Walt Disney spent the last years of his life planning EPCOT not as a theme park but as an actual city. His vision, sometimes called Progress City, would house 20,000 residents in a radial layout inspired by British planner Ebenezer Howard's Garden Cities concept. A dense urban center with community buildings and schools would radiate outward through residential rings to industrial zones, all connected by monorail and PeopleMover systems. Cars would be relegated underground. Disney even petitioned the Florida legislature for creation of the Reedy Creek Improvement District in 1967, giving him quasi-governmental authority over the land. But he died in December 1966, and the company decided it had no interest in running an actual city without Walt's guidance. The dream was too ambitious, the liability too great. EPCOT would become a park instead, constructed for an estimated $800 million to $1.4 billion over three years, the largest construction project on Earth at the time.

The park divides into two fundamentally different experiences. The front half, originally called Future World, houses avant-garde pavilions exploring technology and science. Spaceship Earth, the 180-foot geodesic sphere that has become the park's icon, traces the history of human communication from cave paintings to the internet. Test Track lets guests design virtual vehicles and race them at high speed. Guardians of the Galaxy: Cosmic Rewind, which opened in 2022, became Disney's first reverse-launch roller coaster. The back half, World Showcase, rings a lagoon with pavilions representing Mexico, Norway, China, Germany, Italy, The American Adventure, Japan, Morocco, France, United Kingdom, and Canada. Each pavilion is built in the architectural style of its country, staffed by citizens of that nation through Disney's Cultural Representative Program, and filled with restaurants, shops, and attractions reflecting the culture. The authenticity runs deep: the Morocco pavilion was directly sponsored by the Moroccan government until 2020.

Epcot has spent four decades in a state of perpetual transformation. The original Future World pavilions, sponsored by corporations like AT&T, General Motors, and Kodak, were built around educational entertainment. By the mid-1990s, Disney began replacing edutainment with thrill rides: World of Motion became Test Track, Horizons gave way to Mission: SPACE. The park's name itself shapeshifted, from the all-caps EPCOT Center to the lowercase Epcot in the 1990s (Disney even tried Epcot '94 and Epcot '95, mimicking world's fair naming conventions, before abandoning the idea). In 2020, the name reverted to all-caps EPCOT as an homage to the original concept. Future World was subdivided into three neighborhoods: World Celebration, World Discovery, and World Nature. New attractions arrived, including Remy's Ratatouille Adventure in the France pavilion and Journey of Water: Inspired by Moana. The International Food & Wine Festival, launched in 1995, and the Flower & Garden Festival, from 1994, became annual traditions drawing food-focused crowds.

In 2024, Epcot attracted 12.1 million guests, making it the eighth-most visited theme park in the world. The park spans more than twice the size of Magic Kingdom, with a parking lot accommodating 11,211 vehicles. Yet for all its scale, Epcot retains something unusual among theme parks: a sincere belief in human potential. The opening ceremony in 1982 saw water gathered from rivers, lakes, and seas around the world poured into the Fountain of Nations. A 450-piece marching band played "We've Just Begun to Dream," a song by the Sherman Brothers. The spirit of that gesture, earnest and slightly grandiose, still animates the place. It is a park that asks visitors to learn something between rides, to taste cuisines from countries they may never visit, to consider how a cave painting and a smartphone are connected by the same human impulse. Walt Disney's city of tomorrow was never built. But the park that carries its name keeps trying, in its own way, to be the showcase to the world he imagined.