Did Disneyland's Main Street, USA, Inspire Better Urban Design?

Walt Disney didn't set out to revolutionise urban design when he created Disneyland -- that's what his Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow, or EPCOT, was for. But whereas EPCOT never became anything more than a sort of permanent world's fair, it was Disneyland and especially its Main Street, USA, that ultimately changed the way we think about the built environment.

It's hard to overstate how radical a constructed cityscape Main Street, USA, was when it opened in Anaheim in 1955. Across the U.S., cities and towns were tearing out their historic downtowns in favour of automobile-oriented cityscapes: sprawling parking lots, streets built to highway specifications, large insular buildings that spurned the city outside.

Among the tens of millions of Americans who strolledinto Disneyland, this modern mode of city-making drew unfavorable comparisons with what they saw in Main Street, USA. It felt good to walk through Disney's city, with its varied facades and approachable architecture. Pedestrians were even welcome in the roadway, which they shared with motorcars and horse-drawn railcars.

But could Disney's nostalgic reimagining of small-town America actually change the way architects and planners approached cities? That's the conclusion renowned architectural historian Vincent Scully -- an unforgiving critic who oncewrote that Disney "so vulgarizes everything he touches that facts lose all force" -- reaches in his foreword to Building a Dream: The Art of Disney Architecture (1996):

In the period of the 1950s and 1960s when Disney came up with Main Street, it and indeed all traditional urbanism was despised by