I think for a park like EPCOT to be truly incredible, it must constantly be an example of the better world we’re not living in. It once was this, it could have continued being this, and it maybe can even still be this, but this must be the way it works. Otherwise, it’s just another Disneyland.
EPCOT shouldn’t be about entertainment or media franchises at all. It can use them to attract people and facilitate the demonstration of new ideas, but—in this park specifically—entertainment merely for entertainment’s sake is wasteful of the opportunity the park was founded on.
It’s not just that the park leaned more on franchises and characters lately, it’s that while Disney proposed plans to redevelop huge areas of the park, they failed to follow through. EPCOT is not about the futuristic aesthetic, now considered retro-futuristic. That was just one component of what the park aimed to do: design everything.
EPCOT should be about possibility. It should demonstrate a better future. It should be a vision that could become true. It should be the motivation of the park itself to create a place that inspires its guests to extend futuristic ideas to every corner of the Earth. Every component in the park should be considered, designed, and—when it doesn’t work—redesigned. EPCOT should never rest on its laurels, instead it should constantly look critically at the world and itself to find the better way.
All around the world, people do the same things differently. Knowledge of those differences helps everyone else develop better, sustainable solutions for the places they belong to. Having a dedicated place to put these ideas into practice is an opportunity. Maybe it should not be a whole city, but it should absolutely be an ongoing experiment.
Disneyland was created by extremely smart people who learned so much about creating and operating a small-scale city. So it should be no surprise that EPCOT came out of it. Of course these people would have ideas about how to do everything a city needs to do.
EPCOT should only ever excuse itself from this responsibility when it succeeds. When the world is as good as EPCOT could have ever imagined, that’s when it can become obsolete. That’s when it can be entertainment for entertainment’s sake. Until then, I think it has a responsibility.

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