| An arcology, so far only existing conceptually (with experiments taking place at Arcosanti), is an extremely large building, sufficient to maintain an internal ecology as well as an extremely high human population
density. Popular in science fiction, arcologies are generally advocated as solutions to the problems of overpopulation and environmental degradation, as they reduce the footprint of cities. The word arcology is a
portmanteau of architecture and ecology.
The purported need for arcologies
The basic idea of an arcology stems from the idea that urbanization is
claiming an excessive amount of space on Earth. (This is a common notion in the environmental movement and green movement. Many other ideas have been proposed to solve this future problem, including: ocean colonization; space colonization; rigidly enforced societal birth
control like that practiced in China; rigidly enforced societal death control as seen in Ira Levin's "This Perfect
Day", the movie "Logan's Run" or on the television series Star Trek.) An elegant, but little practiced option, is simply to use what land we
have more wisely. Many architects and scientists have given serious thought to solutions.
Frank Lloyd Wright's Broadacre City thought experiment
Frank Lloyd Wright pondered "An Organic Architecture"
with his Usonian city idea, called Broadacre City. His image was
something like divvying up all of America's land equally for each American family, and he goes on to describe transportation,
agriculture, and commerce systems that would support this idea. While this is an appealing concept, there are problems with
Wright's solution. It cannot accommodate real and rapid population growth that essentially shrinks the amount of divisible land
available. He pre-assumes a more rigid type of democracy than that in which we
live. Also, he assumes a more levelled societal playing field where all of us, regardless of wealth or lack thereof, have roughly
the same amount of home space or business space as everyone else.
Paolo Soleri's arcology proposal
A further solution for this problem, though with some difficulties of its own, is that of Paolo Soleri, who coined the term 'arcology'. In "Arcology: The City in the Image of Man", Soleri
describes ways of compacting our city structures in three dimensions to combat two-dimensional urban sprawl. While this led to
many science fiction interpretations of domed cities, Soleri's ideas
aren't just the "human beehive" model popular in sci-fi. They also encompass vast
differences in societal thinking regarding some of the same things that Wright touched upon in transport, agriculture and commerce. Soleri deepened Wright's ideas of what might specifically need to be done by exploring resource consumption and
duplication, land reclamation, elimination of most private
transport in favor of public transport, and greater use of social
resources like public libraries. This concept also emphasizes, in a
broader scale, more efficient use of resources and compacting of urban space to preserve the environment.
Some experts speculate that arcologies will become common in the information age. Construction methods for arcologies are being tested at Arcosanti. Otherwise, arcologies are restricted to paper proposals and fictional depictions, such as Larry Niven and Jerry
Pournelle's Oath of Fealty (novel) or as an element in the computer game SimCity 2000.
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