It is more accurate to say that Walt Disney personally conceived of EPCOT and his company, The Walt Disney Company, developed it on land they already owned. In the 1960s, through various shell companies, Walt Disney secretly purchased over 27,000 acres of land in Central Florida for what would become the Walt Disney World Resort. EPCOT was originally intended to be a "Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow"—a real, working city of the future. After Walt's death in 1966, the company shifted the concept from a residential city to a theme park that opened in 1982. Therefore, Disney didn't "buy" EPCOT as an existing entity; they created it from the ground up as the second theme park at their Florida resort. Today, it stands as a permanent tribute to Walt's vision of human achievement and international cooperation. The project required the creation of the Reedy Creek Improvement District to allow Disney to act as its own governing body over the land, a unique legal structure that has been the subject of much political discussion in recent years.