A MEANINGFUL MOMENT THROUGH A MEANING(LESS) PROCESS
EPCOT, now known to much of the world as a science-oriented amusement park, was originally conceived as a Disney-designed utopian metropolis. Walt Disney, well known for his genius in animation and film, was also a highly polemical urbanist. His dreams were not confined merely to the animated output of his namesake studio; after achieving commercial success in film and animation, Disney went on to produce some of the most compelling plans for utopian cities drawn in the twentieth century. His utopian masterpiece, EPCOT (short for the Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow), was conceived to house twenty thousand residents in Florida, and was designed in then-ubiquitous Modernist planning principles. At the time of the city's proposal, its concept was revolutionary; Disney’s own designs usurped that of many Modernist architects and urban planners.
From the eyes of the twenty-first century, however, Disney's original vision for EPCOT is a cliché of Modernist urban planning principles: a sad relic of the hope Modernist visionaries once possessed for reforming the metropolitan environment. In true Modernist fashion, all possible forms of urban activity in EPCOT are neatly segmented into distinct categories. Rings of residential development encircle a Central Business District, with little provision for other realms of urban life. A toyish monorail system (copyrighted by Disney as the PeopleMover) shuttles future residents from the suburban outskirts of EPCOT into the city center each and every day, in a manner not so far removed from the monorails of Disney's own theme parks. There is no allowance for accident, no accommodation for the ugly realities of life (and much of the “friction” which makes life in the contemporary American metropolis exciting)––only Disney’s fictionalized, fantastical conception of the future. It is oddly fitting that Walt Disney Studios, a film studio whose animated catalog canonizes the lobotomized exuberance of the 1950s and early 1960s, would go on to design such a hermetic vision for an idealized city.
Though Walt Disney had already selected a site for his gargantuan development, the imagery produced for EPCOT shows the city as if floating in space: one can imagine these centers proliferating worldwide, immune to existing context. In a sense, Disney's vision is Le Corbusier's Radiant City enlarged to a gargantuan scale: each EPCOT represents one of Cobursier's gleaming cruciform towers, with an endless expanse of "Nature" benignly interrupted by these gleaming products of Modern mastery.
The rigid plan, cartoonish design, top-down design, and ever-cheerful ambience implied by the city's representation makes EPCOT into little more than an idealized argument: more specifically, an argument for a positive, ever-bright, technologically-fueled future, where then-contemporary concerns of urban sprawl are but a distant memory. It is unquestionably naive, yet does much to capture the political, social, and cultural climate of the early 1960s.
Though it is easy to criticize the shortcomings of Disney's utopian vision, several aspects of EPCOT's master plan are worthy of closer inspection. EPCOT’s explicitly finite urban development boundary is a prelude to contemporary calls for urban densification; one may view EPCOT as Disney's reaction to a proliferation of suburban development during his lifetime. What’s more, urban transit in EPCOT (and, as shown in the following video, already utilized in Walt Disney's theme parks) consists entirely of centralized mass-transit systems, a method of transit increasingly recognized as an efficient and sustainable means of conveyance (though, notably, without the theme-park ambience suggested by Mr. Disney in the following video). EPCOT’s sectional composition, too, displays a mastery of urban planning not seen in many Modernist designs: the city employs three primary layers of development to function, with automobile transit and other technological services submerged under the metropolis’s surface. In fact, the design of EPCOT looks not-too dissimilar from award-winning urban plans proposed in recent memory (namely, the Latent City project proposed by Yaohua Wang, or my own thesis).
Attached is Disney's animated proposal for EPCOT, accompanied with music by ambient musicians Stars Of The Lid. The listless soundtrack invokes a new reading of the city’s once-exuberant imagery: it plays on the utopic/dystopic dualism present in EPCOT’s simplistic vision of a better tomorrow.