A planned, controlled community

Somewhere I picked up the URL to Waltopia, a site about Walt Disney’s EPCOT – the Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow. Tonight, I found a quote there from Stephen Fjellman’s Vinyl Leaves: Walt Disney World and America:

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 in stead of buying them, and at modest rentals. There will be no retirees. Everyone must be employed. One of our requirements is that people who live in EPCOT must keep it alive.

As I’m currently reading The Death and Life of Great American Cities, I found this interesting. From reading the above quote I get the sense that they (Disney himself?) meant that the reason that there would be no slum areas was that it would be a planned, controlled community – that is, that slums happen because of lack of control. In Death and Life, Jane Jacobs shows that well functioning neighborhoods can emerge although virtually uncontrolled, and that many attempts to apply control to improve ill functioning neighborhoods actually have worsened the situation.

Right now I’m downloading the EPCOT film from the site, to see how Walt Disney presented his ideas.