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.
