Arcology: cutaways of the future city-hives that never were

Great as long as no one changes their minds or evolves in their politics or philosophy…I wouldn’t want to be living now where I’d have chosen when I was 20.

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Utopians often fail at recognizing that their utopias will, in fact, need room for improvement; but it is somewhat understandable why someone who things(however incorrectly) that they are building a utopia would not see the need to facilitate modifications.

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Well one the the principles that Solari espouses is the idea that the individual residences and business would be individually designed and built within the structure. This would enable the archologies to be in a state of perpetual renovation. Of course that in itself would lead to great inefficiencies in design to accommodate broad variations in the individual buildouts… eg. unless everybody is forced to have their bathrooms and kitchens in the same place, the floors would have to be raised above the structural floor to fit sloping drain pipes between them.

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I’ll stay here in Cathedral, if you don’t mind.

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To be sure, the traffic model in the game was a very important part of the message, and it certainly wasn’t pro-car at all. They very explicitly wanted to demonstrate how improving g the road system ultately leads toore traffic congestion. So, kudos for that. I’m just frustrated that the game never evolved beyond that dynamic, never let us imagine completely new (or very old) ways of getting stuff moved around.

I’ve been facinated with the idea of Arcologies since first seeing the review in The Whole Earth Catalog when I was a kid. I never found the vision particularly convincing – but the ideas were brilliant.

In the 80’s I moved to Hong Kong and I often visited KWC – it was a good place to find cheap dentists, among other things. I never made the connection between KWS and an Arcology though. KWS was just a more intense version of places like Sham Sui Po or parts of Mongkok. But the place that did approximate an Arcology was Chung King Mansions in Tsim Sha Tsui back when it was particularly dingy, which some claimed was the most densely populated place on the planet.

I believe it. I stayed in an Indian guest house in Chung King that had originally been designed to be a 2 bedroom flat. There were 50 people living there. I had a room (the size of a closet) but most residents slept on the floor in the hallway – in shifts. We all had to share a single toilet.

I was a bit sad when they demolished KWS – all I could think about was where all of those homeless rats would go…

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I was bad at simcity-- never understood why people wanted roads when they could have the clean, efficient, and all together more sensible rail systems I was giving them.

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Just imagine, 5000 artisanal bell makers, all working in perfect cacophony.

Is the artisanal bell market really that strong?

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I have SAD and my office lamp is an ultra high output sunlight replacement. It kind of works but is nowhere near as good as the real thing; about this time of year I have a significant positive personality change.

Obsessives and cranks have, at bottom, a complete inability to understand people, and just want to fit them into their regimented systems. B F Skinner, who invented Behaviourism, didn’t appreciate that the reason he treated the mind as a black box was because of his notorious lack of insight into other people. When they acquire political power, of course, is when they become really dangerous.

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Having visited Arcosanti 10 years ago, I was really impressed by the design of the architecture. It’s truly gorgeous, and the people who were living there were nice and interesting. I even bought a bell, which sounds and looks great.

But if you want an object lesson in the difference between utopian vision and reality, Arcosanti is there for you.

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An ex of an ex of mine was an artisanal bell maker (as was his father before him). Apparently there are not a lot of bell foundries anymore and it isn’t a common art so, yeah, it probably is strong enough to sustain the number of folks doing it.

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I remember seeing the arcology idea on TV when I was about 8. I’m thinking it was on In the News. There was also an article about Soleri in the World Book encyclopedia. The idea fascinated me, and when I was 13 or 14 I used to come up with story/movie scenarios (I probably never wrote more than 5 pages) that took place in arcologies. One idea was that the city was so laden with electronic connections that it was possible to program a person’s bed to eat him (in hindsight, a bit like Internet of Things).

Also, around that time, I played a TRS-80 game called Supreme Ruler. The game – no matter how many countries were involved – took place in an area the size of New Hampshire and Vermont combined, so upon defeating the other countries, the wining nation would continue to grow to 200 or 250 million people in spite of the small land area. I figured the only way something like that could exist (aside from how well it might work) was if everyone lived in arcologies.

Of all places, Valley View Mall in Dallas, TX furthered my ideas. At the time it seemed like a really huge mall, with a metal truss(?) structure holding up the ceiling. I imagined the place on a much larger scale, with small blimps flying around inside, taking people from one place to another (on different levels of the city).

Then about a year after that, Brazil came out… For some reason, when I first saw the film, I had this idea that the entire city was under one roof (like an arcology). I think that a lot of the film simply took place at night. (When Sam visits the Buttles’ residence, though, it’s evident that there are separate buildings.)

EDIT: I didn’t know Soleri died only a couple of years ago. I figured he had died years earlier; I remember (or misremember) him already being quite old when he was on In the News (or whatever show it was) back in the 70s.

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I think John Crowley’s “Engine Summer” also had a description of living in an Solerian arcology. (Great book, btw, arcology or not.) I think one of the strengths of Soleri’s vision is one he may have deliberately eschewed or downplayed. His arcology outside Phoenix was meant to be hand-built as a replacement for old soulless manufactured, unorganic cities, but it looks like something that might be much more amenable to being build robotically or even printed out, a technology that didn’t exist when Soleri began to draw.
In fact, if there were a need to build a city somewhere unpleasant and remote (Antarctica, Mars, & esp. Europa), I might want to set robotic 3D building-printers working to complete a single large urban structure, especially if I had a little advance warning, but also needed space for a lot of people. And I suspect a megastructure like that would incorporate many of Soleri’s ideas.

I’m pretty sure @doctorow just wrote a story doing just that on the Moon. :slight_smile:

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