In fact, the park's central structure benefited from the input of novelist Ray Bradbury, who was involved in scripting EPCOT's storyline.ĭisney's interest in the socially transformative potential of revolutionary technologies drew him to the author of the Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth, R. His optimistic vision of a harmonious social fabric made possible by eliminating conflicts over resources and by shrinking the world through expanded access to mass media and communication technologies echoed the narratives of many science fiction writers and filmmakers.
In the case of EPCOT, Walt Disney attempted to build a model for urban development in a future shaped by advances in transportation, communication, environmental systems, energy production, and data storage. Large-scale utopian fantasies have often found fertile ground in Florida, home of the mythical Fountain of Youth. If Main Street USA, the principal thoroughfare of the Magic Kingdom, was the idealized version of an urban community central to the American imaginary of the previous century, EPCOT offered a chance to project its counterpart in the next.
This somewhat radical vision of a theme park as an experimental showcase for new technologies and a testing ground for theories about urban design reconnects Disney World-the archetypal theme park-with its origins in the world's fairs of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow, known by the acronym EPCOT, was designed as a utopian city that could continuously change in response to emerging technologies.
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