This book looks at what was to be EPCOT (the city, not the theme park) and Disneyland through the lens of urban design. I think it glossed over a lot of the possible negatives of privately-owned public land. What happens to a city when the corporation that runs it gets bought out, or when the corporation is experiencing lowering share prices?

One aspect of this book that I really didn't like was the author alternating between going into way too much detail about some aspects of urban design and almost no detail in other aspects. I frequently didn't know what the author was talking about when he explained different urban design concepts.

Finally, and this is a small detail that probably most people will totally gloss over, but round runways are total garbage bullshit that only non-pilots would ever think is a good idea. They're horrible ideas. ( )

There are a lot of layers of fascination within this book. For someone just exploring Disney, it is a nice (if detailed) introduction into the various facets of the man and the origination of the parks. For the casual Disney fan, it is a deeper look into how everything got where it is. And for the real geeks – the one who already knew that EPCOT the park has nothing to do with EPCOT as Walt planned it – it is a detailed inspection of Walt’s thinking and planning when it came to his parks and to his dream of the city of the future.

I was pleasantly surprised by this book. And this is coming from someone who was expecting quite a bit. I went into this expecting to hear the details of what Walt’s dreams of EPCOT were, how he wanted to pull them off, and what it might have all looked at. I got that in spades. Genneway provides great insight in the urban planners who may have influenced Walt. (Now, there is a chance he conjectures their influence a bit much, but I am willing to give him license. His premises make sense, and, even there weren’t direct influences, the way Walt was working, these would have been second or third levels of influence.) And he goes into great detail regarding how those were translated into Walt’s plans.

But the extra I got – the part I hadn’t suspected – was deep background on so much of Walt’s other work. Of course EPCOT would not have come to Walt’s mind without Disneyland and the World’s Fair and the railroads and the studio and the ski resort and everything else Walt did. But, one, I didn’t expect the detail in these areas and, two, I didn’t understand how well it all fit together.

This book brings it all together. It has information on what the thinkers of the day were thinking. It has information on how the various Disney projects came together. And it has, as much as possible, an insight into the genius that was Walt.

My copy wound up dog-eared as I marked important pages about innovation and creativity. And it made me remember that Walt was, indeed, a deep thinker that helped us all become much more than we would have been ( )