Epcot (concept)
The Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow, abbreviated EPCOT, was an unbuilt planned city conceived by Walt Disney in the mid-1960s as the centrepiece of his Florida development, the land that later became Walt Disney World. Unlike the theme park that eventually took its name — EPCOT, opened in 1982 — the original EPCOT was intended as a real place of residence and work for about 20,000 people, where companies could test new materials, appliances and urban systems in everyday use. Disney died in December 1966, weeks after recording a film that explained the plan, and the company subsequently set the city aside.
Origins
Disney's interest in planned environments grew out of Disneyland, his work for the 1964–65 New York World's Fair, and contemporary writing on the problems of American cities. For the World's Fair his studio built attractions for sponsors including Ford, General Electric, Pepsi-Cola and the State of Illinois. Those projects demonstrated corporate-sponsored pavilions, Audio-Animatronics figures and transport systems such as the PeopleMover, all of which fed into the Florida thinking.
Disney was also frustrated by the unplanned commercial development that had surrounded Disneyland in Anaheim, where the company controlled only the land inside the park boundary. In Florida the company therefore bought a tract large enough — roughly 27,000 acres, assembled in secret through dummy corporations — to control everything around the development.
The plan
The city as described in 1966 was to be built on a radial plan. A dense central core, covered by a climate-controlled enclosure in some renderings, would contain hotels, offices, shops and entertainment. Around the centre would sit high-density apartment buildings, then neighbourhoods of houses, schools and recreation areas, and finally a green belt separating the city from the rest of the property. An industrial area elsewhere on the site would provide employment and a place for companies to demonstrate new products.
Movement inside the city was to avoid the private car for daily trips. A monorail would run through the centre and connect EPCOT to the theme park, hotels and industrial areas, while electric PeopleMover vehicles would handle shorter journeys within neighbourhoods. Cars and delivery vehicles would travel on separate roads, and a network of service tunnels — developed further in the built Magic Kingdom as the utilidors — would keep deliveries out of sight.
Residents were expected to rent rather than own their homes, to use up-to-date appliances supplied as part of the experiment, and to be employed within the Disney property. Disney presented the city as permanently unfinished in the sense that its technology would be replaced as better systems appeared. Its governance was never fully resolved: control was to remain with the company, and later writers have noted the tension between that arrangement and ordinary municipal democracy.
The Florida film and announcement
Disney announced the Florida purchase publicly on November 15, 1965, without yet describing the city in detail. On October 27, 1966, he recorded a roughly 25-minute film, often called the EPCOT film, written with Marty Sklar. Standing beside maps and a large model — the Progress City model, part of which is now displayed along the Tomorrowland Transit Authority PeopleMover at Magic Kingdom — he set out the city, theme park and industrial areas planned for the property.
The film was intended in part to persuade the Florida legislature to create a special governing district. That district, the Reedy Creek Improvement District, was authorised in 1967, after Disney's death, giving the company wide powers over building codes, drainage and utilities on its land. Those powers were later used for the resort, even though the city itself was not built.
Abandonment and transformation
After Disney's death on December 15, 1966, his brother Roy O. Disney directed the company to build the part of the Florida plan it knew how to operate: a theme park modelled on Disneyland, supported by hotels. Building a city and accepting responsibility for residents' daily lives were judged to be outside the company's business, and no sponsor was willing to underwrite a permanent residential experiment on the original terms.
The EPCOT name and some ideas survived in altered form. When a second Florida park was developed in the 1970s, designers combined a technology exposition with a permanent display of national pavilions. That park opened on October 1, 1982, as EPCOT Center, later shortened to EPCOT. Its monorails, corporate pavilions and World Showcase all descend in part from the earlier plans, although it has no residents. Other elements — controlled planning and a centrally managed environment — were also echoed in Celebration, Florida, a planned community developed by the company in the 1990s.