The Garden City Never was

Delving into classic urbanist texts – including Ebenezer Howard's Garden Cities of To-morrow – Disney interpreted many of the sociological ills of the modern world as simply products of poor urban design. The choked mess of the modern city form was a failure of first principles. The looming problems of sprawl were a disease left unchecked for too long. Slums existed because they were permitted to exist by prevailing design practices.

As a panacea, Disney came up with EPCOT: the Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow. It would take the form of an entirely planned community, named Progress City, located between Orlando and Kissimmee in Florida, on a plot of land encompassing 27,400 acres.

Through a series of front organisations and dummy companies, Disney purchased large tracts of land in Central Florida. He petitioned the Florida state legislature to give him full municipal rights to the land – essentially investing the corporation with the powers of local government. The powers required to operate a city.

As a panacea, Disney came up with EPCOT: the Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow. It would take the form of an entirely planned community, named Progress City, located between Orlando and Kissimmee in Florida, on a plot of land encompassing 27,400 acres.

Through a series of front organisations and dummy companies, Disney purchased large tracts of land in Central Florida. He petitioned the Florida state legislature to give him full municipal rights to the land – essentially investing the corporation with the powers of local government. The powers required to operate a city.

Disney wanted EPCOT to be always in “a state of becoming.” It would be a city that provided the blueprint for a new mode of life, always just out of reach for every other community in the world – an ever-shifting vision of future life which enabled the creation of new technology by preempting problems before the rest of the world got to them. It would be a city permanently out of time, existing constantly on the fringes of the possible.

Like the garden city conceptualised by Howard before the turn of the 20th century, the urban mass of EPCOT’s Progress City would radiate outwards in a circle, becoming more sparse as it spread. The majority of its residents would live in high-density apartment housing around the city’s inner rim.
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EPCOT would be the central attraction of a theme park, where 20,000 people would live and major American corporations would operate in a vast industrial park. Cars would move along underground highways, unseen from above. A monorail would cut through the centre of the city, with arterial lines radiating outward.

For those who lived in the city, Disney imagined a radically different mode of economic life, abandoning the cruft of capitalist society as it then existed. In his community, nobody would own their home, or have municipal voting rights. They would work in the city or the surrounding theme park.

The minutiae of their life would be carefully managed. Disney envisioned a scenario in which you might return to your apartment to find that your appliances had been replaced by new models – built by the corporations which occupied the city’s industrial park. If those with employment were the only ones allowed to live within the urban ecosystem, Disney believed, poverty could not exist.

To Walt, the looming failures of the postwar liberal consensus were mere problems of efficiency. His specific mode of technocracy preempted by decades the Silicon Valley mode of thinking that now pervades our thoughts about sociopolitical organisation. If the broader community structures of a city could be aided by technological solutions, guided by universal design principles, then logic dictated that such a city simply could not fail.
The concept of EPCOT reflects the beginning of a great social unease about existing modes of life under capitalism. Though Disney vigorously embraced capitalism, his great utopian vision nonetheless rejected some of the rougher externalities of capitalist urbanism. The solution he proposed was a withdrawal from the reality of an unplanned existence, and the willful abnegation of the messy actuality of democratic life.

Implicit in Disney’s plan is the notion that American democracy had failed to provide an acceptable system for living, and that this responsibility had to be ceded to a corporation which knew better.
- The concept of EPCOT reflects the beginning of a great social unease about existing modes of life under capitalism. Though Disney vigorously embraced capitalism, his great utopian vision nonetheless rejected some of the rougher externalities of capitalist urbanism. The solution he proposed was a withdrawal from the reality of an unplanned existence, and the willful abnegation of the messy actuality of democratic life.
  
  Implicit in Disney’s plan is the notion that American democracy had failed to provide an acceptable system for living, and that this responsibility had to be ceded to a corporation which knew better.

The remaining directors of the company rejected Disney’s vision, believing the construction of an actual city to be too ambitious a project. They chose instead to develop a more traditional theme park, like the one that had brought so much success in California. Where Disney saw a model for American life, they saw a franchise.
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Many of the technological solutions Walt and his team envisioned – like the monorail – found their way into Walt Disney World.

Time and time again throughout the 1970s, the Disney board revisited the idea of EPCOT. But it was discarded, not only because of the vastness of the project, but also because of its deeper social implications. Nobody would want to live under a microscope, they concluded. The benefits of a planned life seemed hollow in the face of real freedom – however tumultuous it might be.
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Of course, EPCOT does exist now. Epcot is one of the theme parks at Walt Disney World Resort, built on the same land on which Disney wanted the American city of the future to be built. Epcot celebrates human technological and cultural achievement. as represented by a number of attractions based around various world cultures.
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In its representation of the diversity of world cultures – from the United States to Mexico to Norway – Epcot as it exists now represents the death of Disney’s original, flawed vision. To him, a perfect society could be built upon simple, universal principles. In the fake world’s fair of Epcot in 2017, only echoes remain