Mel McGowan, Chief Creative Officer of Storyland Studios and Lead Architect for Grant Town’s G.T.E.C. Project, gives a brief overview of his teams initial concept work for the Grant Town Experimental Community at the 2019 Grant Town Summit.
Walt Disney was really onto something.
No, not just the theme parks, or the movies, or the iconic characters. This endlessly fascinating human being took stock of society in the 50’s and 60’s, noticing the exodus from the cities into the suburbs and thought: we can do better.
What he came up with was EPCOT ― a design for better living. The Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow was Walt’s response to the disintegration of modern cities, as those who could afford it fled to the outlying suburbs. As futurist R. Buckminster Fuller put it, Walt wanted to ‘…build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.’
It’s this model that forms the foundation of the Grant Town Experimental Community’s ideas for a better way in which our society can live. GTEC’s Christian Moran, also a Walt Disney historian, presented these ideas and more when he spoke about the community’s vision at the Grant Town Summit in 2019. ‘We live in interesting times,’ he said, smiling as he noted that some people find this to be ‘a curse’. Automation and Artificial Intelligence (AI) are radically disrupting our way of living, such as by having the potential to increase mass unemployment to 50% by 2045.
However, as Christian pointed out, the purpose of Automation and AI is to ‘reduce human labor’. And so our society finds itself at a crossroads, where we can continue as we are, with a polarized society, particularly economically. Or, we could reconsider this situation as ‘a new threshold for humanity.’
Was Christian talking about utopia? Yes, but not a concept of unreachable perfection. Rather, a city where poverty doesn’t exist, giving people the opportunity to self-actualize and reach their full potential.
Christian referenced the 1970’s vision of R. Buckminster Fuller to further expand on his 21st century approach. Fuller asked: why not make a world where everyone can make it? We have the technological, natural and educational resources to feed, clothe, house, educate and fulfill every human on the planet. Why not build a city of the future that does just that?
This is what Walt Disney was trying to do in his final project. His community design featured a focal central point with hotels and retail, surrounded by offices, high density apartments, green spaces and outlying single dwelling homes.