Walt Disney originally envisioned EPCOT as the Experimental Prototype Community Of Tomorrow, an actual habitable new town, planned with the same precision as Disneyland. Disney died in 1966, soon after making a short film about EPCOT, and his original idea died with him — only to be reborn as the neo-traditional or new urbanist town of Celebration. From Duany Crits Celebration:
This team’s master plan, currently being built out as planned, finally broke ground in 1994. Like all New Urbanist towns, Celebration includes a wide range of mixed-use and residential building types, a network of walkable streets, and at least one town center. Development entitlements include 8,065 residential units, 3,100,000 square feet of workplace, 2,125,000 square feet of retail, including the Main Street shops. [...] The large, mixed-use town center also includes apartments above stores, a school, a branch college campus (Stetson University), a hotel as well as useful retail and restaurants (not one a national chain); a bank, a church and plenty of office space. It includes a cinema attached to a late-night bar and an ice cream store. This center is associated with a lake along a public waterfront drive.
New Urbanists applaud higher-density developments, with shops and restaurants within walking distance. They hate sprawl. Nonetheless, the developers of Celebration didn’t predict the popularity of townhouses:
At first, there were not enough townhouses to meet demand. This is a common mistake among the New Urbanist greenfield towns. Since there is no precedent for higher density housing types located so distant from the center, conventional rear-view market analysis yields no conclusion other than that they will not sell. But such methods do not take into account that while townhouses are meaningless without a town, they are a very desirable residential type when there is one. A row of townhouses isolated amidst suburban parking lots has the double disadvantage of lacking the big yard in the back without the compensation of a lively street in the front. But Celebration is a town, of course, and thus the 200 or so original townhouses that were reluctantly provided sold out immediately, and there are no more to be had in the town center. More are now being built in the outlying areas where they make as little sense.