EPCOT: Walt Disney's Futuristic Utopia that Never Was

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If you're familiar at all with what happened to Walt Disney's entertainment empire following his death, you'll be well acquainted with Roy Disney. I'd call him a polarizing figure except I've never met anybody who remotely approves of the direction he took.

It's tough to figure out how much blame he deserves however, versus shareholders, for the mutation of Epcot from Walt's vision into "just another theme park". It was originally going to be a futuristic, utopian model community based around the newest technology available then, and Walt's own fascinating attempts at social engineering through urban planning.

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Walt approached designing human habitats the way you might design a zoo exhibit, starting from an understanding of the behaviors and needs of the organism that will reside within. He took a view, popular at the time, that clever design could solve many human social ills.

For example, by plotting out convergent foot paths to every shared piece of community infrastructure (like dumpsters, mailboxes, and so on) neighbors would often have to walk next to one another on the way to perform some mundane chore. They would then at least see one another face to face frequently, and perhaps talk.

This would reduce the likelihood of one committing any sort of crime against the other, as it's emotionally a very different thing to wrong somebody whose face and name you know, versus wronging a stranger. This principle facilitated group cohesion in the distant ancestral past of our species, but only works up to groups of a certain size.

This is somewhere between 100 and 250, or "Dunbar's Number". Basically humans are only capable of remembering and maintaining about 150 different relationships. So the size of a social group of humans which exceeds that number will unavoidably begin experiencing social maladies related to anonymity.

It's like living in a small town, where nobody can get away with everything because everybody knows everyone else and gossip spreads quickly, versus living in a big city. Where, paradoxically alone among the teeming masses of strangers, you can indeed get away with a great deal and won't necessarily feel as bad about it because you don't know 99% of the people around you.

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While the notion that you could shape human behavior so directly by architectural means is unpopular among sociologists, it had a great many adherents in the 1960s and 1970s, and many of the principles devised during that period remain influential today.

For example, many prisons paint their walls salmon pink because psychological studies show it reduces aggression. It's hard to feel like a bad ass when you're in a pink room. Or fast food signs being commonly red and yellow, the colors shown to subconsciously provoke hunger.

I do have some feelings of discomfort surrounding these efforts. I am inclined to distrust social engineers who want to change my behavior by one method or another without my knowledge, because I object to a stranger assuming he or she knows what's best for me. Or that I need to be fooled, or controlled in some way, in order to behave myself.

That said, where is the line between social engineering and plain old streamlining? Many of the principles Epcot was going to showcase simply made life smoother and easier. It's not as if nobody these days is trying to sell us products which make our lives easier, but which also control or leverage us in ways we didn't agree to.

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It is after all distressingly common for regular people to separate humanity into themselves, and "the teeming unwashed horde". All of those other people are conscious, feeling individuals too. Few would hesitate, if given the power, to make changes to society that suit them. Reasoning perhaps that if others don't like it, they will warm to it in time, and that "I know what is best for others anyway".

Walt's version of this wasn't as sinister or elitist, I think. If you study his original plans for Epcot, the focus was mostly on preventing isolation and alienation, cultivating a feeling of belonging and community. Walt, after all, was a deeply humanitarian fellow with grand visions for a future which elevated us all. Maybe the problem isn't social engineering. Maybe it just matters very, very much who the engineer is? Or the imagineer, in this case.

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^{Stay Cozy!}