The Florida project: Walt Disney’s urban utopia
In an extract from her book A Cultural History of the Disneyland Theme Parks: Middle Class Kingdoms, Dr. Sabrina Mittermeier discusses Walt Disney’s utopian vision for a new community and urban future for Florida.
Given the enormous success of Disneyland in California, it seems hardly surprising that Walt Disney soon had plans for an East Coast Disneyland as
early as 1959, a mere four years after its opening. (Mannheim 2002: 67) As consumer
research proved, another theme park on the East Coast would be especially lucrative
as very few visitors from east of the Mississippi actually came to Disneyland (Ford
2013: n.p.) – after all, most domestic tourists still travelled by car, not by
plane. Several locations were evaluated; among them New York (Robert Moses had
urged Disney to eventually take over the World’s Fair site), (Mannheim 2002: 68)
Maryland (in the vicinity of Washington, D.C.), and St. Louis, but, after
several reconnaissance missions by Disney and his advisors, the choice was
finally made for Central Florida in 1963). (Arnold n.dat: n.p.)
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Land there was cheap, the weather was sunny and largely stable, and the target area outside of Orlando was well connected by highways. Florida, after all, was already a popular tourist destination. The most important factor for Disney, however, was size, as the “sprawl” of hotels, motels, bars, and fast food restaurants that had quickly started to mushroom around Disneyland in Anaheim had always irked him.
Disneyland was originally only about 160 acres in size, and for his “Florida Project,” as it would become known, he eventually purchased a whopping 27,443 acres. (Mannheim 2002: 5) Disney knew that if he would inquire about the land, prices would soar, so the purchases were made by nine dummy corporations; still, such big investments drew attention, and the local press naturally began to speculate about the identity of the mystery buyer. (Mannheim 2002: 5)
Emily Bavar, a reporter for the Orlando Sentinel, had done months of research on the subject, and when she was invited to a press event in Burbank that celebrated Disneyland’s centennial, she finally took the chance to confront Walt Disney himself. During an interview with him, she outright asked him whether it was his company buying the land. As Bavar would note years later, he “looked like [she] had thrown a bucket of water in his face”. (Schmidt 2017: n.p.) Further, while he denied that it was him, he knew way too many details about the property for someone claiming to not have any interest in it. On October 21, 1965, the Orlando Sentinel ran the headline “We Say: Mystery Industry is Disney.” By then, Disney had already bought 27,258 acres of land, and while the prices for the last few acres still to be purchased soared as predicted, the total property eventually only cost approximately $5.1 million ($184 per acre). (Mannheim 2002: 72)
The vast land (twice the size of Manhattan!) was not purchased to just build another theme park. Disney’s plans, as he officially revealed during a press conference on November 15, were much greater: besides a vacation destination containing a Disneyland-style theme park, resort hotels, and camp sites, the site was planned to contain an “airport of the future,” an industrial park showcasing “American industry at work,” the Lake Buena Vista living community, and most importantly, EPCOT, the Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow. (Anon. 1971: 14)
Everything in this “Disney World” was supposed to be connected by a state-of-the-art transportation system. (Anon. 1971: 14) EPCOT was the heart and soul of the project, and Disney’s main reason to want to build on the newly acquired land. The Disneyland-style theme park was just an easy way to bring in the visitors and cash flow to finance EPCOT. Walt Disney laid out his plans for the prototype community in a short film produced in October 1966 to be shown to industry and government leaders, written by Marty Sklar:
fig.1
Land there was cheap, the weather was sunny and largely stable, and the target area outside of Orlando was well connected by highways. Florida, after all, was already a popular tourist destination. The most important factor for Disney, however, was size, as the “sprawl” of hotels, motels, bars, and fast food restaurants that had quickly started to mushroom around Disneyland in Anaheim had always irked him.
Disneyland was originally only about 160 acres in size, and for his “Florida Project,” as it would become known, he eventually purchased a whopping 27,443 acres. (Mannheim 2002: 5) Disney knew that if he would inquire about the land, prices would soar, so the purchases were made by nine dummy corporations; still, such big investments drew attention, and the local press naturally began to speculate about the identity of the mystery buyer. (Mannheim 2002: 5)
Emily Bavar, a reporter for the Orlando Sentinel, had done months of research on the subject, and when she was invited to a press event in Burbank that celebrated Disneyland’s centennial, she finally took the chance to confront Walt Disney himself. During an interview with him, she outright asked him whether it was his company buying the land. As Bavar would note years later, he “looked like [she] had thrown a bucket of water in his face”. (Schmidt 2017: n.p.) Further, while he denied that it was him, he knew way too many details about the property for someone claiming to not have any interest in it. On October 21, 1965, the Orlando Sentinel ran the headline “We Say: Mystery Industry is Disney.” By then, Disney had already bought 27,258 acres of land, and while the prices for the last few acres still to be purchased soared as predicted, the total property eventually only cost approximately $5.1 million ($184 per acre). (Mannheim 2002: 72)
The vast land (twice the size of Manhattan!) was not purchased to just build another theme park. Disney’s plans, as he officially revealed during a press conference on November 15, were much greater: besides a vacation destination containing a Disneyland-style theme park, resort hotels, and camp sites, the site was planned to contain an “airport of the future,” an industrial park showcasing “American industry at work,” the Lake Buena Vista living community, and most importantly, EPCOT, the Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow. (Anon. 1971: 14)
Everything in this “Disney World” was supposed to be connected by a state-of-the-art transportation system. (Anon. 1971: 14) EPCOT was the heart and soul of the project, and Disney’s main reason to want to build on the newly acquired land. The Disneyland-style theme park was just an easy way to bring in the visitors and cash flow to finance EPCOT. Walt Disney laid out his plans for the prototype community in a short film produced in October 1966 to be shown to industry and government leaders, written by Marty Sklar:
“EPCOT will take its cue
from the new ideas and new technologies that are now emerging from the creative centers of American industry, it will be a community of tomorrow that will never be completed, but will always be introducing, and testing, and demonstrating new materials and new systems. And EPCOT will always be a showcase to the world of the ingenuity and imagination of American free enterprise. I don’t believe there is a challenge anywhere in the world that’s more important to people everywhere than finding solutions to the problems of our cities. […] We think the [public] need is for starting from scratch on virgin land and building a special kind of new community. So that’s what EPCOT is: an Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow that will always be in the state of becoming. It will never cease to be a living blueprint of the future where people actually live a life they can’t find anyplace else in the world.”
(Armstrong, Sam 1967)
(Armstrong, Sam 1967)
Such city planning ideas did
not just come out of nowhere. Disneyland had taught Disney much about building
an environment, and the problems and pitfalls that came with it. After all,
pioneering urban planner James Rouse had called Disneyland “the outstanding piece
of urban design in the United States” in a speech given to the graduating class
of the Harvard School of Design in 1963, (Arnold n.d.: n.p.) something the
EPCOT film also quoted.
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Also, while Disney’s aforementioned ideas for improving on public transport in Los Angeles had always fallen on deaf ears, he never gave up on them. Besides Disneyland, Disney had also begun to work on two other projects in the early 1960s: the campus for CalArts in Valencia, California that was formally established in 1961, and a ski resort proposed for the Mineral King valley in the Sequoia National Park. While the campus opened in 1971, the ski resort would never come to fruition, as environmental concerns eventually stopped its construction.
Yet, it was still underway when EPCOT was announced in 1965. Disney had, however, not stopped there: in 1958 he had already sent some of his staff to the Brussels World’s Fair for inspiration, and in 1962 to the one in Seattle, where they had made an unsuccessful bid to build the fair’s monorail. (Mannheim 2002: 15) For the 1964/65 World’s Fair, however, WED finally designed and built a total of four attractions: the “Pepsi-Cola Presents Walt Disney’s ‘It’s a Small World’ – a Salute to UNICEF and the World’s Children” for the UNICEF pavilion, “Progressland” for the General Electric pavilion that featured the “Carousel of Progress,” “Ford Magic’s Skyway” for Ford Motor Company, and “Great Moments with Mr. Lincoln” for the State of Illinois, featuring an audio-animatronic of Abraham Lincoln.
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fig.iii
All of the attractions were eventually relocated to Disneyland after the fair: Great Moments with Mr. Lincoln came to Main Street, U.S.A., in 1965, “It’s A Small World” to Fantasyland in 1966, the Carousel of Progress to Tomorrowland in 1967, and the dioramas created for “Ford’s Magic Skyway” were added to the track of the Disneyland Railroad in 1966. The transportation system used in the attraction was transformed into the WEDway Peoplemover and opened, like the Carousel, as part of the redesign of Tomorrowland as “New Tomorrowland,” under the aptly titled headline “World on the Move” in 1967.
The People Mover was also planned to be part of EPCOT. The original plans for the city were reminiscent of Le Corbusier’s Radiant City, as well as Ebenezer Howard’s Garden City, and showed a design with several concentric circles. (Mannheim 2002: 3) In many ways, the plans for EPCOT were part of a larger historical tradition of utopian urban planning in the United States and Europe; progressive ideas had spurred on reform programs such as the City Beautiful and the Garden City movement at the turn of the century were still felt in the plans for the “prototype community,” as were newer concepts.
The focal point of EPCOT was the “town center,” essentially a shopping mall themed to different countries around the world, with a landmark hotel in the middle, serving as a visual magnet – much like the “weenie” that is Sleeping Beauty castle in Disneyland. The town center would be completely enclosed by a glass dome, to shield from outside weather and to climate-control the area. (Mannheim 2002: 8) Underneath it was a multi-level “transportation lobby”: WEDway People Movers served as the main mass transit system, as well as a monorail that left from the top level. The mid-level was used by automobile traffic and hotel parking, and trucks drove on the lower level. (Mannheim 2002: 33)
A greenbelt reminiscent of Howard’s ideas divided apartments from single-family housing, and featured, among other things, recreational facilities, schools, and churches. (Mannheim 2002: 11) A 1,000 acre industrial park located south of EPCOT along the monorail route was also featured on the plans, and from the station located here, People Movers would take passengers to the industrial complexes. (Mannheim 2002: 12)
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fig.iii
Disney had long been inspired by the work of his contemporary Victor Gruen. (Mannheim 2002: xvii) Gruen, the inventor of the shopping mall, saw his designs as counteracting the suburban sprawl and decentralization of cities by providing these communities with a true town center. (Mennel 2004: 131) His Southdale Center that opened in Edina, Minnesota in 1956 was climate-controlled and used then-groundbreaking designs such as rooftop parking and escalators. (Mennel 2004: 130) Gruen, like Disney, believed that technology could be used to develop “better forms of social life” and that architecture and design could “mitigate threats to community and individual happiness”. (Mennel 2004: 129) His 1964 book The Heart of Our Cities – The Urban Crisis: Diagnosis and Cure directly served as an inspiration to the plans for EPCOT.
For the 1964/65 World’s Fair, Disney also worked closely with city planner Robert Moses who was in charge of the fair (and won this position in a bid over Gruen). (Mennel 2004: 142) Moses, however, held much different beliefs from Disney and Gruen – for example, he favoured building highways over public transport, and his influence in planning and building cities, especially in New York, had directly contributed to the often-cited “plight of the cities” in 1960s America. Unsurprisingly, Disney clashed with Moses frequently, and it is “more than coincidental that the tide turned dramatically on Moses’ grandiose schemes around the same time as Disney showcased his plans for a utopian city of tomorrow”. (Schmidt 2010: n.p.)
The idea for EPCOT was developed at a time when urban planning had become a popular buzzword (again), further exemplified by Jane Jacobs’ 1961 book The Death and Life of Great American Cities. Jacobs, however, argued against such modernist planning (especially Moses’ methods) and in favour of a more organic urban development.
EPCOT was therefore not only developed from Walt Disney’s personal experiences with Disneyland in the 1950s, but also bigger concerns during these times; the “sprawl” of Anaheim and the wider Los Angeles area was but one example of the decentralization of American cities that came about by the white flight to suburbia, leaving many downtowns struggling. However, it should be noted that Disney’s target audience would likely not have been those mostly working class, and thus BIPOC and queer people that were still living in these downtowns, but again, a middle- or upper-class demographic that was also largely white and heteronormative.
Disney’s plans however called for “starting from scratch” (Armstrong, Sam 1967) and thus had a decidedly more utopian notion at its core than the ideas of other contemporary urban planners. He wanted to come up with a “blueprint” for the future, providing a showcase for technological inventions of American industry leaders – essentially building on the existing successful partnerships with corporations he had established in Disneyland and at the World’s Fair. Much like Disneyland, his goal was to create something that would be able to continuously evolve, but less inhibited by size; a community in a constant “state of becoming”. (Armstrong, Sam 1967) EPCOT, Walt Disney Productions So, while EPCOT makes use of older, as well as contemporary, ideas of utopian urban planning, it equally emerges as part of a larger context of future research that had begun in the post–World War II/early Cold War years and would continue to define the 1960s and 1970s. As historian Elke Seefried has outlined:
fig.ii
Also, while Disney’s aforementioned ideas for improving on public transport in Los Angeles had always fallen on deaf ears, he never gave up on them. Besides Disneyland, Disney had also begun to work on two other projects in the early 1960s: the campus for CalArts in Valencia, California that was formally established in 1961, and a ski resort proposed for the Mineral King valley in the Sequoia National Park. While the campus opened in 1971, the ski resort would never come to fruition, as environmental concerns eventually stopped its construction.
Yet, it was still underway when EPCOT was announced in 1965. Disney had, however, not stopped there: in 1958 he had already sent some of his staff to the Brussels World’s Fair for inspiration, and in 1962 to the one in Seattle, where they had made an unsuccessful bid to build the fair’s monorail. (Mannheim 2002: 15) For the 1964/65 World’s Fair, however, WED finally designed and built a total of four attractions: the “Pepsi-Cola Presents Walt Disney’s ‘It’s a Small World’ – a Salute to UNICEF and the World’s Children” for the UNICEF pavilion, “Progressland” for the General Electric pavilion that featured the “Carousel of Progress,” “Ford Magic’s Skyway” for Ford Motor Company, and “Great Moments with Mr. Lincoln” for the State of Illinois, featuring an audio-animatronic of Abraham Lincoln.
fig.iii
All of the attractions were eventually relocated to Disneyland after the fair: Great Moments with Mr. Lincoln came to Main Street, U.S.A., in 1965, “It’s A Small World” to Fantasyland in 1966, the Carousel of Progress to Tomorrowland in 1967, and the dioramas created for “Ford’s Magic Skyway” were added to the track of the Disneyland Railroad in 1966. The transportation system used in the attraction was transformed into the WEDway Peoplemover and opened, like the Carousel, as part of the redesign of Tomorrowland as “New Tomorrowland,” under the aptly titled headline “World on the Move” in 1967.
The People Mover was also planned to be part of EPCOT. The original plans for the city were reminiscent of Le Corbusier’s Radiant City, as well as Ebenezer Howard’s Garden City, and showed a design with several concentric circles. (Mannheim 2002: 3) In many ways, the plans for EPCOT were part of a larger historical tradition of utopian urban planning in the United States and Europe; progressive ideas had spurred on reform programs such as the City Beautiful and the Garden City movement at the turn of the century were still felt in the plans for the “prototype community,” as were newer concepts.
The focal point of EPCOT was the “town center,” essentially a shopping mall themed to different countries around the world, with a landmark hotel in the middle, serving as a visual magnet – much like the “weenie” that is Sleeping Beauty castle in Disneyland. The town center would be completely enclosed by a glass dome, to shield from outside weather and to climate-control the area. (Mannheim 2002: 8) Underneath it was a multi-level “transportation lobby”: WEDway People Movers served as the main mass transit system, as well as a monorail that left from the top level. The mid-level was used by automobile traffic and hotel parking, and trucks drove on the lower level. (Mannheim 2002: 33)
A greenbelt reminiscent of Howard’s ideas divided apartments from single-family housing, and featured, among other things, recreational facilities, schools, and churches. (Mannheim 2002: 11) A 1,000 acre industrial park located south of EPCOT along the monorail route was also featured on the plans, and from the station located here, People Movers would take passengers to the industrial complexes. (Mannheim 2002: 12)
fig.iii
Disney had long been inspired by the work of his contemporary Victor Gruen. (Mannheim 2002: xvii) Gruen, the inventor of the shopping mall, saw his designs as counteracting the suburban sprawl and decentralization of cities by providing these communities with a true town center. (Mennel 2004: 131) His Southdale Center that opened in Edina, Minnesota in 1956 was climate-controlled and used then-groundbreaking designs such as rooftop parking and escalators. (Mennel 2004: 130) Gruen, like Disney, believed that technology could be used to develop “better forms of social life” and that architecture and design could “mitigate threats to community and individual happiness”. (Mennel 2004: 129) His 1964 book The Heart of Our Cities – The Urban Crisis: Diagnosis and Cure directly served as an inspiration to the plans for EPCOT.
For the 1964/65 World’s Fair, Disney also worked closely with city planner Robert Moses who was in charge of the fair (and won this position in a bid over Gruen). (Mennel 2004: 142) Moses, however, held much different beliefs from Disney and Gruen – for example, he favoured building highways over public transport, and his influence in planning and building cities, especially in New York, had directly contributed to the often-cited “plight of the cities” in 1960s America. Unsurprisingly, Disney clashed with Moses frequently, and it is “more than coincidental that the tide turned dramatically on Moses’ grandiose schemes around the same time as Disney showcased his plans for a utopian city of tomorrow”. (Schmidt 2010: n.p.)
The idea for EPCOT was developed at a time when urban planning had become a popular buzzword (again), further exemplified by Jane Jacobs’ 1961 book The Death and Life of Great American Cities. Jacobs, however, argued against such modernist planning (especially Moses’ methods) and in favour of a more organic urban development.
EPCOT was therefore not only developed from Walt Disney’s personal experiences with Disneyland in the 1950s, but also bigger concerns during these times; the “sprawl” of Anaheim and the wider Los Angeles area was but one example of the decentralization of American cities that came about by the white flight to suburbia, leaving many downtowns struggling. However, it should be noted that Disney’s target audience would likely not have been those mostly working class, and thus BIPOC and queer people that were still living in these downtowns, but again, a middle- or upper-class demographic that was also largely white and heteronormative.
Disney’s plans however called for “starting from scratch” (Armstrong, Sam 1967) and thus had a decidedly more utopian notion at its core than the ideas of other contemporary urban planners. He wanted to come up with a “blueprint” for the future, providing a showcase for technological inventions of American industry leaders – essentially building on the existing successful partnerships with corporations he had established in Disneyland and at the World’s Fair. Much like Disneyland, his goal was to create something that would be able to continuously evolve, but less inhibited by size; a community in a constant “state of becoming”. (Armstrong, Sam 1967) EPCOT, Walt Disney Productions So, while EPCOT makes use of older, as well as contemporary, ideas of utopian urban planning, it equally emerges as part of a larger context of future research that had begun in the post–World War II/early Cold War years and would continue to define the 1960s and 1970s. As historian Elke Seefried has outlined:
“future thinking in the 1960s was dominated by ideas of feasibility and some sort of technological optimism, as most exponents of the futures field were confident that they would be able to plan and steer the future by using “modern” and rational methods.”
(2013: n.p.)
(2013: n.p.)
This makes it part of a line
of tradition of what Seefried has termed a “critical-emancipatory” approach to
future thinking perpetuated mostly by Austrian Robert Jungk and German Ossip K.
Flechtheim. (Seefried 2015: 125) While their ideas were grounded in a
socialist, neo-Marxist ideology, as well as connected to the social philosophy
and critical theory of Adorno and Horkheimer and critical peace research(Seefried 2015: 125–28), they were aiming at creating active, plannable steps
toward the future instead of just theoretical speculation. (Seefried 2015: 141)
Disney’s ideas, however, do not call for active citizen participation as they
are, but are supplanting any participatory ideas with corporate control. Still,
his agenda for EPCOT can be seen as part of “‘Western’ futures research […]
aiming at combining forecasting and planning a better future”. (Seefried 2013: n.p., original emphasis)
And yet, Disney’s vision would indeed never become more than that: on December 15, 1966, only two months after the EPCOT film was shot, Walt Disney died after a failed operation of his lung cancer. On his deathbed in St. Joseph’s hospital in Burbank, he would stare at the ceiling, picturing the squares of tile as a grid map for Disney World. (Mannheim 2002: 31)
![]()
fig.v
Anon. (1971), The Story of Walt Disney World, Walt Disney Productions.
Armstrong, Sam (1967), EPCOT, Walt Disney Productions
Arnold, Matthew C., ‘A commodified utopia’, The Original E.P.C.O.T. https://sites.google.com/site/theoriginalepcot/essays/a-look-back?authuser=0. Accessed February 17, 2017.
Ford, Steven (2013), ‘50 years ago, Walt Disney saw Orlando as perfect site for new kingdom’,Orlando Sentinel, November 21.
Mannheim, Steve (2002), Walt Disney and the Quest for Community, Aldershot, England: Ashgate Publishing Limited.
Mennel, Timothy (2004), ‘Victor Gruen and the construction of Cold War Utopias’, Journal of Planning History, 3:2, pp. 116–50.
Schmidt, Chuck (2010), ‘Disney, Moses and the plight of America’s cities’, Staten Island Advance, October 20, https://www.silive.com/goofy_about_disney/2010/10/post_5.html.Accessed February 16, 2017.
Schmidt, Chuck (2017), ‘Reporter Emily Bavar has a special place in Disney history’, Staten Island Advance, https://www.silive.com/goofy_about_disney/2017/01/post_67.html. Accessed February 16, 2017.
Seefried, Elke (2013), ‘Steering the future: The emergence of “Western” futures research & its production of expertise, 1950s to early 1970s’, European Journal of Futures Research, 29:2, doi: 10.1007/s40309-013-0029-y.
Seefried, Elke (2015), Zukuenfte: Aufstieg und Krise der Zukunftsforschung 1945-1980, Oldenbourg: De Gruyter.
And yet, Disney’s vision would indeed never become more than that: on December 15, 1966, only two months after the EPCOT film was shot, Walt Disney died after a failed operation of his lung cancer. On his deathbed in St. Joseph’s hospital in Burbank, he would stare at the ceiling, picturing the squares of tile as a grid map for Disney World. (Mannheim 2002: 31)
fig.v
Anon. (1971), The Story of Walt Disney World, Walt Disney Productions.
Armstrong, Sam (1967), EPCOT, Walt Disney Productions
Arnold, Matthew C., ‘A commodified utopia’, The Original E.P.C.O.T. https://sites.google.com/site/theoriginalepcot/essays/a-look-back?authuser=0. Accessed February 17, 2017.
Ford, Steven (2013), ‘50 years ago, Walt Disney saw Orlando as perfect site for new kingdom’,Orlando Sentinel, November 21.
Mannheim, Steve (2002), Walt Disney and the Quest for Community, Aldershot, England: Ashgate Publishing Limited.
Mennel, Timothy (2004), ‘Victor Gruen and the construction of Cold War Utopias’, Journal of Planning History, 3:2, pp. 116–50.
Schmidt, Chuck (2010), ‘Disney, Moses and the plight of America’s cities’, Staten Island Advance, October 20, https://www.silive.com/goofy_about_disney/2010/10/post_5.html.Accessed February 16, 2017.
Schmidt, Chuck (2017), ‘Reporter Emily Bavar has a special place in Disney history’, Staten Island Advance, https://www.silive.com/goofy_about_disney/2017/01/post_67.html. Accessed February 16, 2017.
Seefried, Elke (2013), ‘Steering the future: The emergence of “Western” futures research & its production of expertise, 1950s to early 1970s’, European Journal of Futures Research, 29:2, doi: 10.1007/s40309-013-0029-y.
Seefried, Elke (2015), Zukuenfte: Aufstieg und Krise der Zukunftsforschung 1945-1980, Oldenbourg: De Gruyter.
