To truly understand Celebration, the issues that it raises and the tradition out of which it has emerged, one must first understand Walt Disney’s original plan for a utopian community in Florida, a community that he called the Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow, or EPCOT. It is in the original design for EPCOT that the seeds of Celebration can be found. And while Celebration is not merely an updated 90’s version of Walt Disney’s EPCOT plan, both have their basis in a common philosophy, and play on a common set of American myths and symbols.

Celebration is possible today because of actions that Walt took in the early 1960’s. It was during this period that he secretly bought up the Florida land upon which Celebration, as well as Disney World, EPCOT Center, MGM Studios, the new Animal Kingdom and a series of resorts are built.
In February of 1967, two months after Walt Disney’s death, Walt Disney Productions announced that it would be going ahead with the project closest to Walt’s heart at the time of his death, a “city of tomorrow” to be built adjacent to Disney World in Orlando, Florida. Echoing the words of John Winthrop, Walt explained that he “would like to be part of building a model community, a City of Tomorrow…This might become a pilot operation for the teaching age – to go across the country and across the world.”
Eerily, this announcement to the press was narrated by Walt himself, in a film that he had taped for the purpose before his death. “The most exciting, and by far the most important part of our Florida project, in fact that heart of everything we will be doing in Disney World,” announced Walt, “will be our Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow. We call it EPCOT. And EPCOT will always be a showcase to the world for the ingenuity and imagination of American free enterprise.”

In the film Walt explained in detail his dream of creating a community that would be a technological and futuristic utopia. It was to be the home of 20,000 residents, and its purpose was to explore new ideas in urban planning. Walt said “I don’t believe there’s a challenge anywhere in the world that’s more important to people everywhere than finding solutions to the problems of our cities. But where do we begin…how do we start to answer the great challenge?”

Walt’s first proposal was to build a giant dome that would house the entire community, so that the climate of the new city might be perfectly regulated. It was to be organized like a wheel, the heart of the city’s industry and commerce at the wheel’s hub, with residential areas moving out in concentric circles and serviced by a monorail system. The heavy traffic was designed to take place underground on two levels, one for cars and another for trucks. By keeping traffic below ground inside the city, “the pedestrian will be the king” said Walt, and he planned that pedestrians would be whisked around on people movers.

Walt felt that EPCOT should be grounded in a concern “with the public need.” To serve this need EPCOT would be “an experimental city that would incorporate the best ideas of industry, government, and academia worldwide, 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. In EPCOT there will be no slum areas because we won’t let them develop. There will be no landowners and therefore no voting control. People will rent houses instead of buying them, and at modest rentals. There will be no retirees; everyone must be employed.” He concluded that “people still want to live like human beings.”

The thing that strikes me most about Walt’s statements are the incongruities that exist within them. In one breath he talks about serving the public’s needs, and creating a place where people can live like human beings. And in the next, he explains that they will be denied the right to vote and to own property, two of unalienable rights of the American Declaration of Independence. Only a certain class of people will be allowed to live in Walt’s utopia, excluding the lowest class of slum dwellers and the elderly.

Like Celebration, Walt’s utopia was envisioned an actual community where he had all the power, not just a park that people visited. The architectural plan in some ways reflects the emptiness and control implicit in this vision. EPCOT’s citizens would not be allowed to own property. The whole design centered around a 30 story hotel to be built at the very heart of EPCOT, a structure which essentially represents transience. Would the elderly eventually be forced out? The residents would not even be allowed to experience the weather. This does not sound like an environment in which people can live like human beings.

To make type of development a reality, Disney brokered a deal with the Florida Legislature that gave him almost total control over the land he had purchased in Florida. This including the right to make all the zoning regulations that would govern this property. In effect, he had free license over this property.

Walt vision for EPCOT co-opted two of the most powerful narratives in the American self-conception, narratives that exist in tension with one another. First, he tied his community to the land. By stating that it should be started “from scratch on virgin land”, he echoed the title of Henry Nash Smith’s seminal work and tied the community to a long tradition of the pastoral in American history. Smith wrote in The Virgin Land that “one of the most persistent generalizations concerning American life and character is the notion that our society has been shaped by the pull of a vacant continent drawing population westward.”(Smith 3) Although Disney was trying to pull society southward instead of westward, he was operating under the same ideological construct of which Smith writes. Like other pioneering communities before it, Walt Disney’s EPCOT would leave behind the problems of past civilization and start over afresh.

Second, Disney’s emphasis on technology and the improvements that technology could bring to modern life tied EPCOT to the idea of machine in the garden, the power of technology over the land and the symbolism of American’s conquest over Nature.
Epcot and Celebration

After Walt’s death, his plan for EPCOT was eventually discarded as impractical. EPCOT was developed as a different kind of theme park which embraced Walt’s interest in technology and futuristic architecture. EPCOT’s symbolic structure is a geodome that represents on a small scale the dome under which EPCOT’s original inhabitants were to reside.

Through corporate partnerships, the Walt Disney Company developed pavilions that emphasized the important place of technology in everyday life. In cooperation with a group of foreign governments, Disney also constructed national pavilions in EPCOT, so that one can walk from Japan to Italy, which have been placed next to each other and can be seen in the illustration below. In the same way that our senses have been confused by seeing the Cinderella’s castle next to Tomorrowland, two things that could not logically exist together, we stop questioning the juxtaposition of nations in EPCOT and accept them as part of the reality that Disney has created.

In Celebration, Disney has again created their own reality, but it is one of coherence, not disparity. One becomes accustomed to the environment in Celebration because there is a sameness and consistency to every element of life that makes Celebration seem like an acceptable reality.

Epcot The City

By 1997, so much had already been written about Walt Disney’s city of the future that I was hesitant to attempt anything comprehensive for WYW’s first page on the concept.  In addition, Paul F. Anderson had by that time targeted EPCOT as the subject of a future   Persistence of Vision story, which would have been exhaustive and mind-shattering had the magazine’s publication not been indefinitely suspended!  Even in the absence of Anderson’s essays, it is difficult to contribute to the public record regarding EPCOT in terms of offering something factually new.

But this immense unrealized dream has to be included in any self-respecting (or maybe even self-deprecating) overview of WDW anomalies.  EPCOT was the driving force behind Walt’s entire Florida vision, the perceived destination of his fantastic free enterprise voyage.  The whole of the WDW project, at the time of construction, was built around the notion of EPCOT falling into the middle of the works a few years later.  Of course, it never happened.  As most everyone knows, the dichotomous theme park that ultimately usurped the EPCOT acronym in 1982 bore no physical resemblance – and scarcely a philosophical one – to the concept for which it was named.  And the explanations given for this over the years have been almost as varied as the range of rough drafts that broke EPCOT down into a bankable enterprise instead of the incredible, far-reaching gamble originally envisioned by the “world’s master showman.”

Walt Disney had been messing with matters of space planning, crowd flow and infrastructure for decades leading into the early 1960s, which is when colleagues first remembered him walking around with books on city planning.   The Disney Studios, the CarolWood Pacific Railroad, Disneyland and CalArts were some obvious examples where his hand could be seen in the development of real-life environments which would be inhabited, whether for a few minutes or a full day at a time, by real-world people.  His first public mention of plans for an actual city, however, came only thirteen months before his death.  At a November 15, 1965 Florida press conference (where he confirmed that Walt Disney Productions was the “mystery industry” that had purchased over 27,000 acres of land southwest of Orlando), he spoke of both “a model community” where the employees of his development would live and a “city of tomorrow.”  But the public’s interest at the time was focused on Disney’s plans for a theme park and recreational facilities, not on vague references to futuristic cities.

So with thousands of Florida politicians and businessmen calculating the economic windfall that WDW Phase 1 would cause their respective communities and corporations, Walt Disney returned to California to spend his final year working on the one aspect of his new endeavor that could set his company back by untold hundreds of millions.  While many of his key WED personnel were focused on Disneyland’s upcoming Pirate attraction, Tomorrowland overhaul and/or the relocation of 1964-1965 New York World’s Fair exhibits from Flushing Meadows to Anaheim, he set up a separate team of designers behind a locked door at the studio to work on nothing but the utopian guts of his Florida Project, to plan the conversion of Herb Ryman’s stunning concept painting (above) from canvas to steel.  This was to be EPCOT, which stood for Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow, and it had Walt’s full attention.  In October 1966 he made a film, also entitled “EPCOT,” in which the basic principles and designs of this community were outlined.

EPCOT’s signature visual feature was its 30-story hotel structure placed in the dead center of the city’s elliptical layout.  This spatial configuration,, a.k.a. “the radial plan,” looked like an eyeball drawn by H.R. Giger.  It was basically an extension of the hub principle employed to success at Disneyland and was closely related to Ebenezer Howard’s garden city and Victor Gruen’s cellular metropolis of tomorrow – a circular city with businesses and community gathering spots positioned with increased density toward the central point.  Everything would radiate out from there like spokes on a wheel.  Shopping districts, office buildings, convention centers, the hotel and a transportation center would sit at the heart of the community under a common roof, completely enclosed and climate-controlled.  Along the perimeter of this core would sit high-density apartment buildings, home to some of the city’s workers.  Just beyond these structures would be an expansive green belt upon which would sit community buildings, schools, churches, sports and recreational complexes for EPCOT’s residents.  Further out still, surrounding the entire development, would lie the low-density neighborhood areas.  Here houses would back up against broad parks where children could play safely, free from traffic.

The purpose of this city, in Walt’s words, was to “build a living showcase that more people will talk about and come to look at than any other area in the world.”  It was designed for a population of 20,000 who would live, work, learn and play primarily within EPCOT or other parts of Walt Disney World.  And the entire complex would be charged with the daunting task of continually forecasting American urban and home life 25 years into the future.  American industries would be constantly updating the technologies in both the commercial buildings and the homes, and those industries would be heavily relied upon as financial partners in the venture.

EPCOT’s transportation system would consist largely of two technologies that Disney had already been using or developing at the time: the monorail and the peoplemover.  The monorail would run straight through the center of the city with a station directly below the hotel.  In this “transportation lobby,” there would be connecting service to all parts of the community via the peoplemover.  This system would radiate from the central lobby on 20 separate tracks to the furthest extremes of the low-density residential areas, with intermittent stations (vs. stops, for the peoplemover never stops).  It was projected that residents would only need their cars for making long trips, not for commuting or shopping.  While EPCOT contained plenty of roadways, they were all set up to flow effortlessly in counter-clockwise circles, both large and small, as a result of master-planning.  Industrial automotive vehicles would be relegated to streets and parking spaces below the center of the city to keep things practical and looking pretty.  It was even predicted that “nowhere in Disney World will a signal light ever slow the constant flow of traffic.” What fun would predictions be if they all came true?

As mentioned above, EPCOT was to be the key component of Walt Disney World, the crucial stop on an almost six-mile long stretch of monorail beam that would also visit the theme park area, a 1,000-acre industrial park and a massive entrance complex which in turn connected with a “Jet Airport of the Future.”  This was Walt Disney World as envisioned by its namesake.  This was the plan he sketched out himself and supervised as it was taken further toward a master plan.  But it was only about a year after he made the first announcement that Walt died, on December 15, 1966.  This was the beginning of the end for the EPCOT and the “Florida Project” as he saw it.

Yet the public knew remarkably little about just how he saw it until February 2, 1967.  This was when his EPCOT film of the previous October was first seen by anyone outside Walt Disney Productions (hereafter “the company”).  It premiered at the Park East Theater in Winter Park, FL, where it was screened for Florida business and government figures.  It served as a fantastic pitch, something to not only confirm that the company would move ahead with Walt Disney World and whet the appetites of potential corporate sponsors, but to also pave the way for the Reedy Creek Improvement District legislation that the company would successfully seek to have passed later that year in Tallahassee.  This legislation gave the company extensive governmental controls over its Florida property.  The film served another purpose that the company would find less desirable in the long run: it cemented certain concepts in the public’s collective consciousness, one of which was the image of EPCOT, this beautiful city Walt had obsessed over, a city not outlined in as vague a set of terms as some in the company would suggest not too many years later.

In late 1967, a massive model of EPCOT debuted as the finale for Disneyland’s Carousel of Progress.  The Carousel of Progress was brought to Disneyland for the “whole new” Tomorrowland after a two-year run at the World’s Fair.  The model, pictured above and below, was called Progress City during its Disneyland years.  When the Carousel of Progress was shipped to Walt Disney World for a 1975 opening, a section of the model came to Florida as well.  It was installed as a part of the WEDway Peoplemover and can still be seen today by guests riding the attraction (now known as the Tomorrowland Transit Authority).

After the updated Carousel Of Progress and several other new attractions were unveiled at Disneyland in 1967, the primary concern at WED (the company’s design & engineering arm) was master-planning the first phase of Walt Disney World.  This would consist of a Disneyland-type theme park, several resort hotels, a wide array of recreational options, a transportation system linking all of those together and a support infrastructure that would service the same areas.  Phase One’s five-year development plan would provide the foundation upon which the company would build the remainder of the “Florida Project.”  As late as 1969, what lie beyond Phase One was still projected in basic accordance with Walt’s outline.  But it was off in the distance and nothing had been done to further define the plans or set any timetables.  By 1970, with the opening of Walt Disney World just ahead, EPCOT, the industrial park, airport and entrance complex were planted firmly in the background.

Walt Disney World opened on October 1, 1971 to rave reviews and, soon enough, great attendance figures.  Plans for additions to, and the refinement of, the first phase of the project sprang up almost immediately to meet the demands of guests arriving in greater-than-expected numbers.  This trend continued for a couple years as the company became comfortable with its Florida empire and reacted to its needs.

During this time, EPCOT was barely mentioned.  Careful attention was also being given to the context surrounding the precious few EPCOT allusions that did make it into company publications.  The planned development of land at Lake Buena Vista (townhouses, apartments and condominiums) was heralded in the company’s 1972 annual report as a step toward the development of EPCOT – as was the demand for “WED Enterprises to do consulting work in transportation, recreational and city planning” in 1973.  All the while a corner was being turned slowly, and around that corner there would be a frequent usage of one particular statement Walt had made: that EPCOT would be a “Community of Tomorrow that will never be completed, but will always be introducing and testing and demonstrating new materials and new systems.”

On May 15, 1974, Card Walker (then President and chief operating officer of the company) announced to a meeting of the American Marketing Association that Walt Disney Productions would be moving ahead “in a phased program” with the development of Walt Disney’s concept for EPCOT.  The company reasoned that Phase One of Walt Disney World was essentially completed ahead of schedule and it was time to turn toward Phase Two.  The idea for a World Showcase of nations was introduced.  More importantly, EPCOT was now being considered “from the point of view of economics, operations, technology, and market potential.”  While the future phases of EPCOT were left very hazy, Walker did state that the company was not seeking “the commitment of individuals and families to permanent residence.”  Rather the company was looking for “long-term commitments from industry and nations.”

Or, in other words, there wasn’t going to be a city.  The process of taking Walt’s EPCOT apart and concocting something different with the pieces had begun.  WED Enterprises spent about six years tossing ideas around, scrapping many and fine-tuning others.  Future World was conceived as the “introducing and testing and demonstrating new materials and new systems” part of the project.  It was grafted onto World Showcase and EPCOT Center was born.  Groundbreaking took place October 1, 1979.

The term “center” in the name of this new theme park, though no longer used today, was a crucial part of the company’s strategy at the time.  From the beginning, Walt Disney World was built with EPCOT in mind, and even the development of Phase 1 had employed a variety of new systems and processes.  From the modular construction techniques used in building the hotels to the water hyacinth waste treatment program, Walt Disney World was a sort of testing ground.  And now the company purported that WDW was EPCOT and had been EPCOT all along, and EPCOT Center was where the “new materials and new systems” of WDW/EPCOT would be shown to the public.  It was a fairly daring rationale to put forth to anyone who remembered Walt Disney’s film or had seen the initial intended scope of Project Florida.  But the company was doing just that, straight-faced and free of concessions.

The approach had an inherent flaw about which, strangely enough, journalists failed to question Disney management during EPCOT Center’s construction and opening.  It was that while WDW had dabbled in a handful of experimental processes, none of the cornerstone precepts of EPCOT the city had been applied to development of WDW since 1971, and precious few were being built into EPCOT Center itself.  On-property transit for employees from parking lots to their work locations was handled by fossil fuel-burning buses rather than clean, electric Peoplemover systems.  The majority of connections for on-property resort guests was also handled by bus instead of monorail.  The “pedestrian is king” concept never truly caught on.  Traffic lights did, of course, catch on exponentially since working roadways into a constant circular flow was apparently too costly.  And the company’s highly-touted utilidor concept was only employed one more time on property, in EPCOT Center, and only below a small portion of the park’s Communicore area.  The Magic Kingdom’s AVAC trash-collection system was never replicated in another park.  In short, all of those forward-looking concepts that were to have been integral to WDW were phased out over time.

In 1990 ABC’s Chris Wallace interviewed Walt Disney Attractions President Dick Nunis for a Prime Time Live segment on WDW.  During their conversation, Wallace asked Nunis about EPCOT, the city that never materialized.  Nunis, who had years earlier suggested that the EPCOT plans Walt left behind were sketchy at best, responded by asking, “isn’t this a city?”  He offered by way of example the fact that thousands of guests spent the night on WDW property every evening, and they were real people.  Using Nunis’ logic, guests at WDW hotels had become the citizens of EPCOT, an extension of the theory that WDW was EPCOT.

Others within the company, such as Marty Sklar, have offered more straightforward accounts of EPCOT’s end. They assert that Walt’s successors really didn’t know what to do with his city, or how to do it without him.  He was the one consumed with the passion for the project, and without his guidance the only palatable option was to make something out of it that was in keeping with proven formulas; i.e., turn it into a theme park venture that wouldn’t scare the stockholders.

That theme park, by the way, became Epcot instead of EPCOT Center in 1995.  In dropping the “Center” from the title and changing the acronym to a name, the company exercised some sound judgment in allowing for the difference between EPCOT the city and Epcot the park.  In 1996, Disney’s newly developed “town” of Celebration (Osceola County, FL) welcomed its first residents.  This planned community has been compared to Walt’s plans for EPCOT by many of the company’s high-ranking officials.  Some have reasoned that the spirit of EPCOT is being fulfilled now, so many years after it was first introduced.  It’s difficult, however, to reconcile this with that 40-year old vision, with that painting, with that model.  If Celebration was intended to answer for EPCOT as a community, it does so with a whimper.

Of course, some of those who worked with Walt doubted that even he could have pulled off the experimental city.  Ward Kimball for one, who was Walt Disney Productions’ preeminent lunatic-in-residence for decades, expressed uncharacteristic reservations about EPCOT’s potential.  The sentiment that “you can’t experiment with people’s lives” has come up on more than one occasion.  This is not exactly true; governments, corporations, doctors and real estate developers experiment with people’s lives all the time.  But the notion falters for a more specific reason: before Walt Disney died it was already established that anyone living in EPCOT would do so on a temporary basis, most likely for no more than two years.  This doesn’t change the fact that it would still be a huge laboratory with human mice, but its intended long-range impact was not to be on individual families but the world at large.

One thing about EPCOT that persists in rearing its impossible head is the assertion that it was going to be a “domed city.”  After reading various quick journalistic sketches from the past 25 years and comparing those to Walt Disney Productions actual plans for EPCOT, I wondered how anyone could believe that WDP might want to dwarf a billion-dollar city of the future with a translucent dome that would, if built to truly span the city center, represent an engineering feat that shamed the Pantheon just so birds could crap on it in places that could not be cleaned without a helicopter.  But there have also been references to this mammoth dome in more scholarly works such as Steve Mannheim’s extremely well-written Walt Disney and the Quest for Community (Design & the Built Environment)
.  Mannheim wrote that Walt’s EPCOT film contains animation depicting a hemispherical dome enclosing the city’s 50-acre core.  What the film actually depicts is a close-up – concurrent with the narrator’s reference to the enclosed, climate-controlled city center – of a domed skylight structure on the city center’s flat roof.  Depending on which rendering you view, there were twelve to thirty of those around the central roof structure.  EPCOT would have been full of domes, but none in the plans had a diameter exceeding 75 feet.  The mere fact that there were a series of these small domes shown on the city center roof makes the notion of a larger dome covering the whole of that roof ridiculous, as it would render all of the smaller ones superfluous.  But this is typical of misinformation about Disney, such as Walt being frozen, that perpetuates itself indefinitely.*

In the end, combining all the rumors, drawings, interviews, rationales and facts of EPCOT yields a perplexing portrait of magnificent ambitions being tempered by cold corporate feet.  It’s safe to say that EPCOT will never go full-scale in its original form, but discussions surrounding just what it would have become if built will likely continue for decades.

Walt Disney’s Original Plan for EPCOT – Part 1 Video

Here is Walt Disney’s original idea for EPCOT. The film was made for the Florida Legislators so that the state would give the company the self-governing rights and permissions it needed to build its giant theme park, resort, city utopian thing. ***TRIVIA: He dyed his hair for this.

Walt Disney’s Original Plan for EPCOT – Part 2 Video

Walt Disney’s Original Plan for EPCOT – Part 3 Video

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