Arcosanti, Arizona

ITALIAN ARCHITECT Paolo Soleri came to the United States in 1947 to study with Frank Lloyd Wright in Arizona. In the barren desertscape of Cordes Junction he began to develop Arcosanti, a prototype town designed for seven thousand people, based on his theory of "arcology," in which he fuses concepts of ecology and architecture. "Arcology advocates cities designed to maximize the interaction and accessibility associated with an urban environment; minimize the use of energy, raw materials and land, reducing waste and environmental pollution," writes Soleri. The town has in fact been under construction since 1970, but, like any practical homage to an impractical theory has become more a spectacle than an actual town -- or, as Soleri himself puts it, a "laboratory" for urban planning. This laboratory hosts lectures and concerts, building workshops and tours; it even offers a café and gift shop. Nevertheless, it has a mission: to develop an alternative to suburban sprawl -- to counteract its inherently wasteful consumption of land, energy, time, and human resources.

The arcology concept proposes a highly integrated and compact three-dimensional urban form that would need about two percent as much land as a typical city of similar population. Today's typical city devotes up to sixty percent of its land to automobile functions. Arcology eliminates the automobile from inside the city and reserves it for use outside the city's borders. Walking would be the main form of transportation within. Arcology would rely as much as possible on the sun, the wind, and other renewable energy so as to reduce pollution and dependence on fossil fuels. Experimental green cities of this kind seem to be springing up all over the place. The new urbanists are incorporating some of these concepts into their designs: William McDonough's Coffee Creek Center in Indiana, for example, is being developed to create more energy than it uses, with photovoltaic-paneled houses and wind farms.

In Earth's Answer, Soleri calls his mission urban implosion: "The problem I am confronting is the present design of cities only a few stories high, stretching outward in unwieldy sprawl for miles. As a result of their sprawl, they literally transform the earth, turn farms into parking lots and waste enormous amounts of time and energy transporting people, goods and services over their expanses. My solution is urban implosion rather than explosion. In nature, as an organism evolves it increases in complexity, and it also becomes a more compact or miniaturized system. The city too is an organism, one that should follow the same process of complexification and miniaturization to become a more lively container for the social, cultural, and spiritual evolution of [humankind]."

-- Amanda Griscom

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