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EPCOT (concept)


The Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow (EPCOT) was an unfinished concept being developed by Walt Disney. Its purpose was to be a "real city that would 'never cease to be a blueprint of the future,'" designed to stimulate American corporations to come up with new ideas for urban living. This was part of Walt Disney's original plan for the property purchased near Orlando, Florida, but after his death in 1966, the property became the Walt Disney World Resort in 1971 and a theme park based on the idea opened in 1982. A portion of the original architectural model of the concept can be viewed on the Tomorrowland Transit Authority PeopleMover in the Magic Kingdom.

In the early 1960s, entertainment industry magnate Walt Disney, who by this time had many grandchildren, began to worry about the future of the world they would inhabit. He worried especially about modern cities, which were hectic, disorganized, dirty, and crime-ridden, a far cry from his clean and controlled Disneyland Park in California. Realizing that what he and his Imagineers had learned in the development of Disneyland could be put to use in planning communities, and perhaps even cities, Disney began to immerse himself in books about city planning, such as Ebenezer Howard's Garden Cities of To-morrow. Around the same time, Disney had given the East Coast a glimpse of his style of entertainment, with the four pavilions he developed for the 1964-1965 New York World's Fair. The success of these exhibitions convinced him that the time was right for an "East Coast Disneyland". (See Great Moments with Mr. Lincoln, Carousel of Progress, It's A Small World) However, Disney did not want simply to build a second Disneyland. He wanted to create something entirely different: a community for people to live in.


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