in Tourist Utopias: Offshore Islands, Enclave Spaces, and Mobile Imaginations,

Ed. Tim Simpson, Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2017.

7 Disney’s Utopian Techno-Futures

Tomorrow’s World That We Shall Build Today 1

Angela Ndalianis

In 1962, Walt Disney began planning the most challenging project of his
career, EPCOT – the Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow – a
prototype community that was inspired by his utopian ideas and which
would encapsulate the possibilities of the future through the combined
forces of science, technology, and corporate enterprise. Disney’s dream,
however, would not come to fruition due to his death on 15 December 1966.
This chapter focuses on the construction of such futuristic cities, and the
manner in which they serve, like many other ‘tourist utopias’, as laborato-
ries for testing utopic urban and architectural innovations. My particular
interest is in Walt Disney, the utopian vision that drove his creation of his
theme parks and his plans for EPCOT, which was to be built in Kissimmee,
Florida. To explore Disney’s vision, I will also travel back in time to examine
the world’s fairs and expositions that influenced his thinking, as well as
forward to Odaiba in Japan and Futuroscope in France – both of which
inherited aspects of Disney’s urban planning ideas. In taking this journey,
it will be argued that the theme park as conceived by Disney reflects the
concerns of world exposition predecessors that visualized the possibilities
of scientific advancement, technological progress, and human ingenuity
and how such developments could shape future human civilization. Since
the late nineteenth century and the opening of the Chicago World’s Fair of
1893, science-fiction themes and utopian ideals have been integral to the
rationale that drove the design of the fairs.2
Expositions like the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893 and the New York
World’s Fair of 1939 relied on combinations of theming and emergent ride

1 This is taken from the theme song of the New York World’s Fair. The complete passage is:
We’re the rising tide coming from far and wide
Marching side by side on our way
For a brave new world,
Tomorrow’s world that we shall build today. (Rydell 1993: 132)
2 Amusement parks of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century – predecessors to the
contemporary theme park – were more overtly science fictional in the design of rides such as
the 1902 ride ‘Trip to the Moon’ at Coney Island, and the rides themselves were an important
showcase of advances in engineering and technology.

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technologies that took participants on journeys into future cities, and that
offered potential consumers an ‘educational’ spectacle of how US industry
and corporate power could – and would – shape the future. Leaving aside
the fact that the theme park itself would become an embodiment of the
affiliation of corporations and industry as producers of wondrous, innova-
tive technologies, as will be argued, the exposition’s focus on corporate
sponsorship of industry was a model that would later be adapted by Walt
Disney and the Disney Corporation in the theme parks. When EPCOT
opened in 1982 – not as a city, but as a theme park in Orlando – it was very
much an homage to the exposition tradition and its belief in scientific
and technological progress. The concept of the science-fictional future
city that’s integral both to the theme park and the exposition has more
recently found a new form of expression in the guise of the ‘learning city’
that aims to showcase the utopian future in a living city environment. The
themes, narratives, and technologies that are contained and rehearsed
within the parameters of science fiction here slip into the public sphere in
more architecturally and socially invasive ways. The issues that concern me
in this chapter center around our fictions of science, and their new forms
of expression in our urban spaces.

Astro Boy, Odaiba, and Futuricity

Tetsuwan Atomu first came to life within the panels of a science-fiction

manga in 1951.3 This super-boy robot, who came to be known in the Western
world as Astro Boy, was the creation of Osamu Tezuka. Tezuka later gave
Astro Boy movement in the form of a science-fiction animated television
show, Astro Boy (1963-1966). Astro Boy’s fictional birthday – 7 April 2003
– finally arrived when reality caught up with fiction and, to make this
reality even more ‘real’, the urbanscape of the future envisioned by Tezuka
(super-transport systems, gleaming architecture, and a world where human
and robot live in harmony) also appeared to have arrived. Having influenced
an entire generation of Japanese roboticists, it comes as no surprise that
Astro Boy has become an iconic figure who embodies the future now. Astro
Boy’s birthday celebrations began on 6 April 2003 ‘with the launch of a new
Tetsuwan Atom Japanese animated series on the Fuji TV network’ (Nakada

3 Sections of this article appeared in Angela Ndalianis, ‘Tomorrow’s World that We Shall
Build Today’, in Screen Consciousness: Cinema, Mind and World, edited by R. Pepperell and M.
Punt (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2006), 41-64.

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2003). Beyond the robot star that it promotes, the Fuji Television head office,
designed by Kenzo Tange, itself recalls classic tropes of science fiction as it
rises majestically like a network matrix in all of its metallic glory. Crowning
its peak is a mega-ton globe that appears to defy gravity; the structure is
one of many impressive symbols that reflect the utopian-inspired, futuristic
imperatives that drive urban development on the island of Odaiba, a man-
made island that is situated just outside Tokyo in Tokyo Bay. The lesson of
Odaiba is that science fiction no longer exists beyond our reach, far into
the future: it is with us now. To emphasize the point further, in 2009 an
18-meter/59-feet-tall RX-78 Gundam mecha-robot (based on the 1979 anime
series Mobile Suit Gundam) was placed at the outside entrance way of Aqua
City, a retail complex in Odaiba (see Figure 7.1).
Original plans for Odaiba were to develop it as ‘a “teleport”, as a main
information hub and to build clusters of highly intelligent buildings in
response to the development of the information age in the late 1980s’ (Mu-
rayama and Parker 2007: 73) and a showcase for futuristic living; however,
the collapse of the economic bubble led to delays in development. Again in
1996 there were plans to hold an international exposition in Odaiba called
‘Tokyo Frontier’, but funding problems stalled its development. Neverthe-
less, an exposition building did eventually come to light in Odaiba in the
form of the Tokyo Big Sight (the Tokyo International Exhibition Center).
And just like many of the expositions of earlier times, both the Tokyo
Big Sight and Odaiba came to be perceived as places of grand innovation
that were nurtured by corporations, science, and technology. Muruyama
and Parker explain that by 1999, the plan was ‘to reposition Odaiba as the
strategic hub for leading industries for the 21st century, including IT and
the creative industries’ (Murayama and Parker 2007: 74). The idea was, by
2016, to make Odaiba into a self-contained ideal urban center that included
residential, shopping, and leisure facilities, and attracted major industry
innovators, including telecommunication centers (Telecom), broadcasting
stations (Fuji Television), universities, and research facilities (the National
Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology), museums (the
National Museum of Emerging Science and Innovation) and entertainment
complexes (Decks, Aquacity, and Mediage) (Murayama and Parker 2007: 76).
The central logic behind emerging cities such as Odaiba is the principle
of the ‘learning city’ – a city that promotes scientific and technological
innovation by integrating it into its economic plans and by educating citi-
zens about the importance that innovations in media and communication
technologies have within the context of the global market. Combining retail
developments with industry and technology, to quote Kurt Larsen, ‘learning

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Figure 7.1 The 18-meter/59-feet-tall RX-78 Gundam mecha-robot at the entrance

way of Aqua City, Odaiba

Angela Ndalianis

cities’ act ‘as drivers for the knowledge-based societies of the 21st century’
(Larsen 1999). Yet, while situated in the present, because they borrow so
many tropes from science fiction these ‘learning cities’ are imbued with
an undeniable ‘futuricity’. This feature is clear in the intentions that drive
Odaiba’s MIRAIKAN – the National Museum of Emerging Science and

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Innovation – whose construction was supported by the Japanese govern-

ment ‘to prepare its country for the transition into the scientific society’
(Max Planck Society 2005), and which has held numerous exhibitions that
use science fiction in order to tell a story about the real possibilities of
science and technology. Past exhibitions have included ‘Science + Fiction’
(2005), ‘Terminator – Battle or Coexistence? Robots and Our Future’ (2009),
‘The World of Manga Experienced through Science’ (2012), ‘Thunderbirds
Expo – Special-effects of the Century Depict our Future’ (2013), ‘Android:
What Is a Human?’ (starring the uncannily human-looking robots of Hiroshi
Ishiguro of Osaka University), and daily performances by Asimo the Honda
robot whose design is clearly modeled on Astro Boy and who is the official
ambassador of robots.
The one powerful memory that is reignited every time I visit Odaiba is
the extent to which it feels like I’ve entered a series of science-fiction films
from the post-1950s period. The mise-en-scène is indisputable: the spotless,
meticulously manicured urbanscape with the metallic and monochromatic
building surfaces of structures like the Tokyo International Exhibition
Center (known as the Tokyo Big Sight) and the Telecom complex 4; the
expedient people movers littered throughout Aqua City and Decks Tokyo
Beach (the two destination shopping malls); the super-velocity, Yurikamome
train that travels from mainland Tokyo to Odaiba, a driverless train that
relies on the maglev system which was perfected by the Disney Corporation
in the early 1960s and which levitates above the tracks via magnets; the
massive-architectural structures that stand as monuments to corporations
like Fuji TV, Telecom, Panasonic and telecommunication companies like
NTT, which has its offices in the skyscraper called ‘Tokyo Teleport’ – all
seem to be straight out of films like 2001: A Space Odyssey (1969), Logan’s
Run (1976), and Minority Report (2002), or television shows like Star Trek.
The technologically controlled, computer-reliant infrastructure of the
entire city, which includes the visible presence of robots, computer games
in the Joypolis game city, cutting-edge entertainment complexes such as
Mediage, Toyota’s Mega Web, the Panasonic Center and the Sony Complex,
as well as the high-tech surveillance system that monitors every move that
citizens make, recall The Forbin Project (1969), Westworld (1973), and THX 1138
(1971). This science-fiction mise-en-scène speaks of a utopian existence – an
environment where human and machine come together in perfect unison
for the betterment of human kind. The flip side, of course, is the dystopian

4 See http://www.bigsight.jp/english/index.html

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narratives that the films insist underlie the utopian surface; these urban
spaces, on the other hand, refuse to acknowledge any dystopian narrative.

I Have Seen the Future … at the World’s Fair

In words that are consistent with Marin’s (1984) conceptualization of utop-

ics, Kihlstedt (1986) has stated that: ‘Mass utopias are mere figments of
the imagination, and most are embodied only in literature. Even in the
nineteenth century, when some small utopian communities were actually
built, utopian endeavors remained primarily literary. In the twentieth
century, however, visionary images of the future were brought to life and
offered to the public at world’s Fairs’ (Kihlstedt 1986: 97). In the early twenty-
first century this is even more the case. Being influenced and also imaged
by the imagined cities of science-fiction cinema, projected utopias have
escaped the confines of the fairs and expositions and entered actual urban
environments; however, before returning to our time I’d like to travel back
to some of those earlier visions of utopian communities.
Since the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893, world’s fairs and expositions
returned continuously to the concern with creating idealized cities. The
Chicago World’s Fair was especially significant in establishing what would
later become integral not only to the logic of expositions, but to theme
parks like Disneyland and EPCOT and urban destinations like Odaiba that
would follow in their wake: in all instances, a ready-made ideal city was
created, one that was technologically driven and reliant on commercial
imperatives and popular culture (Gilbert 1991: 15).5 As James Gilbert has
explained when discussing early exposition visitors, ‘the visible future
they encountered was a carefully engineered vision, a prophecy […] of the
coming relationship between work, leisure, and culture’ (Gilbert 1991: 37).
But unlike the dystopian futures often delineated in science fiction, in
the future visions of the expositions, the inclusion of technological and
scientific innovation within the social environment was intended to inspire
the creation of utopian spaces.

5 Despite these imperatives, however, as Gilbert explains ‘the Chicago World’s Fair… proposed
an ideal city in which popular culture was controlled and limited. If the format of the Chicago
Columbian Exposition was a carefully calculated balance between the neoclassical White City
and the commercial Midway there remained a serious problem. Trying to create a controlled fair
(a contradiction in terms, perhaps) and a careful cultural environment did not always work…
This meant that there were two Chicago fairs coexisting in Jackson Park: the first celebrated
control and high culture; the second fantasy, liberation and ethnicity.’

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Events like the Chicago World’s Fair of 1933-1934 (also called the Century
of Progress International Exposition) and the New York World’s Fair of 1939
took the first important steps not only in forging a relationship between sci-
ence, technology, industry, and society, but also integrating these concerns
with the visions and consumer pleasures offered by science fiction and
entertainment. Rydell explains that, in the wake of the Great Depression,
‘1930s scientists, confronted by a “revolt against science”, joined corporate
backers of the fairs in trying to pin popular hopes for national recovery on
the positive results expected from the fusion of science and business’ (Rydell
1993: 526). Specifically, combining the speculation familiar to science fiction
with the realities of the scientific and technological innovations of the time,
these fairs specialized in presenting the public with future utopian realities
made possible through technological advancement.
It was the New York World’s Fair of 1939 that became one of the most
famous examples to showcase a new urban landscape, one that featured
the utopian possibilities of technology and science. On the opening night,
after Albert Einstein switched on the lights that would bring life to the fair’s
motto – ‘Designing the World of Tomorrow’ – the fair proceeded to create
a vision of a world in which ‘science could become a way of life and utopia
would be nigh’ (Rydell 1993: 111). The fair showcased the latest technologies
offered by corporations (such as Rotolactor, an automatic cow-milking
machine). Numerous other technological inventions were presented to
an eager public as well: Voder, a synthetic human-speech device by AT&T;
television sets by RCA, GE, and Westinghouse; and Elektro, a walking and
talking robot by Westinghouse (Kuznick 1994: 341). However, it was the
representation of a ‘city of the future’ that drew crowds by the millions
(see Figure 7.2).
The plans for this city of the future, which were conceived by the in-
dustrial designer Norman Bel Geddes, set the foundations for cities that
were riddled with massive freeway systems, cars, and soaring skyscrapers.
Preempting many of the later rides in Disneyland, in Geddes’ Futurama
‘Highways and Horizons’ exhibit sponsored by General Motors, viewers
sat high above a miniature city of the future in 1960 while a motorized belt
moved them along in a full circle. As they looked down on a 36,000-square-
foot model city of superhighways and skyscrapers designed by Geddes,
through speakers built into the backs of their seats, a narrator asked the
audience to imagine how the traffic and housing problems of the present
United States would be solved through these technological and industrial
wonders by the year 1960. Provided with souvenir pins that read ‘I have
seen the future’, as Morshed explains, the Futurama exhibition reinforced

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Figure 7.2 Bel Geddes’ Futurama ‘Highways and Horizons’ exhibit sponsored by

General Motors for the New York World’s Fair of 1939-1940

Available at the New York Public Library’s Biblion online: http://exhibitions.nypl.org/biblion/

world-of-tomorrow

two things: ‘The first is the idea of the Future as spectacle, and the second
is the process of seeing that spectacle’ (Morshed 2004: 74).
Significantly, Morshed draws attention to the fact that the Futurama
exhibit deliberately placed the viewer not only at a vantage point of height,
but also of flight: ‘Bel Geddes had his protagonist – the Futurama’s specta-
tor – literally fly to an American utopia’ (2004: 77). The exhibit was, in
fact, typical of the era’s obsession with flight as representative of a new
mode of being. A new type of ‘aerialized’ spectatorship came to life in this
exhibition, one that would not only influence the design of rides in theme
parks but one that opened up the possibility of new modes of architectural
and urbanistic imagination. To quote Morshed: ‘The fantastic idea that the
view from above would somehow facilitate the process of designing the
ideal future city became an enduring fascination among utopias architects,
planners, and science-fiction writers’ (Morshed 2004: 80).
Like the cult figure of the aviator as embodied in the persona of the
American Charles Lindbergh, the comic book superhero joined other
popular icons of the time – Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon – in representing

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the eugenicist concept of the New Man, which had gained popularity since
the early 1920s and found new expression in the New York World’s Fair of
1939 (Morshed 2004: 82). Projecting Social Darwinism into a yet-to-be-seen
future, many of these superbeings conquered the laws of gravity, physics,
and biology; ‘physically evolved, and standing on a high moral ground, the
New Man was projected as the harbinger of a Future Western industrial
society’ (Morshed 2004: 82). Actor Ray Littleton even donned the cape of
Superman who made his first appearance at the world’s fair in 1939, as did
Batman, Robin and the Sandman in the pages of New York World’s Fair
Comics.
In addition to inspiring Walt Disney’s design of Disneyland in the
1950s, and in presenting a glimpse of the highways and skyscrapers of the
metropolis that would later dominate our contemporary city spaces, the
‘World of Tomorrow’ theme of the New York World’s Fair of 1939 was a
mediator that provided a bridge between science fiction and reality. It
was the stepping-stone to later urban designs and its inspiration came
directly from the realm of science fiction. Geddes drew inspiration from Le
Corbusier (in particular his Ville contemporaine of 1922 and Ville radieuse of
19306) and other utopian urban planners of the 1920s and 1930s but, whereas
Le Corbusier’s inspiration for the transcendental themes that are evident
in his ideal cities drew directly on religious traditions and iconography,
Geddes turned to another form of religious experience – that provided
by the prophetic wisdom of science fiction and popular culture. In this
‘ride’ into the future the audience entered a science-fiction narrative of
the future. Walt Disney would take the premise of this ride in creating the
Magic Skyway ride for Ford for the New York World’s Fair of 1964, a ride that
took travelers on a journey from humanity’s caveman technology past to
the utopian Space City of their future (see Figure 7.3).
The futuristic, technologically reliant cities that populated the Buck
Rogers comic strips of the 1920s and film serials of the 1930s had a great
impact on this glimpse into the world of tomorrow, as did the science-fiction
novels of Edward Bellamy and H.G. Wells. In Bellamy’s Looking Backward
(1888), Julian West wakes up to find himself in the year 2000, a ‘“high-tech”
world of soaring skyscrapers, streets covered with transparent material,
and music piped into the home’ (Kihlstedt 1986: 100). Similarly, in Wells’
novel When the Sleeper Wakes (1910), the hero falls into a trance and comes
to in 2100. The technological city he finds himself in relies on windowless
houses, central lighting, air conditioning, and an urban environment that

6 For more on Le Corbusier, see Frampton 2001.

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worships mechanization and the wonders of science and technology, very

like the Futurama exhibit of the New York World’s Fair of 1964 (Kihlstedt
1986: 101). Again, like the participants in the Futurama ride, Bert Smallways,
the central character in Wells’ novel The War in the Air (1908), explores the
futuristic city from the window of his aircraft, and in 1939, the artist Julian
Krupa’s vision of ‘Cities of Tomorrow’ was published in Amazing Stories, one
of the first science-fiction magazines. ‘The city of tomorrow, Amazing Stories
prophesied, would consist of an idyllic, vertically stratified urbanscape in
which “dwellers and workers [….] may go weeks without setting foot on the

Figure 7.3 Julian Krupa’s vision of ‘Cities of Tomorrow’ in the August 1939 issue of
Amazing Stories

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ground, or the ground level”‘ (Morshed 2004: 78-80). In addition, the mov-
ing chairs in the General Motors Futurama display (which would become
integral to Disneyland and later theme park ride technology) were called
Time Machines in a deliberate allusion to Wells’ novel of the same name. It
was no surprise that, during the fair, H.G. Wells was asked by The New York
Times to write a lead article (titled ‘World of Tomorrow’) about the fair and
how it equated with his version of the future (Wells 1939).7 Notably, the first
science-fiction convention was held at this fair and included participants
who were to become famous authors of science fiction, influencing genera-
tions with their visions of the future: Isaac Asimov, John W. Campbell, Ray
Bradbury, and famed pulp science-fiction artist Frank R. Paul.

When You Wish Upon a Star: Disney, Disneyland and the

Experimental Prototype City of Tomorrow

Much as Rem Koolhaas (1997) contends that the Coney Island amusement
parks served as a laboratory to test planning motifs that would be applied
to the design of Manhattan, expositions like the New York World’s Fair of
1964 would have a dramatic impact on real-world spaces that would be built
a decade later – most memorably in the form of Walt Disney’s Disneyland,
which finally opened its doors to a utopian landscape in Anaheim, Califor-
nia, in July 1955. Clearly, in his conception of Disneyland, Walt Disney was
inspired by the exposition structure: the pavilions and corporate-sponsored
exhibits were transformed into ‘lands’ – Adventureland, Tomorrowland,
Frontierland, Fantasyland – the corporate sponsor was now the Disney
Corporation and its technologies now took the form of cutting-edge rides
that were ‘themed’ according to Disney films, including Dumbo, Alice in
Wonderland, and The Scary Adventures of Snow White.
In addition, many of the utopianist writings of the late nineteenth/
early twentieth century, especially the ideas of Ebenezer Howard, Victor
Gruen, Le Corbusier, and the Archigram Group, also had an impact on
Disney. What was most interesting was that while Disney embraced the
desire to build the future now and to construct utopian environments
that pushed the envelope when it came to scientific and technological

7 For detailed accounts of the impact of science-fiction literature, see Nancy Knight, ‘“The
New Light’: X-Rays and Medical Futurism’, and Folke T. Kihlstedt, ‘Utopia Realized: The World’s
Fairs of the 1930s’, in Imagining Tomorrow: History Technology and the American Future, edited
by Joseph J. Corn (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1986), 10-34 and 97-118.

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innovation, he rejected many of the popular visions of how this future

would be conceived.8 By the 1950s, the freeways riddled with automobiles
and super-scrapers that towered toward the heavens, which had been
central tropes of science-fiction writers, utopianists, and expositions, had
become a reality and Disney was not impressed with this version of the
future. Instead, in Disneyland, Disney set about creating his version of a
science-fiction future, one that later filtered into his conception of EPCOT
and contemporary urban spaces.
Tomorrowland at Disneyland was a place in which Disney was to test out
some of his ideas about realizing utopia through science and technology. In
the 1950s he made his futurist views clear in his Wonderful World of Disney
television show, stating that:

Tomorrow can be a wonderful age. Our scientists today are opening the
doors of the Space Age to achievements that will benefit our children and
generations to come. The Tomorrowland attractions have been designed
to give you an opportunity to participate in adventures that are a living
blueprint of our future. (Walt Disney Studios 2004)

In the Carousel of Progress attraction in Tomorrowland, which was origi-

nally created for the General Electric Pavilion for the New York World’s Fair
of 1964, Disney pushed his interest in the possibilities of technology into
new directions. Like Geddes’ Futurama, the attraction was a rotating theater
that thematically adopted the role of time machine, however, this time the
audience rotated around a circular stage that presented a series of families
spanning from before the arrival of electricity in the nineteenth century
up to current times. However, it’s not just the subject matter depicting the
advancement of electricity across the ages that was the truly radical element
of this attraction. What was astounding was the presence of Disney’s famous
audio-animatronic system of robotics that now operates throughout the
Disney parks. Working with NASA scientists and Disney animators who
formed the Disney Imagineers during this period, the team devised a system
that relied on electricity and pneumatics to move puppetlike figures so they
appeared to talk, sing, and move. The ride would end with the current era
and the family home showcased the presence of cutting-edge technologies.
First opening in 1967 at Disneyland in Anaheim after its world’s fair debut,
as each year past, the ‘present’ part of the attraction aged dramatically and

8 At the New York World’s Fair, ‘Disney was represented by a specially commissioned Mickey
Mouse cartoon in the Nabisco pavilion’ (Marling 1997: 35).

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frequently had to be replaced. It came as no surprise to me that when I

visited Disneyland in 2006, the ‘present as indicative of the future’ had been
replaced by Asimo the robot. The once cutting-edge audio-animatronics
had been superseded by the latest in robot design.
In Tomorrowland, Autopia, a mini-freeway and automated car intro-
duced visitors to what would soon become the National Interstate System.
Monsanto’s ‘House of the Future’ introduced the world to a plastic house
that seemed to float above a central base, and which had in its interior
stylish plastic furniture, a microwave oven, and a wall-mounted television
screen. And on 14 June 1959, the Disneyland-ALWEG Monorail System
opened. According to Karal Ann Marling,

[Disneyland] presented a powerful critique of the manifest ills of Los

Angeles in 1955 […] [and] included pedestrian spaces free from vehicular
traffic. In the form of rides (or ‘attractions’, in park lingo), it spotlighted
every imaginable kind of people-moving device that did not entail a
driver piloting himself through increasingly congested streets – and
chewing up the landscape in the process: trains, monorails, passenger
pods, canal boats, riverboats, and double-decker buses. (Marling 1997: 30)

But for Disney, the monorail became the vehicle that had the potential for
real-world application beyond the walls of the theme park and in the city
environment. In the late 1950s, Disney negotiated a deal with ALWEG, the
Cologne company whose owner Axel Lennart Wenner-Gren had developed
a monorail prototype, that would allow the Disney designers to develop
the prototype further. Influenced by comic books and science-fiction pulp
magazines in the tradition of Amazing Stories that saw the future as being
full of slick, metallic machines that freed up humanity from their boring
everyday tasks, Disney designer Bob Gurr designed a streamlined, rocketlike
train that would have done any cover of Amazing Stories proud. Some years
later it would be practically incorporated not only into theme parks, but
places like Las Vegas and Odaiba.
In Disneyland, not only did Disney create ‘the happiest place on earth’ – a
place that repurposed nostalgic images of old America and Europe as well
as fictional perceptions of the future within a contained utopia – but Disn-
eyland also became the testing ground for the development of cutting-edge
technologies that had previously been considered to belong in the realm of
science fiction. As soon as the possibilities for such advances became clear,
Walt Disney set up his own company (that was independent of Walt Disney
Productions, which had other controlling owners including ABC and his

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brother) which was called WED (Walter Elias Disney) Enterprises and it’s
within this structure that the Imagineers worked on their technological
breakthroughs.
In his keynote speech before the 1963 Urban Design Conference at
Harvard University, James W. Rouse, developer of the new city of Colum-
bia, announced that: ‘I hold a view that may be somewhat shocking to an
audience as sophisticated as this: that the greatest piece of urban design
in the United States today is Disneyland’ (Mannheim 2002: 17). Ironically,
most of Disneyland’s designers were neither urban planners nor architects.
Both were rejected by Disney for their conservative approach to design and
he instead used animators to create the world that became Disneyland.
Perhaps it’s the fact that Disney and his animators came to architecture
with animators’ minds that freed them up to think of new possibilities;
true animation artists know that when drawing fictional worlds anything
is possible – you can even defy the laws of gravity. Disneyland made Walt
Disney think about what was possible and through the fantastic possibilities
of animation and animated worlds his approach to architectural design
wasn’t constricted by conventions and rules.
The lessons learned from Disneyland inspired Disney to develop his
fascination with the synergy of science, technology, and industry as gen-
erator of utopian cities. EPCOT (Experimental Prototype Community of
Tomorrow) – also known as Project X – was based on Walt Disney’s plans
to create a futuristic community, plans that never came to be according
to Disney’s vision because of his death in 1966. Wanting to escape the
increasing encroachment of the Los Angeles urbanscape and the invasion
of cars and freeways on Disneyland, in the 1960s Walt Disney Productions
purchased 27,443 acres of land in Florida, an area ‘roughly twice the size
of Manhattan’ (Mannheim 2002: 72). As Steve Mannheim explains in his
comprehensive book about the project:

As early as 1959, the Disney organization began looking for a site in the
eastern United States where it could build another theme park. A joint
venture opportunity to develop 12,000 acres with RCA and investor John
D. MacArthur presented itself in Palm Beach in that year. Both economist
Harrison Price and company attorney Robert Foster recall that the RCA
deal ‘contemplated the development of the “City of Tomorrow”’. (Man-
nheim 2002: 67)

The opportunity at Palm Beach would not eventuate but a few years later
plans for a ‘City of Tomorrow’ would begin to solidify with the purchase of

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property in Kissimmee, Florida. At a conference held in Orlando in 1965,

Walt Disney announced that ‘I would like to be part of building a model
community, a City of Tomorrow, you might say, because I don’t believe in
going out to this extreme blue-sky stuff that some architects do’ (Mannheim
2002: 7). Having total control of the property that surrounded the new
development for miles in any direction, here, the realities of Norman Bel
Geddes’ imagined skyscrapers and automobile society would find it difficult
to infiltrate Disney’s vision of the future now.9
Disney’s ‘utopian dream of a real city’ not only focused on building a
community with ‘dependable public transportation’, but this perfect city
would also be ‘covered by an all-weather dome’ and its factories and key
industries (which would be ‘concealed in greenbelts that were readily ac-
cessible to workers housed in idyllic suburban subdivisions’) would embody
the latest innovations in science and technology (Marling 1997: 31). Disney’s
Project X was the original ‘learning city’ that would later influence cities
like Odaiba. Disney’s fascination with urban planning and the future is
perhaps best encapsulated by this quote by Mannheim:

The Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow (EPCOT) was

entertainment industry pioneer Walter Elias ‘Walt’ Disney’s (1901-66)
final dream. After more than forty years in the entertainment industry,
Disney wore the hard hat of a builder. He had acquired experience in
the planning and development of various projects, including private
residences; advanced motion picture studios; motion picture sets;
Disneyland, the world’s first theme park; a redevelopment project in St.
Louis, Missouri; four notable 1964-65 New York World’s Fair pavilions; the
Mineral King Valley, California, ski resort; the California Institute of the
Arts (CalArts) campus; and other projects. His development concept at
the time of his death would combine company town, visitor attraction,
and a device with which to help solve the problems of cities (Mannheim
2002: xiii ) (See Figure 7.4)

9 Nevertheless, as was the case with Geddes, Disney’s allegiance with science fiction was
clear when he asked the famous science-fiction author Ray Bradbury to work at the Disney
Imagineering Studio. Bradbury had met Disney when Tomorrowland was being conceptualized
and Bradbury had expressed his interest in collaborating on its design. But, while recognizing
the value of such an alliance, Disney had insisted that such a partnership between two geniuses
would be doomed to failure. Nevertheless, Bradbury’s talents as creative consultant were later
put to use not only in the design of the US Pavilion at the 1964 New York World’s Fair, but also in
the planning of Spaceship Earth – one of the central attractions at Disneyworld’s EPCOT theme
park – in 1982 (Bradbury 1999: 7).

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Figure 7.4 Walt Disney presenting a map of EPCOT on the Wonderful World of

Disney

The city would feature ‘new ideas and technologies’ emerging ‘from the
creative centers of American industry’. Disney explained his desire was
that EPCOT ‘would never be completed’ and would ‘be producing, testing,
and demonstrating’ (Walt Disney Studios 2004). In his presentation on the
Wonderful World of Disney television show, he proclaimed:

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.

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One of the requirements is that people live in EPCOT must keep it alive.
(Walt Disney Studios 2004)10

Taking quite a few leaves out of science-fiction films and literature, Disney
wanted to create a private community of 20,000 inhabitants who would
live and work with the latest cutting-edge technology – this would be what
he called a laboratory city that showcased to the world the possibilities of
new science and technology in combination with free enterprise. EPCOT
would be the world’s first glass-domed city (an idea he developed from
visionary architect Buckminster Fuller) in which one could totally control
the temperature; like Disneyland, the city would be based on a radial design
with the inner sector including high-rise apartments, retail, entertainment
and the business district; a greenbelt parkland and recreation lands created
a perimeter around this, and the next level was followed by low-density,
neighborhood residential zones; and the outer perimeter was populated
by an industrial zones. A network of transportation systems would radiate
from the central hub and would take people to and from the central city
underground. The high-speed monorails like those invented for the Disney
parks would take commuters to work from the outer suburbs and WEDWAY
people- mover system (which had also been tested in Disneyland) would
transport pedestrians from destination to destination in the inner-city
zone without causing traffic build-up. And even though cars and trucks
were permitted in EPCOT, they would travel below the pedestrian level on
special underground roadways: the primary form of transportation would
be the electrically powered people movers and monorails.11 (See Figure 7.5.)
As was the case with the design and planning of Disneyland, for Walt
Disney architects lacked the versatility to think outside his box. The result
was the formation of WED Enterprises (Walter Elias Disney Enterprises),
which would later become the Disney Imagineers. This became the research
and development arm of Disney, and it was responsible for the design of the
Disney theme parks, the rides, the audio-animatronics and, later, the Disney
resorts. The soon-to-be Imagineers, who included Marvin Davis, Herbert
Ryman, John Hench, and Bill Evans, all contributed to the planning and
development of Progress City. As Mannheim explains:

10 The footage is also available on YouTube at: https://w w w.youtube.com/

watch?v=sLCHg9mUBag
11 See Mannheim 2002 for a detailed account of the plans for EPCOT. Mannheim points out that
‘EPCOT’s three-level transportation hierarchy’ was influenced by Le Corbusier’s Contemporary
City multi-level transportation lobby and the Archigram Group’s 1963 Interchange (Mannheim
2002: 10 and 33).

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Figure 7.5 View of the transportation center below the urban center of E.P.C.O.T.
Design by Herbert Ryman, 1965

© The Walt Disney Company. Available at: https://sites.google.com/site/theoriginalepcot/

conceptual-drawings

While Marvin Davis’ conceptual EPCOT plans feature lakes, trees, and
turf in the greenbelt, industrial park, and ‘radiential’ areas, detailed
landscaping remained for a later stage in the planning process. In ad-
dition, Herbert Ryman’s Progress City paintings, early expressions of
Disney’s thinking about EPCOT, include lakes, trees, and abundant green
space, although they are highly conceptual. The Progress City narration
states that landscaping was used to make industrial areas more like
parks. (Mannheim 2002: 83)

The utopian vision according to Walt Disney’s view consisted of the radial
plan and landscaped environments that would make their presence felt
across the city – from residential to industrial areas.

The EPCOT Theme Park and Town of Celebration

Disney died on 15 December 1966, and soon after Roy Disney, his brother,
announced that the Disney Company would build an ‘entertainment
center’ based on Disney’s dying wishes which would include the world’s
first ‘glass-domed city’. The reality, however, was different. An aging Roy
caved in to the company concerns and when EPCOT finally opened on
1 October 1982 it was a theme park that refashioned world expositions as
its primary theme by devoting the park to the future, new technology, and
industry – specifically, a future supported by the possibilities of scientific

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and technological advancement in the hands of multinational corporations.

As Marling has stated, EPCOT ‘became a kind of permanent World’s Fair’
complete with corporate sponsored pavilions (Marling 1997: 31).
Both ‘lands’ at EPCOT – Future World and World Showcase – owe a
great deal to the conventions and philosophical concerns established in the
fairs. World Showcase, which themes the world by including miniaturized
versions of France, Morocco, Japan, and Germany, updates the displays
of different cultures that were found in the Midway section of the expos
and fairs in the twentieth century. But it is Future World that displays the
most dramatic inspiration of fairs and science fiction. Radiating around
Spaceship Earth, the giant geosphere that dominates the theme park, are
numerous themed attractions – Innoventions, Journey into the Imagination,
Universe of Energy – all of which are sponsored by major corporations. The
geodesic dome that stands at the center of the theme park doesn’t house a
city, but instead stands as emblem of the park, also recalling the Perisphere
of the New York World’s Fair of 1939. Called Spaceship Earth, the structure
was designed with the help of science-fiction writer Ray Bradbury, who
also helped write the storyline for the attraction that was contained within.
Taking his cue from his friend Walt Disney, Bradbury would address
the visitors as if they were characters in a science-fiction film. The earlier
Futurama ride of 1939 took visitors forward in time to experience the city of
the future in 1960. On Spaceship Earth, seated on cars in the newly designed
Omnimover system, guests entered a time machine that took them on a ride
that revealed advancements in human technology and communication from
the days of prehistoric man to the dawn of the twenty-first century. Display-
ing this history through a series of audio-animatronics, and beginning with
a Cro-Magnon shaman who recounts the story of a hunt while others record
it on cave walls, viewers witness a series of communications milestones: the
Phoenician and Greek alphabets, the printing press, the telegraph, radio,
film, television – even outer space where the power of satellite systems is
on display. True to its exposition roots, exiting the ride, participants find
themselves in a pavilion sponsored by corporations like AT&T and are
invited to sample a range of technological goodies – from computer games
to simulation rides – all made possible by the company’s electronic network.
The second revision of Project X came in the form of the town Celebra-
tion, which occupies Disney property in Florida and which went through
various stages of development in the 1990s and early 2000s: this community
attempts to bring life to Walt Disney’s dream by time traveling back to a uto-
pian and idealized version of a non-existent past when small town America
embodied the aspirations of the American Dream. While fascinating as a

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study of utopian ideals, its conception of a ‘future now’ is, in actuality, more
about the ‘past now’. Celebration, in fact, is more aligned with Disney’s
vision of ‘yesterday’ rather than ‘tomorrow’ and, as such, lies beyond the
scope of this essay – only to say that, it comes as no surprise that the kind of
community it ended up idealizing was the stuff of horror in episodes of The
X-Files and Millennium and films like The Truman Show and Pleasantville.

Futuroscope and Experiential Architecture

Since Disneyland opened its doors in 1955, the theme park slowly became an
important feature not only of contemporary retail and leisure culture, but also
as venues, which – like their world exposition predecessors – showcased the
possibilities of new technologies. For film studios such as Universal, Warner
Brothers, Paramount, and 20th Century Fox, the theme park became both a
marketing tool for its film products (where popular films were ‘themed’ as
rides or environments), and a spectacular symbol of the power and economic
potential of cutting-edge technology delivered in an entertainment package,
a concern that obviously drives EPCOT. Since entering the new millennium,
our urban spaces have continued to embrace the logic of the theme park
with amazing zeal. One of the most fascinating revisions of the theme park/
exposition foray into science-fiction realities is the ‘theme park’ Futuroscope,
which is situated in Poitiers, France, and was heavily modeled on the EPCOT
concept. Initiated by a local politician, René Monory, who wanted to build a
park that was the ‘centrepiece of a new-tech industrial estate’, Futuroscope,
which opened in 1987, was built with the support of the local council of
Poitiers and assisted by national government funding. Over the last decade,
it has become radically revised as a ‘learning city’ more aligned with Odaiba.
Futuroscope is situated 200 miles outside Paris. In the 1990s it offered
Disneyland Paris some serious competition while also boosting the local
economy in the role it serves as an entertainment destination. The theme
park’s premise is to use entertainment attractions in order to educate and
acclimatize audiences to new imaging technologies. Scattered across an
idyllic landscape are a series of futuristic-looking buildings that appear to be
part of a science-fiction film set (one is shaped like a giant crystal, another
like an enormous set of glass organ pipes, and another still looks like a 1950s
spaceship), and within these buildings, audiences can experience some of
the most amazing audio-visual technologies that the entertainment industry
has to offer. The attractions (which are sponsored by high-tech corporations)
include: a 360-degree cinema; a 3D cinema experience; a Kinemax-IMAX

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Theater; a Dynamic Motion Simulator using the Showscan system devised

by Douglas Trumbull (the effects guru who was responsible for the effects
of films like 2001: A Space Odyssey and Blade Runner); a dual IMAX cinema
with one vertical and one horizontal screen; a multi-screen show with ten 35
mm projectors projecting onto ten screens of different sizes (including the
hemispherical Omnimax screen); the ‘Cineautomate’, an interactive film; and
an hourly night show that features a computer-generated ‘water symphony’
(à la the Belaggio in Las Vegas, the Dubai Mall, and Macau’s Wynn Resort)
that comprises dancing water fountains, laser lights, fireworks, and music.
The park director between 1987 and 2000, Daniel Bulliard, stated that
‘The park’s theme of image is based on the observation that “easy, daily ac-
cess to reality or dream, the omnipresent image is the backdrop to our lives
and changes how we see the world. It seduces, captivates and invades our
professional being and devours our leisure time.”‘ Isabelle Houllier, assistant
to the director, extends on this: ‘By offering a wide array of contemporary
images, the park educates as well as entertains. “People have a tendency to not
understand technology they see every day. […] Here, they can learn and see
technology through cinema, and have fun at the same time”‘ (O’Brien 1992).
Clearly, Futuroscope has adopted an identity as a ‘learning city’ in that it aims
to promote innovation through its showcase of cutting-edge technologies.
But, in addition to what is contained within the walls of the theme park,
unlike EPCOT or the expositions of the past, it extends the promotion of
innovation beyond its walls into the social realm that contains and surrounds
it. The park itself has become a hub around which an entire industry in
multimedia, computer, and communication technology has evolved.
Larsen explains that for Futuroscope ‘research and development with
education and leisure activities, is the focus of its strategy. Thus far, it has at-
tracted 70 firms and created 1,500 jobs in the park and 12,000 jobs indirectly
in the whole region. It is also a major tourist site, drawing visitors from
around the world’ (Larsen 1999). Importantly, since 2000, the area around
the theme park has undergone a dramatic transformation: hotels, residential
areas, universities, big business sectors have flourished. Recalling Star Trek,
‘Teleport’ is the technology park near the theme park that companies like
Telecom France and e-Qual (a company with specialization in IP-based
network solutions and satellite communications) call home. Near Teleport
– and part of the training and research area – is France’s first combined
experimental high school and university ‘where students matriculate from
high school directly into the same area of study in college. Engineering and
technology degrees are emphasized’. Also included as part of the complex
is the International Institute of Long-Term Forecasting (Larsen 1999).

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Like the New Bad Future films of the 1980s (Glass 1990) – Robocop, Total
Recall, Blade Runner – and consistent with the public-private partnerships
typical of tourist utopias, corporations combine forces with the government
to control the products of science and technology and, in turn, the shape of
the society that develops around them. In doing so they demonstrate the
manner in which such spaces may function as laboratories of technological
or political innovations. Whether these cities offer a path to utopian living or
dystopian malaise, only time will tell. Walt Disney was certainly a visionary
in taking major steps toward creating a fully functional city that brought
to life his own thoughts on utopian living. Using Disneyland as an experi-
mental space to provide entertainment to a mass audience that embraced
what it offered with open arms, Disney also considered Disneyland as a
testing ground where he could trial his ideas about technology, urban space,
transportation, and future living. He certainly wasn’t the first to be inspired
by utopian visions and was, in many respects, the product of his times, being
inspired by architects, philosophers, and urban planners dating back to
the nineteenth century. However, he was one of the first – if not the most
significant of firsts – to unite his utopian dreams with a touristic focus.
Being one of the most popular and well-known global tourist destinations,
Disneyland was to serve as a gateway into utopian living in the future.

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