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EPCOT (concept)


This article is about the unrealized concept. For its theme park successor, see Epcot.
"Florida Project" redirects here. For the 2017 film, see The Florida Project.
The city's central commercial areas and Cosmopolitan Hotel. Concept art by Herbert Ryman.
Overlay of the 1966 plans for EPCOT (orange) and contemporary situation (blue).

The Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow, shortened to EPCOT or E.P.C.O.T., is an unfinished concept for a planned community, intended to sit on a swath of undeveloped land near Orlando, Florida, that was created by Walt Disney in collaboration with the designers at Walt Disney Imagineering in the 1960s.[1][2] Based on ideas stemming from modernism and futurism, and inspired by architectural literature about city planning, Disney intended EPCOT to be a utopian autocratic company town. One of the primary stated aims of EPCOT was to replace urban sprawl as the organizing force of community planning in the United States in the 1960s. Disney intended EPCOT to be a real city, and it was planned to feature commercial, residential, industrial and recreational centers, connected by a mass multimodal transportation system, that would, he said, "Never cease to be a living blueprint of the future".[3][4]

After Disney died in 1966, the plans for EPCOT were eventually abandoned. Later, upon the opening of Walt Disney World in 1971, EPCOT served as the inspiration and namesake for the resort's eponymous theme park, and the nearby planned community of Celebration, Florida.[5] Several components and aesthetic designs of the original EPCOT vision survived and evolved into elements of the modern-day Disney World park, including the Walt Disney World Monorail System and the Disney utilidor system.

  1. ^ Barrier, J. Michael (2007). The animated man : a life of Walt Disney. Berkeley: University of California Press. ISBN 978-0-520-24117-6. OCLC 70864455.
  2. ^ Acuna, Kirsten (June 26, 2012). "Walt Disney's Original Plan For Epcot Sounded Like An Eerie Futuristic Dystopia". businessinsider.com. Retrieved October 20, 2020.
  3. ^ Gennawey, Sam (2011). Walt Disney and the Promise of Progress City. Theme Park Press. pp. xiii. ISBN 978-1941500262.
  4. ^ Bowers, Alan. "FUTURE WORLD(S): A Critique of Disney's EPCOT and Creating a Futuristic Curriculum". Electronic Theses and Dissertations: 58, 74–75, 84–85, 99–105 – via Georgia Southern University College of Graduate Studies.
  5. ^ "Epcot - Disney - Orlando". www.orlandoviagem.com.br. 2012-06-27. Archived from the original on 2012-09-06. Retrieved 2012-06-27.

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