ABSTRACT
In 1967, employees of a number of major corporations were assigned to task forces to work with WED Enterprises on new systems and materials for EPCOT. Planning statistics for a living community called EPCOT appeared in architect Peter Blake's June 1972 article in The Architectural Forum. EPCOT would have entailed an even higher debt burden for a community developer and Walt Disney Productions. Walt Disney Production's annual report that year introduced a preliminary model of World Showcase, a satellite center planned to accompany the original EPCOT. International communication was nothing new to the Disney organization. Disney's favorite community topic was transportation, be it model railroading or promoting the monorail. Community Transportation Services was formed as a subsidiary of Walt Disney Productions in 1974. Disney's response to the urban crisis was to conceptualize a living urban laboratory where new ways of experimenting with electronic connections for the twenty-first century.
