The word “utopia” means, literally, “nowhere,” and that’s with good reason. Mankind has searched and tried for centuries to try and find a way of creating the perfect place to live. Each attempt at building a utopia has failed. Those repeated failures haven’t kept humans from trying to create the perfect place, however. Take the case of one such utopian plan that arose in Florida in the early 1960s.
The concept of this planned utopia was so vast and forward-thinking that people were stunned. Here was an idea to have a city that was constructed under a dome–all fifty acres (20 hectares) of it. That would take care of any climate issues, it was believed. A downtown work center would be ringed by worker housing (apartments and single-family dwellings), and the two areas would be separated by large swaths of greenways, gardens, and forests. The workers would connect to the downtown via rapid and cheap public transportation. New materials and prototype, renewable and sustainable construction methods would be used. As needs of the population evolved, the city would evolve. It was, in the words of one of the main architects of the plan, the city as experiment.
And the people who would/could live there were not to be beyond a certain age. No retirees! And unemployment would be non-existent. No fossil fuel vehicles would be allowed inside the dome, and a heavy emphasis would be placed on recycling and repurposing of all consumer goods. Prices in the city would be regulated closely, and all citizens would have all healthcare and medical expenses met. There would never been any need for things like voting or representative government because the town would provide all the needs for the people who lived there. The town wanted to ask the people to trade their political voices for financial and physical security, swap their political freedoms for a place where their children could grow up happy and safe and productive.
This conceptual city was, of course, never constructed. On the other hand, it has influenced the proposal for other potential utopian cities in the modern era. Walmart has thought of building Telosa, a utopian city in the desert of the American Southwest. Saudi Arabia, in beginning work on their Green Line in the desert there, analyzed the plans for the Florida project to see what they could learn from it. And other more recent attempts still look to the domed city that was never built for their inspiration.
However, some of the features of this proposed Florida utopia were indeed incorporated into something that not only was built but also something that you can visit today. The idea behind a utopia is, after all, an attempt to make people happy. And the place you can visit today is, ironically, part of the “happies place on earth,” Walt Disney World. You know it as the Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow–EPCOT.
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