The great cities that were never built (many giant images)

Was looking at a skyscraper in Mecca and found this:

tugPj.jpg

Da Fuq
 
That would've been horrible…
Well, the thing was back when urban redevelopment had these "grand" ideas on urban and long distance transport.

And the thing was, the airfield downtown was only one of five planned in total.

To quote this article on the idea.

And for the most part, this eventually happened, but without Toledo’s involvement (it was ultimately up to the State of Ohio to build the Ohio Turnpike and the state and federal governments to come up with the Detroit-Toledo Expressway).


The Bel Geddes plan perhaps over-emphasized air travel a little: it proposed five airports for the Toledo area: downtown, downriver, the Laskey/Jackman Road area, and by the Heather Downs Country Club on Glendale Avenue.


Rail travel was to be concentrated in one area southeast of the city, with through freight bypassing the city entirely.

The original Toledo Blade article on the subject states that

Toledo Tomorrow lies within and around a network of express highways, great arteries of motor traffic knifing through the heart of Toledo and affording safe, rapid passage to points in or beyond the city.
These highways are depressed below street levels or elevated above them so that there are no cross traffic or intersections. They are divided by landscaped center strips so that all danger of head-on collisions is removed.
Most of these highways carry eight lanes of traffic so that automobiles and trucks can move through downtown Toledo as fast as they can over rural highways.

The article does mention one of the people involved conceived it more as a stunt to draw attention for the need for redevelopment, rather than as a master plan.

A wide shot of the model (link posted due to image size).

http://images2.toledolibrary.org/getimage.asp?image=/images/ndrive/Z000/Z00054/Z0005471.jpg
 
20070410bronx.jpg


These affordable housing units would had been a great addition to the Bronx. A shame nothing really came out of it. We need all the projects we can get to make it a better place.

:(
 
So I guess I'm the only one who is surprised that the original E.P.C.O.T. concept is not on here. Guess it's up to me to fix it then.

550210_519675108045159_1795337700_n.jpg


The Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow (E.P.C.O.T) was a concept developed by Walt Disney near the end of his lifetime that went as far as elaborate visions and plans and the purchase of property near Orlando, Florida that eventually became the Walt Disney World resort, including Epcot (formerly known as EPCOT Center), a related concept transformed into a themepark. It was a "community of the future" that was designed to stimulate American corporations to come up with new ideas for urban living. Of E.P.C.O.T, Walt Disney is quoted as saying, "E.P.C.O.T will take its cue from the new ideas and new technologies that are emerging from the forefront of American industry. It will be a community of tomorrow that will never be completed. It will always be showcasing and testing and demonstrating new materials and new systems."

Walt's original vision of E.P.C.O.T was for a model community, home to twenty thousand residents, which would be a test bed for city planning and organization. The community was to have been built in the shape of a circle, with businesses and commercial areas at its center, community buildings and schools and recreational complexes around it, and residential neighborhoods along the perimeter. Transportation would have been provided by monorails and PeopleMovers (like the one in the Magic Kingdom's Tomorrowland). Automobile traffic would be kept underground, leaving pedestrians safe above-ground. Walt Disney said, "It will be a planned, controlled community, a showcase for American industry and research, schools, cultural and educational opportunities. In E.P.C.O.T, there will be no slum areas because we won't let them develop. There will be no landowners and therefore no voting control. People will rent houses instead of buying them, and at modest rentals. There will be no retirees; everyone must be employed." The original model of this original vision of E.P.C.O.T can still be seen by passengers riding the Tomorrowland Transit Authority attraction in the Magic Kingdom park; when the PeopleMover enters the showhouse for Stitch's Great Escape, the model is visible on the left (when facing forward) behind glass. Disney passed away before the Magic Kingdom opened and his vision of E.P.C.O.T (the original project) was not realized.

During its design until 1967 where it became "Walt Disney World", the project was known inside Walt Disney Productions as various names:

"Project X", "The Florida Project", "The Disney Florida Project", "Disney World"

The concept eventually evolved into the Epcot theme park, which opened in 1982 at the Walt Disney World Resort.

I would have put up more photos but for some reason it will only do one, so I'll just leave you this link where I got the photo and the info from.

https://sites.google.com/site/theoriginalepcot/
 
I like grids. Grids are logical, easy to understand, and efficient. Anything else ends up with a mess and hard to cross streets where you get lost.
I guess it depends on whether one views cities as something like SimCity or a place where there's actually living, breathing people.
 
I've got to say that Daniel Burnham was probably one of the greatest American city planners of the early 20th century. He also did a massive proposal for Manila IIRC. His ideas for San Francisco were amazing.
 
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