walt’s vision

To truly understand Celebration, the issues that it raises and the tradition out of which it has emerged, one must first understand Walt Disney’s original plan for a utopian community in Florida, a community that he called the Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow, or EPCOT.  It is in the original design for EPCOT that the seeds of Celebration can be found.  And while Celebration is not merely an updated 90’s version of Walt Disney’s EPCOT plan, both have their basis in a common philosophy, and play on a common set of American myths and symbols.  

Celebration is possible today because of actions that Walt took in the early 1960’s.  It was during this period that he secretly bought up the Florida land upon which Celebration, as well as Disney World, EPCOT Center, MGM Studios, the new Animal Kingdom and a series of resorts are built.


EPCOT

In February of 1967, two months after Walt Disney’s death, Walt Disney Productions announced that it would be going ahead with the project closest to Walt’s heart at the time of his death, a “city of tomorrow” to be built adjacent to Disney World in Orlando, Florida.  Eerily, this announcement to the press was narrated by Walt himself, in a film that he had taped for the purpose before his death. 

“The most exciting, and by far the most important past of our Florida project, in fact that heart of everything we will be doing in Disney World,” announced Walt, “will be our Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow.  We call it EPCOT.  And EPCOT will always be a showcase to the world for the ingenuity and imagination of American free enterprise.”

In the film Walt explained in detail his dream of creating a community that would be a technological and futuristic utopia.  It was to be the home of 20,000 residents, and its purpose was to explore new ideas in urban planning.  Walt said “I don’t believe there’s a challenge anywhere in the world that’s more important to people everywhere than finding solutions to the problems of our cities.  But where do we begin...how do we start to answer the great challenge?”

Walt’s first proposal was to build a giant dome that would house the entire community, so that the climate of the new city might be perfectly regulated.  It was to be organized like a wheel, the heart of the city’s industry and commerce at the wheel’s hub, with residential areas moving out in concentric circles and serviced by a monorail system.  The heavy traffic was designed to take place underground on two levels, one for cars and another for trucks.  Inside the city, “the pedestrian will be the king” said Walt, and he planned that pedestrians would be whisked around on people movers. 

Walt continued to explain that EPCOT would be grounded in a concern “with the public need.”  To serve this need “EPCOT will be an experimental city that would incorporate the best ideas of industry, government, and academia worldwide, a city that caters to the people as a service function.  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.”  he concluded that “people still want to live like human beings.”

The thing that strikes me most about Walt’s statements are the incongruities that exist within them.  In one breath he talks about serving the public’s needs, and creating a place where people can live like human beings.  And in the next, he explains that they will be denied the right to vote and to own property, two of unalienable rights of the American Declaration of Independence.  Only a certain class of people will be allowed to live in Walt’s utopia, excluding the lower class of slum dwellers and the elderly.  And to make this code a reality, he brokered a deal with the Florida Legislature that gave him the power to make these rules a reality.  To me, this describes a dictatorship, not a utopia.


house un-American activities?


PRECEDENTS

In this vision, Walt co-opted three of the most powerful narratives in the American self-conception, narratives that exist in tension with one another.  First, he tied his community to the land.  And second he tied it to the machine, the power of technology over that land and its symbolism of American’s conquering of Nature, their power as the nation upon which God has chosen to smile over the natural landscape.  

Echoing the title of Henry Nash Smith’s seminal work, he proposed that the community must be started “from scratch on virgin land.”  The importance of this statement is of course the way in which it ties Disney’s plans to a long tradition of the pastoral in American history.  As Smith wrote “one of the most persistent generalizations concerning American life and character is the notion that our society has been shaped by the pull of a vacant continent drawing population westward.”(Smith 3)  He states further that this generalization is one that “most Americans of the present day cherish, an image that defines what Americans think of their past, and therefore what they propose to make of themselves in the future.” (Smith 4)

Something about the machine in the garden, 

utopia destroyed by another of the important myths of American nationhood - drive to industrialize, to have power, to feed and supply the world - this dictates the destruction of the original and still potent myth of the agrarian nation. 

also city on a hill “I would like to be part of building a model community, a City of Tomorrow...This might become a pilot operation for the teaching age - to go across the country and across the world.”

quote Modell

utopias