Words From Walt
Page 18 of 20
December 31
It's like the city of tomorrow ought to be. A city that caters to the people as a service function. It will be a planned, controlled community, a showcase for American industry and research, schools, cultural and educational opportunities. |
One of the last projects that Walt Disney worked on before his death in 1966 was his Experimental Community of Tomorrow, or EPCOT. He even plotted its design on the ceiling tiles of his hospital room in his final days. Walt was convinced that this was going to be his greatest project that he had ever brought to fruition; his "greatest gift to mankind." He was going to cure all of the ills of society and make government serve the residents in a way that had seldom been seen.
Ambitious? You bet! Realistic? Who knows? With Walt anything was possible. EPCOT was to be an environment planned from the ground up with all possible growth accounted for, all infrastructure in place. It was to be a fantasyland come true. Walt believed he could eliminate or diminish the social ills that he saw in many urban environments. And he set about to do something about it.
At the heart of EPCOT was to be a commercial center with residential areas radiating from this center with large areas in between for schools and recreation spaces like parks. Transportation would be state-of-the-art with Peoplemovers and Monorails taking people to where they needed to go. Commercial traffic, like trucks bringing supplies and merchandise, would travel through underground tunnels. EPCOT would be as self-contained as possible and provide its citizens with everything that they could possibly need for a more idealized lifestyle.
EPCOT was to be the heart of the Florida Project. After the success of Disneyland, Walt wished that he could have had a buffer zone around his theme park from the cheap hotels and restaurants that sprouted up along its borders. As he planned for the East Coast version of Disneyland, Walt and Roy had the opportunity to accumulate a substantial amount of land. Enough land to hold all of the dreams that Walt Disney could come up with. To Walt, that meant EPCOT.
A model of such a community was on display above the Carousel of Progress at Disneyland. And such a community was announced in a film made for Florida residents in October 1966. Unfortunately, Walt would die two months later and so would much of the idea for his new community. Roy Disney would open the Magic Kingdom at Walt Disney World and his successor, Card Walker, would go forward with EPCOT. By this point, EPCOT was no longer a community of tomorrow but became a theme park celebrating the best of communities - ideas of worlds of tomorrows and present countries around the world.
In 1996, the Walt Disney Company decided to give it a go with a community like the one Walt envisioned. Celebration, a city built on Walt Disney World property, would be more of an idealized city of today rather than a community of tomorrow. Residents of Celebration agree to maintain their yards a certain way and decorate their houses a certain way. Giving up certain freedoms would afford them the opportunity to live in a community where everyone knows one another and crime is at a minimum. In many ways, Celebration is a throwback to towns of olden days rather than being futuristic in scope.
It would be interesting to see what Walt Disney's EPCOT would have become. It would have been interesting to see if people would have embraced this community in a way that Walt Disney wanted. If anyone could read the pulse of the mass general public, it was Walt Disney. And as such, it would have come as little surprise if EPCOT became a huge urban success with similar communities springing up throughout the nation. EPCOT would have been a culmination of everything Walt had learned through his life. And for all that would have inhabited this futuristic community, the "real world" would certainly have seemed a fantasyland.
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-- Matthew Walker
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