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Community Innovations and Planned Communities

April 2, 2003

I was taking the bus into the city yesterday. The bus... rickety, the occassional inoperative headlight, the destination indicator (well, what do you call those things on a bus?) half-garbled. Nothing like, I thought, those shuttle buses at Walt Disney World.

Ah, the glorious shuttle buses at Walt Disney World. It's remarkable, the kind of equipment, facilities, and resources a place can have when they have a large pot of money to work with. What would life be like in the city if... no, nevermind. Sometimes a rickety old bus will have to suffice.

But back to Walt Disney World - and EPCOT Center, in particular. EPCOT was supposed to be a prototype of the future of cities ("Experimental Prototype Community Of Tomorrow"). Have any real innovations ever come from EPCOT?

Slashdot has a discussion about the (lack of) dissemination of Disney innovations.

The Monorail is probably the best known innovation from EPCOT. When I was at Raytheon, one of the ongoing projects was the Personal Rapid Transport, which was like a monorail, but with individually routable cars. They actually came quite far in its development, and the PRT test track hung over the parking lot like a roller coaster for the timid. They had a contract with the Chicago suburb of Rosemont, which was supposed to be the first town to get the PRT, but so far, it hasn't happened.

Now Disney has a new project: Celebration, FL - "the first planned community developed by The Walt Disney Company". Celebration [a more official link] is what EPCOT was supposed to be. It almost looks like SimCity, played in a real world instead of a virtual one.

My first reaction was, "Gack! A community planned by a corporation!" But after thinking about it, I have to admit that it may have some merit. After all, what would a community look like if we could take a blank slate and fill it in with all of the knowledge we now have about community living? It's like building a new house versus living in an old one - both are valid options.

Interestingly, I'm finishing up the last few chapters of Walden Two, which is a fictional account of a utopia built with all of the knowledge we have amassed about communities and living. Quite an interesting read, a lot of good rhetoric and thought-provoking argument, but I'm still waiting for that wild twist that shatters the dream - if there is such a twist to occur (I'm surprised at the poor reviews readers have given this book, I have immensely enjoyed it). While looking up that link at Amazon, I also found this book, A Walden Two Experiment: The First Five Years of Twin Oaks Community - sounds like someone took Walden Two, originally written in the 1940's, to heart.

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