Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2018/06/25/would-epcot-have-worked-as-a-c.html
…
3 Likes
Happiest dictatorship on Earth!
9 Likes
The way Walt and his planners envisioned the city functioning was very Utopian, with residents being active in the community and working in local industry while electing local officials, etc. It was the sort of thing that Aldous Huxley wrote about, a sort of combination of socialist & capitalist ideas that sounds great on paper but in practice has never functioned well.
I’ve read that one of the big reasons Roy Disney nixed the original EPCOT plans, besides his inability to figure out how to monetize it, was that they needed to select 20,000 people to live there and nobody could agree on what sort of lottery or selection process to use without it seeming seriously weird.
6 Likes
Additionally given how much of the city was supposed to be a “glass fishbowl”, finding 20k folks willing to have their lives perpetually available for public scrutiny and be monetized for what probably would have been roughly the same pay as a “normal” job would have been a challenge, to say the least.
It’s pretty awesome that Walt thought they were just a few design issues away from the society of tomorrow like that, but history since that point tells us how badly EPCOT would likely have failed in the end, even if built today.
Too bad. Instead we get a pretty good culinary festival once a year and fireworks 
9 Likes
It had shades of being a less douchebaggy version of Fordlandia
6 Likes
Would EPCOT have worked as a city?
Maybe, if it weren’t in Florida.
4 Likes
Exactly, and even if you drop that and say “Ok, let’s just open it up to anyone who can pay to buy a house here,” you end up with, well, a city of rich central-Florida residents, and if you want to know what that’d be like, just look at the nearby The Villages, where rich white retirees live in the world’s largest gated community, tool around in souped-up golf carts, and complain about brown people.
4 Likes
The first was the fact that the proposed 50 acre shopping center surrounding the hotel was going to be completely enclosed and climate controlled.
What immediately came to mind reading this was the inevitable addition of this feature by the hard-pressed Imagineers of the future:
8 Likes
Nobody’s mentioned Disney’s slightly more realisitc (engineering-wise) but still creepy Celebration, FL?
6 Likes
Carousel, baby! Can’t have any wisdom from that 30+ downer crowd creeping into EPCOT. May the Great Walt renew me!
6 Likes
I would rather live in Aladin City.
2 Likes
A utopian creative is an optimist. A utopian ruler is an autocrat.
While I claim to be no where near as optimistic or creative as Walt was, there’s a reason I’d discourage anyone for ever asking me to tell them how to live.
1 Like
Arcosanti is another grand visionary city designed by a single charismatic individual, it’s permanent population hovers between one and two hundred people, I think. Like EPCOT, I think a better description than “city” would be “cult”.
By way of contrast, is Black Rock City even comparable? Huge and successful (on its own terms) it leaves essentially no infrastructure in place for the rest of the year.
I think the essence of any city doesn’t lie in some grand visionary scheme authored by one man, but rather its a software protocol that allows thousands of competing and complementary visions to coexist at once.
4 Likes
If he’d done his homework he’d know that this has all basically been done:
Rating the value of the project on whether or not GE would install a new refrigerator every three months is pretty facile. And all the things he says couldn’t work today because of the internet are pretty much all things that happen in the Bay Area, and happened there because the Bay Area (at least 30 years ago) basically resembled a gigantic version of Epcot.
2 Likes
Or a more douchebaggy version of Bournville.
5 Likes
Like Arcosanti, EPCOT was designed by someone just bubbling with enthusiasm for their vision, and a huge piece of that vision assumed that the people who’d live there would be just as enthusiastic to involve themselves in the community, grow the project, and keep it running. But also like Arcosanti, without its visionary to push a crazy idea, it sputtered along. As much as I would’ve liked to have seen EPCOT/Progress City built, by now it’d likely be just as dated as those awesome concrete arches out in the New Mexican desert.
1 Like
Putting on my planner hat for a moment, the answer is no. The engineering would be manageable and we actually have a really good working model, the Las Vegas strip. The two big problems come from the social side. The first is the inflexibility of planned and controlled cities. They just don’t work well in practice. The second is the tunnel system would represent a perfect venue for a lot of crime.
1 Like
I don’t even want to visit it. Living there? A new circle of hell has just been found.
1 Like
Nah.
The type of person who exposes every aspect of their lives existed 50 years ago; it’s just that they didn’t have Facebook yet.
1 Like
It would have been a gleaming utopia until destroyed by barbarians from a Creationist Dinosaur park.
