Goodbye, Reedy Creek

Reedy Creek Improvement District is a forty-square mile piece of Central Florida including the towns of Bay Lake, Lake Buena Vista, and - last but certainly not least - Disney World.

Florida gave the territory as a charter city to the Disney Corporation back in 1967, when they were first planning Disney World. Partly this was so Disney could handle the services for their theme park, but partly it was because Walt Disney had grand plans to build the “Experimental Prototype Community Of Tomorrow” (EPCOT), and Florida wanted to let him. According to Wikipedia:

EPCOT was to be a utopian autocratic company town completely controlled by Walt Disney himself and featuring commercial, residential, industrial and recreational centers, connected by a mass multimodal transportation system. Based on ideas stemming from modernism and futurism, it was designed to replace the inefficient infrastructure created by urban sprawl that was growing in the United States in the 1960s. Needing the flexibility and independence to establish and maintain his own specialized, personalized government, Walt lobbied the Florida Government to create what became the Reedy Creek Improvement District.

But Walt died the next year, his successors had less interest, and the plan was cancelled. Parts of it survived as the Disney World monorail (originally planned as EPCOT’s public transit) and as the EPCOT Center (a Disney World attraction memorializing the plan).

In the end, all Disney had was a forty-square mile corporate fiefdom, on which they built several cities. Overall they seem pretty nice, although more because of the magic of walkable urbanism than the magic of Disney.

But earlier this year, Florida passed a law banning schools from teaching LGBT topics to young children, which the media dubbed “the Don’t Say Gay Law”. Disney did some corporate activism against the law, the Florida government got mad and brainstormed ways to punish Disney, and the best they could come up with was to re-establish state control of Reedy Creek, which DeSantis officially did last month. Disney has sued the state, but it looks like it’s just over some debts and the lawsuit is unlikely to prevent the dissolution. (read more)