What if Disney built the original Epcot plans?
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- Опубліковано 1 лип 2024
- In 1966, just weeks before his death, Walt Disney filmed a special preview of the plans for his "Florida Project". This was the world's introduction to the Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow, or E.P.C.o.T. Unfortunately, with Walt's passing, most of these plans remained forever in the realm of imagination and dreams.
Like many others, we wondered what the original E.P.C.o.T. plans would look like, if they were actually built. Since we can't do that for real, we settled for building a version in a popular city planning simulation game - Cities: Skylines. Join us for this episode of Sightlines - part of a two-part series - exploring our simulation of Walt Disney's Epcot.
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this is absolutely fascinating and well done. Have you ever heard of the city skylines channel Akruas? He uses multiple mods that allow him to create any buildings and structures he wants for his cities anywhere even through roads. I believe whatever mods he used would be very useful for a project like this with so many specifically designed buildings. Anyway thank you for recreating EPCOT this was a great video!
1:13 this screenshot tho! Not only is this a very cool simulation but the concessions and work arounds based on the game limitations are explained so well, and make sense. Looking forward to part 2.
Testing something you might like... #FreeThe
@@ThemeParchive 😂 yesssss!!!!
well done! i think there’s some DLC now that will make the industrial park a little more realistic. for example, IIRC cargo trains can be used to cut down the traffic, and you can now build transit-first developments without needing road access to everything necessarily.
There's also the combo metro/train station and other combined transit stations they released as part of a free update, which came out after I was already finished with the video. But those could definitely help in a few places.
Hey man cool video keep it up 👍
Your part 2 brought me here. Halfway through im shocked how much this would have cost. Has there been anything like this ever built? A real city built wholesale by a company or group of companies. I mean ive heard of company towns but those are focused on one industry. This is insane.
There have been many “utopian” or “planned community” types of projects started, but nothing ever built on the kind of scale Walt Disney imagined, at least as far as I’m aware.
Usually, if they build anything at all, it’s a few houses and not much else. Building housing, services, and commercial space to shelter, provide for, and employ 20k people, all from scratch, is beyond anything I’ve ever heard anyone actually accomplish.
As far as the company towns go, I’m sure there were some that got to that size population while the company still owned them, but typically they weren’t quite as planned as Epcot was meant to be. And very few were meant to serve as a model example of a town or city.
Wow great work!
I wonder if a version of CitySkylines Instance could be networked together with other cities!? 🤔
There's a mod that purports to do multiplayer, but I'm not really very involved in the mod community for that game. I don't really know if or how it works, so I can't vouch for it. It may only do a single, shared city vs the networked cities you're thinking about, idk.
Also, there's a sequel coming, but again, I've not really looked into it. It seems like multiplayer is at least rumored to be a part of it, though how that will be implemented also seems to be unknown at the moment.
This is all that we CAN do at this point.
No
What a fantastic concept! I been a fan of Walt Disney and Disneyland for over fifty years. I just watched his film and you’re video, and it all sounds very exciting, but because a lot of the transportation is publc what happens if a monorail breaks down, how do people get around? Just curious thanks 😊
Most people living out in the "suburbs" section of the city would've owned cars, so they would've probably used those. But since the idea was that cars wouldn't be needed, and the people living in the apartments in the city center would've been younger and poorer, it's hard to say what solutions they would have in cases of monorails closing for maintenance. The plans were in such an early stage when Walt died that a lot of these kinds of problems were never considered or solved.
This is fascinating. I don’t know if I missed this but did Walt want to build a city like this? And if so what happened to his plan that it didn’t happen. This v CB puke have been a city within Orlando. Crazy!
This could have been a city within Orlando
EPCOT as Walt imagined was scrapped after he died sadly. They made a park named after Epcot out of respect. It's a real shame Walt died too soon
As Sarah said, this plan was what Walt originally intended for the land where Walt Disney World is today. The area where the city’s plan would’ve been covers much of the resort hotels, Epcot and Hollywood Studios parks, and all the way up to the Transportation and Ticketing Center, south of Magic Kingdom, of today.
This idea for cities planned as concentric rings pre-existed Disney by quite some time. But towards the end of his life, he became fascinated with the idea, and so he developed (along with his team at WED Enterprises) this concept for a complete city. Of course, once he died, the company bearing his name had zero interest in building and owning an entire city, especially with the legal issues surrounding the concept.
All that said, the city would’ve had a population - according to Walt - of a mere 20,000 people. Compared to the Orlando Metropolitan Area today, that’s 1/100th of the city’s population (Orlando metro population is close to 2 million).
Long story short -- Yes, The Florida Project (what would later be called Walt Disney World) was intended to be EPCOT City. Then Disney died and the backers threatened to pull out. Roy Disney salvaged the project by turning it into a theme park and resort destination, which the financers were will to pay for. It's a shame the city never got built. What an incredible place it would have been.
Walt wanted people to remember him as an artist, a movie maker or a theme park creator. He wanted a legacy similar to Henry Ford, a change maker that changed society like how cars changed how people lived their lives.
EPCOT was a planned city that wouldn't give it's residents any voting rights. Walt's coworkers, employees and obviously lawyers explained to him that that was a bit difficult to achieve. The residents had to only live there for 9 months at a time. And Disney Imagineers get to decide what appliances are used inside the living spaces. Essentially it'd be a bizarre benevolent dictatorship theoretically run by Walt himself.
The channel Defunctland has a few videos on how low-key insane the building plan would be if any observer put any time thinking about how it would work.
EPCOT the theme park we have now IRL is no less as interesting from concept to actual. The real one costed a billion dollars in 1970-80s dollars.
Sorry, I was distracted listening to the video. Did you make this model? Is it a theme park sim or something?
He recreated the idea in city skylines
Where did you find the more detailed closeup plan layout of EPCOT?
I thought large trucks going to the industrial park were meant to be on the lowest level road that goes through the city without any stop options. Because Epcot is meant to be a layers city
Ah wait never mind I think I see where the truck problem is. It’s outside of the city. Although I though the truck road broke off outside of the city into it’s own mini highway?
Yeah, so the idea was that trucks (coming from Interstate 4 or U.S. 192) would be traveling north into the property. That means most of the truck traffic bound for the industrial park area would never even reach the city. Any trucks in through-traffic (ie, going to the themed resorts for deliveries) wouldn't stop in the city by taking the underground highway, as you stated.
There were, however, trucks that would need to stop in the city center. These would mostly be deliveries of food for restaurants and merchandise for retail shops. From the animated plans in the "Florida Project" special, it appears these trucks would've had a special exit ramp from the highway under the city, and a large underground loading docks/parking lot. How feasible this would've been is definitely debatable, but that was what they were planning, at least early on.
The way the game handles trucks means that there were a number of caveats necessary to make the city function. First, the nature of the game's industrial zoning and traffic means that we're seeing a lot of the delivery of retail merchandise, manufactured goods, and food come from the industrial park area, which wouldn't have been the case. Second, the game really doesn't like when heavy trucks (semis) can't deliver to retail locations, and it causes all kinds of grief. But since the plans were very explicit that no heavy trucks would enter the city streets, we kept true to that by banning all heavy vehicles from the city center and suburban zones. This means that all of those deliveries are conducted by smaller, van-sized vehicles, which creates its own traffic issues.
This is a major reason why we make the point in both of these Epcot simulation videos about taking everything with a grain of salt. It's really cool to see something close to the original E.P.C.o.T. model brought to life, with people and traffic, but it's hard to separate the flaws in the design from the flaws in the game's way of handling the city's design.
Looks too auto dependent
What do you mean by unfortunately?! EPCOT would SO have banned non-Disney merch for its residents! I may like the theme park but I doubt I'd like living in a company town!