaside travel guide

Seaside is an unincorporated master-planned community on the Florida panhandle roughly midway between Fort Walton Beach and Panama City. It was founded by builder/developer Robert Davis on land that he had inherited from his grandfather. The town plan was designed by architects/new urbanists Andrés Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk. Seaside is located in Walton County.
Seaside is over 50,000 square feet. The community is often cited as the first New Urbanist development. At the time of Seaside's construction, Walton County had no zoning ordinance, leaving Seaside's founders able to plan with a comparatively free hand. In the absence of these regulations (e.g., minimum lot size, separation of uses), Duany and Plater-Zyberk (DPZ) were able to design a mixed-use development with densities greater than conventional suburban development.
DPZ hired architects such as Melanie Taylor and Robert Orr to design the buildings and housing for the development. Seaside is primarily a resort community, consisting of residents who live there for months at a time as well as vacationers renting cottages and houses.
Seaside is often cited as an example of successful implementation of New Urbanism. Time magazine has called it "the most astounding design achievement of its era and, one might hope, the most influential" It has been used as a model for other New Urbanist developments in the United States and abroad. However, some have criticized Seaside as being overly rigid (the community's architectural standards provide strict limitations on the external aesthetics of the houses), resulting in conformity of style rather than creativity -- which some people call a manufactured fantasy. Others have criticized the community for its lack of socioeconomic diversity, which some see as particularly ironic given that the community was itself modeled on the diverse and urban neighborhoods of large North American cities such as New York City and San Francisco. (...) more....