 Good afternoon everybody. Welcome to stage A, stage A, stage C, stage C, wrong stage. Can I introduce you to Dan who's going to talk about what Walt Disney and what was meant to be the future? Hello, I'm Dan and this is Epcot It's the second of a Walt Disney World theme parks, and I think it's the most boring theme park in the world So I thought I'd tell you all about it It's themed as a permanent world's fair More volume It's themed as a permanent world fair It's split into two parts a world showcase with pavilions for every country and a future world The world showcase has pavilions for different countries little pastiche recreations of different places There's a United Kingdom which has a pub efficient chip shop and most importantly of all a merchandise shop selling keep calm and carry-ons mugs In the bottom of the park you have future world you can tell it's future world because it has a monorail There you can do exciting things like visit a hydroponic garden That's pretty much it And there's kind of two main reasons why I find Epcot frustrating The first is a world's fair acts as a snapshot for a specific year specific point in time and Epcot's a snapshot of 1982 I'm not particularly interested in going on holiday to 1982 But secondly is the name Epcot stands for the experimental prototype city of tomorrow It was never meant to be a theme park in its original design It was meant to be an entire city built by Walt Disney Walt Disney decided that American cities were incredibly broken. They were full of crime poverty and that he was the one who could solve this He'd kind of seen run down amusement parks and gone well I can build one of those better and built Disneyland He'd seen animated kids films and thought I could do that better and it built better animated films So he thought a city is pretty much the same problem So to do this he bought a patch of land in Florida. It's an area twice the size of Manhattan It's probably the distance of Bristol to Bath from one end to the other It's kind of 54 times the length of Western Supermere Pier for scale And his plan was that he would build a theme park at the top to lure people in build a city in the middle and An airport to the south with a monorail collecting them all to buy this land he used a number of shell companies and lawyers Kind of who weren't associated with a Disney company to anonymously buy this land without anyone figuring out what was going on He used the Company that later went on to launder the money for the Bay of Pigs invasion kind of X CIA people Really underhand stuff. He even had to buy the mining rights for land because that was owned separately from the landowners And this meant that later on after he built his theme park Someone could turn up the drilling rig and just go for it in the middle of the park So his plan was to build a from scratch modernist utopia. It would be concentric in the center There would be sit shops restaurants offices all under a glass roof fully air conditioned Separate from the elements. He would run his own public transport infrastructure He'd have monorails for long-distance travel Podcars that would take you wherever you wanted Underground would be where the cars are hidden underneath that a service tunnel with the lorries for deliveries to places You'd never have to encounter traffic as a pedestrian on the outside He would build parks and schools in a green belt and then outside that would be suburbia with the houses where everyone would live And you wouldn't own your house. You'd rent your house from Disney Disney would kind of choose what electrical appliances you had so he could experiment and try the best things for your home They built a massive model to simulate it. They'd kind of Got them quite far on the planning stages They even got as far as to announce it to the public with this half an hour long film kind of selling the citizens of Florida on television this utopian vision for the future and But sadly a few days after announcing the project what Disney was diagnosed with lung cancer He was a heavy cigarette smoker and the city was never built Instead they went ahead with just building the theme park Which they still outfitted the modern The most modern technology they could this is the contemporary hotel It's a prefabricated concrete a-frame structure each of the rooms is a different module that been Cramed in and swapped out to complete so that no maintenance is carried out on site And you can tell it's futuristic because it's got a monorail running through it The entire theme park is built on the first ground of a massive structure called utilidors There are a series of concrete corridors service structures so that staff can get around the park without being seen on the ceiling of these tubes called Avax they suck pneumatically the rubbish from rubbish bins around the park so that nobody sees the staff emptying the bins They even run their own power grid and their own telephone network If you've ever tried to get BT to install a landline You'd probably realize it's quicker to build your own phone company And they can do this because technically they're a city Even though Epcot never got built the legislation got passed which formed The re-decreak improvement district It's a special legal structure roughly equivalent to a city council and it contains two cities including this city of Lake Buena Vista This means it has all the powers and rights of the city It can run a police force. It runs ambulance services fire service. It can open a court It can run a jail. It can appoint judges. It can run hospitals It's even got permission to run its own nuclear power station And it's also got the responsibilities of the city so it has to hold elections But the way it's structured is only landowners in the area can take part in the elections Which are 16 Disney employees who are given special little houses purely for the sake of voting this means that Disney never has to deal with a Government that isn't in its interests which is helpful because it applies for planning permission from itself So when Disney passed away they searched his office and They found he only owned one architecture book in all his planning to build a city and it was a book by Victor Gruen Victor Gruen turns out to be the inventor of the shopping mall. There's kind of perfect glass-covered air-conditioned city Already exists. We already have these utopian cities. It's just it turns out they don't fix the problems of cities By building a glass dome over a roof and opening some Nandos That's pretty much all I have sorry I should say what Disney World did later on go ahead and build its own town It was a kind of Basically a suburban sprawl of villas But they built it not because they wanted to build an utopian city But because the land that they owned was so vast and it becomes so valuable because of Disney World It meant that someone could buy the entire of the Disney Corporation Sell off all of the film assets not care about those not care about the theme parks and just built hotels and houses and make a massive profit so they built an entire town and annexed it off into Orange County outside of its own jurisdiction to prevent someone creating a takeover of the Disney Corporation for real estate purposes It's a quite a ridiculous structure Anyway, thank you