Featuring insights from Kevin Blakeney
Director of Master Planning, Storyland Studios
When guests move through a theme park that feels truly seamless, flowing naturally from land to land, discovering new worlds around every corner, they rarely stop to wonder why it feels so right.
That feeling is not an accident. It is the result of a master plan, often developed years before a single attraction opened.
Kevin Blakeney has spent 15 years shaping immersive destinations across the globe as a landscape architect and master planner. He knows that the magic guests experience on the ground begins long before any designer draws a single detail.
“Master planning is really the strategic blueprint of how a theme park or destination is going to evolve over time,” he explains. “It establishes the physical layout, the circulation systems, land use distribution, infrastructure planning, and the long-term development framework of a park.”
It is, in other words, where everything begins.
Starting with Feasibility
Before a single creative decision is made, a master plan has to answer a more fundamental question: can this actually work?
The feasibility stage is where planners evaluate site constraints, environmental conditions, infrastructure access, transportation connections, and the economic model that will support development over time. In themed entertainment, that also means modeling attendance projections and crowd capacity, understanding how guests will be distributed across the park throughout the day, and studying nearby resorts, airports, and transportation networks to determine whether a new destination can function as a regional draw or a global one.
“Getting guests to your front door can make or break a project,” Kevin says. “A theme park is only successful if people can, and choose to, get there. That means looking beyond the park itself to understand how guests begin their journey and where that experience can be improved. For example, Shanghai Disneyland was developed with direct connections to the Shanghai Metro, while the Marne‑la‑Vallée–Chessy station was purpose‑built as part of the Disneyland Paris development, based on the recognition that seamless, direct transport from Paris would be critical to the resort’s success. These types of decisions are monumental in making sure a new park succeeds.”
Feasibility is not the most glamorous part of the process. But without it, even the most visionary creative concept has nowhere to stand.
Planning the Story Before the Attractions
Once feasibility is established, master planning moves into story. At Storyland Studios, storytelling is treated as a core element of master planning—not something layered in later by designers, but a fundamental force that shapes the land itself from the very beginning.
Kevin takes this seriously at the planning stage. Long before individual attractions are designed, planners are already making decisions that shape the narrative journey of the entire park. The story influences where landmarks sit; how the skyline is anchored; how lands transition from one theme to the next. Story is used to lead guests in the discovery of new spaces as they move through the park.
By embedding the story into the design of the land, we create a sense of curiosity. Galaxy’s Edge at Disneyland is one of Kevin’s go-to examples for how story creates curiosity. Guests do not arrive through a gateway or a typical theme park portal. They come through natural rock formations, and the pathways slowly reveal the spaceport of Black Spire Outpost. The physical layout of the land was designed to feel like a real settlement within the Star Wars universe.
“All of those decisions happen at the master planning stage,” Kevin says. “The master plan creates the narrative framework that later designers build upon. Every attraction that comes after fits into a structure that was already there.”
Walt Disney’s often quoted philosophy is that “Disneyland will never be completed; it will continue to grow as long as there is imagination left in the world!” This is not just a romantic idea. It is a design requirement, one that demands a master plan strong enough to support decades of expansion without ever losing the thread of the original vision.
The Three Keys to a Cohesive Park
When Kevin thinks about what makes a theme park feel truly unified rather than like a collection of unrelated attractions, he comes back to three things consistently: circulation, visual continuity, and narrative transitions.
Circulation is the foundation. Pathways should guide guests naturally, without confusion and without creating bottlenecks. When circulation is well planned, guests discover new lands without ever feeling lost. When it is not, the experience breaks down quickly, regardless of how good the individual attractions are.
Visual continuity is often subtle, but it plays a critical role in shaping the guest experience. Lines of sight are carefully considered, with significant creative effort devoted to determining what should be hidden, framed, or revealed—allowing the environment to unfold in a deliberate and engaging way.
At Walt Disney Imagineering, for example, sightline testing became a foundational part of the design process through the use of weather balloons. Imagineers would fly helium balloons—often early in the morning or late at night—to represent the proposed height of new buildings, trees, or attractions. By observing what was visible from within the park, designers could adjust plans to ensure that backstage elements remained out of sight and the immersive experience was preserved. These tests were even used to confirm that major visual icons within a new land did not unintentionally dominate or disrupt sightlines elsewhere in the park.
This approach reflects the design philosophy of Imagineering pioneer John Hench, who emphasized the importance of removing visual contradictions. By carefully controlling what guests can see—and just as importantly, what they cannot—designers sustain the illusion that each land is a fully realized, cohesive world.
“If you carefully frame what guests see, you maintain the illusion that every land is real,” Kevin says. “Tall structures, show buildings, landscape, they all have to be thoughtfully positioned when you are laying out a new land.”
Narrative transitions bring it all together. Moving between lands should feel intentional. Environmental cues, architecture, vegetation, topography, and audio all play a role in signaling to guests that they are crossing into somewhere new. This is factored into the master planning stage, marking areas of transition and demonstrating how those transitions will happen.
Pandora – The World of Avatar at Disney’s Animal Kingdom offers a fantastic example of deliberate, immersive arrival design. The approach bridge is intentionally designed to limit sightlines, withholding views of the land until the final moment and creating a careful sense of revelation. As guests cross the bridge, the soundscape shifts—ambient nature sounds and subtle otherworldly tones begin layering in, aligned visually with the first glimpses of bioluminescent plant life and the floating Hallelujah Mountains emerging through the mist. Guests are not simply walking into a new area; they are being transported to another world entirely. Within the land itself, forced perspective makes the floating mountains seem far bigger than they really are, and even the waterfalls move more slowly than natural water, reinforcing the illusion of immense distance and scale.
When the Circulation, Visual Continuity, and Narrative Transitions are coordinated through the master planning process, a park feels cohesive.
When they are not, it shows.
Managing Scale and Crowds
For large destination parks, master planning must also manage tens of thousands of people a day, in a way that never lets guests feel the weight of the crowd around them.
Major attractions are positioned strategically to pull guests toward different areas of the park rather than concentrating them in one place. Pathway widths, plaza sizes, and queue configurations are all tools for absorbing peak attendance. Entertainment venues, restaurants, and retail are placed to reduce congestion and keep guests moving comfortably through their day.
At the resort scale, transportation systems become part of the equation.
For example, Walt Disney World’s robust network of trains, boats, and people movers keeps guests flowing between parks, parking, and hotel properties all day long. When those systems are coordinated well, guests experience shorter waits, smoother movement, and a more relaxed day overall, even if they never consciously register the planning behind it.
“One of the biggest lessons is that guest experience is shaped by factors guests should never notice,” Kevin says. “Circulation efficiency, shaded rest areas, intuitive wayfinding. When those elements are well planned, the park feels comfortable no matter how crowded it is.”
Designing for a Future That Does Not Exist Yet
One of the most interesting challenges in master planning is that planners have to make decisions today for attractions that have not been conceived yet.
Expansion areas are always reserved within a park’s master plan, sometimes for whole new lands, sometimes for added capacity or new attractions within existing ones. Infrastructure systems, utilities, transportation routes, and backstage access all have to be designed with future growth in mind, so that construction can happen while the park continues to operate without disruption.
Epic Universe, coming to Universal Orlando, is a recent example of this kind of long-range thinking. Planners have built in room for expansion within each land, and space for entirely new lands to be added when the right IP and the right moment align.
When the foundational structure is strong, new attractions can be added at any point, seamlessly, and from the guest’s perspective they feel like a natural extension of the park rather than an afterthought.
“Theme parks are designed to evolve over time,” Kevin says. “The goal is to lay out that foundation so that growth can happen without ever disrupting the experience of the park as it already exists.”
What Makes It Worth Doing
For Kevin, the appeal of master planning comes down to something simple: the opportunity to shape how people feel.
At the scale of a master plan, the work is not about individual buildings or single attractions. It is about creating entire worlds where guests explore, celebrate, and make memories. The collaboration across disciplines—landscape architecture, engineering, architecture, operations, and creative storytelling—is what drives the process. And seeing those perspectives come together into a destination that feels genuinely cohesive is, in his words, incredibly rewarding.
“Theme parks are often described as organized emotion,” he says. “When a master plan works well, guests feel wonder and discovery simply by moving from space to space. The places that inspire imagination and bring stories to life. That is what makes this such an exciting field.”
At Storyland Studios, the approach starts exactly there: with the large-scale thinking that treats a destination as a complete environment before a single attraction is designed. Circulation, infrastructure, guest capacity, visual corridors, how a park fits into a broader resort or urban context. Once that framework is in place, detailed storytelling follows, layered in through environmental design, architecture, landscape, and material choices that all contribute to the narrative.
The goal is always the same. Not a collection of rides.
A world.
About Kevin Blakeney
Kevin Blakeney is the Director of Master Planning at Storyland Studios, with 15 years of experience designing and constructing theme parks and entertainment venues at all scales, both domestically and internationally. He has worked on a number of THEA award-winning projects, including Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge and Universal Beijing, and has most recently overseen the landscape architecture and construction of multiple new lands in Universal’s Epic Universe.
