Walt & his Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow

Walt Disney’s original plan for Epcot was much different than the well-known theme park we have today. Walt wanted to build a city: a completely functional, self-sustained city. He was very interested in solving the problems of modern cities and wanted to create a completely new design with no current city serving as the model for this new Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow. The idea was to have Epcot always being upgraded with the latest technology and, as he has quoted, “never cease to be a blueprint of the future.” This Progress City would find the solutions to any urban problems and would share those solutions with the entire world. Every detail about Epcot would be dedicated to the happiness of its residents and visitors.

The design of Epcot would be radial, starting in the centre with the energetic business hub and spanning out like the spokes of a wheel. A network of transportation would fan out from the city centre, again in a radial design.

This innermost business area would feature a diverse hotel and convention centre at the very core. There would be office buildings, theatres, entertainment, restaurants, and shops. This centre would be very multicultural with the shops and restaurants featuring different nationalities and ethnicities from around the world. The urban centre would be completely enclosed and climate controlled. Each day would hold ideal weather conditions and everyone would be protected from the elements.

The main level of the city centre would be for pedestrians only. Mass transport would be electric multi-passenger vehicles that run above the city. Delivery trucks and any visiting cars would drive on roads underneath the pedestrian level and on their own specified level with trucks being on the very bottom and cars one level up. The mass transport would be in two forms of vehicles: the high-speed monorail to travel long distances and the short-distanced WedWay PeopleMover. Both of these forms of transportation could be found at Disneyland at the time of Epcot’s proposal.

The next area outside of the urban centre would have been high-density apartment buildings. All the residences would rent and not own, to give Disney easy right to constantly upgrade and renovate the units to keep up with modern times.

Beyond the high-density housing, would be the green belt. The green belt consisted of recreational areas for the residents of Epcot. Though not only were there parks, playgrounds, and community centres here, but churches and schools as well.

The final area circling around Epcot would be the low-density neighbourhoods and residential streets. The same concept of keeping pedestrian paths and streets completely separate would still apply, though the two would be separated by areas of green space rather than on separate levels of the city. This area would consist of single family homes and the WedWay PeopleMover would have stations in every neighbourhood. The idea would be that family cars would only be used on weekend trips and the mass transportation would be used on every day trips to the city centre.

Even though Epcot was at the heart of Walt’s dream, there was so much more to this future Florida project. He pitched the idea of building a city to his investors but they were not nearly as keen as Walt was about the idea. In the end, they compromised that Walt could build Epcot as long as there was another Disneyland-esque theme park nearby to fund the city. The entire project plan grew to include a theme park vacation destination with surrounding hotels, Epcot, an Industrial Park where Epcot residents could find employment, a Welcome Center, and an Airport of Tomorrow. All of these destinations would be connected via monorail. This entire project became known as Disney World! However, Walt sadly passed away in December of 1966 and the entire project was rerouted to include only the theme park portion.

As farfetched as many of these ideas and plans seemed, many elements did end up in fruition in one way or another. The theme park destination area became the Magic Kingdom and Walt Disney World certainly is a vacation destination with over 25 hotels surrounding the four Parks. The monorail and the PeopleMover are both in operation at Walt Disney World and there is even an original concept model of Epcot displayed on the PeopleMover attraction in Tomorrowland. When Disney decided to add another theme park near the Magic Kingdom, they looked back at the original concepts for Epcot. Two of the main concepts behind Epcot the city did go into Epcot the theme park: technology and culture. Future World was made to showcase the progress of technology, and even though most aspects seem outdated today, it was ahead of the times back in 1982. World Showcase could be called a permanent World’s Fair, very similar to how Walt envisioned the shopping and dining districts of Epcot’s city centre.

And in the end, Disney World was renamed Walt Disney World to honour the man who had such a passion to dream up something so unbelievably expansive and futuristic.