A lot of architectual/planning groupies get so wrapped up in various plans and regret that a lot of visionaries' were 'corrupted' or 'massacred'.
However in some cases, if they were to go ahead, hell would be the result.
Just as modern Australia's 'original sin' was the dispossession of its original inhabitants, Disney's 'original sin' would have been the suspension of local democratic authority. Can a strong free diverse civil society have been built on a corporate dictatorship?
Residents of EPCOT would have been mere vassals, who if they lost their job would also lose their home and evicted. There would almost certainly have been a 'struggletown' ringing the Disney enclave containing the dispossessed (a bit like Canberra vs Queanbeyan but far more marked and more than just a joke).
As was fashionable at the time, Disney was also into eugenics and was interested in controlling peoples lives more than the average mad architect (for everyone's own good it must be hastened to add).
While more modest, what got built appears to have been preferable to the original plan.
Lawyers have a bad name. They have an indispensible role in the justice system but when taken to extreme they become apologists for the stupid and represent a hidden tax on many commercial activities and enterprises (through liability).
Architects and city planners are less lowly esteemed. In fact they are celebrated amongst the intellectuals and may associate with same. However their inability to understand human nature and how we live, most marked in their more audacious city schemes, have been disasterous. Especially when housing and low income people are concerned where they can make a bad situation worse.
Eg Le Corbusier (tower blocks) and Radburn (suburbia).
The reward for introducing such ideas is architecture awards and continued big government contracts. What other profession so profusely rewards failure?
http://www.smh.com.au/news/national/demolition-orders/2009/01/07/1231004105780.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_Cox
Architects (and artists in general) rarely repent. The spendid vision not infrequently becomes the expensive folly, with significant social costs. And 'we know best' from various professions does not necessarily transpire in practice.
