Disneyland Resort Expansion

Anaheim, California, USA

The Disneyland Resort is the transformation of one the world’s most beloved theme parks into a multi-day, mixed-use, entertainment destination district and tourism zone in the city of Anaheim. As a member of the WDI executive Management team and Director of Development Management for Walt Disney Imagineering, Thomas Kozlowski led the master plan implementation team responsible for developing the vision and facilitating the integration of Disneyland, Disney’s California Adventure, Downtown Disney retail and entertainment, 2200 hotel rooms including Disney’s Grand Californian, a 10,000-car parking structure, public roads, streetscape improvements, environmental branding, a graphics and identity program, future development planning and strategy, public/private partnerships and entitlements for the US$2 billion expansion of the 550-acre Disneyland and 1100-acre Anaheim Resort Districts.

“An unusually large number of consulting design professionals are hired to bring about the transformation - in part because a lot of work had to be done in a short period of time. “This was the sort of normal transformation that any city goes through. The difference here is that the schedule and the amount of investment”, says Thomas Kozlowski, director of Development Management at Walt Disney Imagineering WDI, the creative, design, development, and research arm of Disney’s Parks and Resorts division. “You can incrementally change things over 20 years, but, in this particular case everything was done in a really constrained timeframe. And everything in the existing urban framework had to continue to operate with a minimum of disruption.

"LAND Forum 12 Magazine"