Riding off into the weekend: Epcot's birthday

They used to call it EPCOT Center. It began as Walt Disney's Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow, and it was not a theme park but a planned city. Disney, a dedicated futurist, wanted to expand beyond what he had already done into solving major problems of urban life. His idea was, in a way, one of the last of the great futurist projects, a category that stretched back almost over the entire 20th Century. The underlying problem with the futurist vision is that it's cold and clean and it eliminates all the messiness of human life that it just so happens that humans like and cities apparently need to thrive. Cities that work are organic, with accruals over time of homes and buildings and shops in different fashions for different ages. Planned communities, on the other hand, might conceivably work for a small group of people looking to fence their homes off from other people, but that's not a working premise for commerce. That's a cave. And cities are not caves.

Of course, for Walt, a man of his times, EPCOT was a potential solution to the problems of urbanization. He wasn't trying to lead us down the path of sterile ruin, he was trying to eliminate slums and tiresome commutes and economic unsteadiness. It just turned out that history has proven that his solution wasn't the right one. When he died in 1966, it was EPCOT that he left behind as his next step forward. The Florida Project was already a go. The Magic Kingdom would be built first, and then the city. But it was not to be.

I don't know whether Disney's successors came to believe that a city like EPCOT wouldn't work, or if they just weren't up to the task of attempting to create it. In any case, what they did come up with was a plan that united two different parks into one, a standing world's fair at least in its inception. On the one hand, corporations would show their ideas for the future, and on the other, countries would exhibit themselves and their people. It wasn't exactly a world's fair (usually countries want to show off their futures, not their pasts), but it was close enough.

It opened 30 years ago, in October of 1982.

It's changed a lot since the early days. Some of the changes are improvements, some are losses, but as with all of the Disney parks, they can't be envisioned as museums, and they move along with the times as the Disney corporation perceives of those times. I would kill to get Horizons back, as would most folks who remember it. Then again, who doesn't love Soarin'? Things come and go.

To celebrate the anniversary, some Epcot (now lower-cased) links:

The Epcot that never was: Walt's original proposal.

World Showcase original artwork I love concept art!

An Horizons tribute. Sigh...

The Universe of Energy original art.

And finally, original art from The Land.

All of this is from the Disney and More blog, which, needless to say, I highly recommend.