THE DISNEY UTOPIA CITY

[Lord Raffles]

Walt Disney's original vision of EPCOT was for a model community, home to twenty thousand residents, which would be a test bed for city planning and organization. The community was to have been built in the shape of a circle, with businesses and commercial areas at its center, community buildings and schools and recreational complexes around it, and residential neighborhoods along the perimeter. Transportation would have been provided by monorails and PeopleMovers (like the one in the Magic Kingdom's Tomorrowland). Automobile traffic would be kept underground, leaving pedestrians safe above-ground. Walt Disney said, "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." The original model of this original vision of EPCOT can still be seen by passengers riding the Tomorrowland Transit Authority attraction in the Magic Kingdom park; when the PeopleMover enters the showhouse for Stitch's Great Escape, the model is visible on the left (when facing forward) behind glass. This vision was not realized. Walt Disney was not able to obtain funding and permission to start work on his Florida property until he agreed to build the Magic Kingdom first. Disney passed away before the Magic Kingdom opened.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epcot

AND he was a German-American...

 

[headvoid]

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In all the publicity that surrounded the hundredth anniversary of Walt Disney’s birth in December 2001, another significant Disney anniversary was rather overlooked: the fifth birthday of Celebration. Five years ago, in November 1996, 350 people became the first residents of the town, built by the Disney Corporation on mosquito-ridden swampland in Osceola County, Florida, next to its World Resort. This model town is now a thriving community of 5000 residents, with a projected population of 20,000. The early brochures for Celebration immodestly described it as a massive project in social engineering, an attempt to recreate the kinder, gentler America of the past: ‘There was once a place where neighbors greeted neighbors in the quiet of summer twilight … There is a place that takes you back to that time of innocence … A place of caramel apples and cotton candy, secret forts, and hopscotch on the streets.

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