Comment by zabriel_goss

9 hours ago

The original EPCOT as imagined by Walt Disney was a master-planned city, with all the pleasant amenities and cleverest design you could imagine in the 1960's: Walkable areas, clean public transit, no traffic congestion, homes furnished with the latest in technology and appliances. It was his greatest ambition at the end of his life to make it a reality.

But it didn't happen. Namely, because of how much central control would be given to one man and/or his company to pull it off. The plan in its early iterations essentially meant that if you lived in EPCOT, you forfeited certain freedoms, such as what goes in your home, where you worked, and so on.

This game gave me a good chuckle as a Sim City fan. I'm guilty of complaining about politicians of all levels. But I don't envy their position of having to cut through the vines of competing motives and regulations. And at the same time, as a citizen, I'm not sure I would opt for the Utopian alternative.

7 comments

zabriel_goss

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subscribed  4 hours ago

There are fully planned and built cities, like around here so called "Garden Cities": Welwyn Garden City, Milton Keynes.

I've been in several and they actually feel okay to live in, to run errands, to shop.

It only sounds funny if it's cranked up to the extreme -- like abusive housing associations, a cancer growing on the corpse of the old communities which just wanted some quiet evenings and the bins to not be overflowing, but it can be done well.

dgently7  5 hours ago

scrolled down like 100 posts to find one that actually referenced the op's game directly.

I'm pretty sure the point of the game was to make a statement and make people think/talk and boy-howdy op you did a great job.

crooked-v  8 hours ago

I think the bigger reason the original "EPCOT as a city" didn't happen is that once Walt passed, everyone else in the company looked at the plan and knew it would be a bottomless money pit from day 1.

  • chrisco255  8 hours ago

    I think EPCOT could have been quite successful. The Villages, Florida was centrally planned and designed by many Disney architects (among others) and it is hugely successful and profitable.

    Walt's brother, Roy (who remained after Walt's passing), was not the same visionary that Walt was. Simple as that. Most people would never have taken the risks Walt did with the company. Even the idea of a theme park that has tens of thousands of employees and requires millions of people to fly in from all over the world to be profitable sustainably, was quite a bold idea in the 1950s.

    I regret that Walt passed too young. Florida would probably be covered in a large monorail network had he lived a couple more decades. And Epcot as a city would have been a tourist destination in its own right, and might have influenced urban development elsewhere.

    • crooked-v  2 hours ago

      Well, sure, but The Villages doesn't have all vehicles restricted to an underground roadway supply system grid built out under an entire city, pedestrian PeopleMovers for an entire city, a downtown completely enclosed in a climate-controlled dome, the legal issues that come with changing peoples' furnishings out from under them or trying to evict anyone unemployed, etc etc. There's a huge difference between 'planned community' and the kind of absurd stuff that Walt wanted to build that would all need to work perfectly before anyone could even move in for the first time.