October 10, 2023: Arcologies
Good afternoon. Today we will look at the concept of Arcology: what it is, what has been proposed or built, and how practical the idea might be.
The term “arcology” was coined in 1969 by Paolo Soleri in Arcology: The City in the Image of Man, which I must warn is not an easy read. The word, a portmanteau of “architecture” and “ecology”, is Soleri’s answer to how humans can live prosperous lives with minimal environmental impact. An arcology is typically (though not necessarily) a single megastructure, houses tens of thousands of people or more in dense, 3D arrangements, and fulfills many of its needs on-site, including power production, manufacturing, agriculture, waste management, and so forth.
While the term originated with Soleri, antecedents of the concept go far back. Soleri was a protege of Frank Lloyd Wright, who illustrated some arcology elements in this Broadacre City vision, though Broadacre City is not a megastructure and contains a road system. Or if we really go back, Çatalhöyük is a settlement in modern-day Turkey, which experienced a heyday around 7500-6400 BC, that shows some arcology characteristics. Individual homes had doors on the ceiling, and people navigated the city by walking on the rooftop.
Contemporary with Soleri was Buckminster Fuller, who in 1971 proposed the Old Man River’s City project for East St. Louis. By this time, is was clear that East St. Louis, a city that had once been a thriving manufacturing center, was in a state of serious decline. Fuller envisioned a 1000 foot domed megastructure that would house up to 125,000 people, as well as businesses and athletic fields, described in Critical Path. The cost of the structure was estimated at $700 million, about half of the cost and triple the original budget of the first World Trade Center, which was built around the same time (had Old Man River’s City been built, it would have almost certainly experienced similar cost overruns). In 1971, East St. Louis has a population of 70,000. As of the 2020 Census, the city’s population had fallen below 19,000. It will not be a great surprise that the project was never built.
A few years later came Jacque Fresco’s The Venus Project, promulgating a “resource-based economy”. The Venus Project can be described as a utopian vision for social planning, which, the team claims, will solve problems such as war, hunger, poverty, and and resource scarcity. The Venus Project derives its name from the town of Venus, Florida, and houses its research center in this otherwise decrepit agricultural community.
There was also Orville Simpson’s Victory City, a vision that he started developing in 1936 and made public in 1960 for a 102-story arcology-like structure with plans for most aspects of the economy. Shades can also be seen in Le Corbusier’s Ville Contemporaine, entailing a plan (Plan Voisin) for remaking central Paris that, probably for the best, was never realized. Ville Contemporaine entailed a mix of tall residential structures, high population density, and abundant open space, though it different from later visions by centralizing the private automobile. Ville Contemporaine serve as inspiration for much of New York City’s public housing. There are far too many other concepts to try to list comprehensively.
Soleri’s vision is manifested in Arcosanti, a community in an otherwise rural part of Arizona that has never housed more than about 100 people, falling well short of Soleri’s vision of 5000 people. The most recent building completion was in 1989. Arcosanti’s biggest economic role is handcrafted bronze windbells.
Soleri’s, Wright’s, Fuller’s, and Fresco’s visions, as well as even earlier antecedents such as Ebenezer Howard’s Garden City movement, have much in common. All are highly ambitious plans that were developed in response to the social challenges of the day. In later three visions, those social challenges were the perceived unsustainability of conventional urban development. All demonstrated social engineering pretensions that went far beyond the city’s physical form.
To what extent has Soleri’s notion of arcology become a reality? Nothing exists today that comes close, but some proposed projects were/are approximations, and some actual projects do demonstrate some elements.
The Ziggurat Pyramid is an arcology envisioned for (where else?) Dubai, which, according to Wikipedia, would have a height of 1200 meters, 45% taller than the Burj Khalifa, which is the tallest building in the world today, 300+ floors, a footprint of 2.3 km^2, and a population of nearly one million people. It would be largely energy self-sufficient. I haven’t found any official information since the project was proposed in 2008, so I would assume that it is dead.
Dongtan was a eco-city concept near Shanghai that would have housed 500,000 people by 2050 and would have been highly self-sufficient on energy. Dongtan was never built, but some concepts were incorporated into later eco-city projects.
Crystal Island is an arcology envisioned near Moscow, which would have been the largest building in the world by enclosed volume. Given the lack of recent information, I would assume that this is also dead.
The Line is a 170 kilometer long, 200 meter wide, and 500 meter tall project proposed for Neom, Saudi Arabia. Last year I discussed my skepticism about the viability, though the dimensions alone should be enough.
Masdar City is a planned community near Abu Dhabi that meant to showcase ecological design principles. Unlike the above, Masdar City exists and is home to some high profile tenants, including the International Renewable Energy Association, though so far it has fallen well short of the original vision. On the less pleasant end of the spectrum is Kowloon Walled City, an extremely dense, ungoverned enclave in Hong Kong until it was demolished in 1993-94 due to problems with sanitation and crime.
Then there are those concepts which were never meant to be built (or so I don’t think). X-Seed 4000 is a 4000 meter, 800 floor mountain-like megastructure, proposed in 1995 to be near Tokyo. Similar extreme ideas include the Shimizu Mega-City Pyramid, also near Tokyo; the Ultima Tower in San Francisco; the New Orleans Arcology Habitat (NOAH), proposed to rebuild after Hurricane Katrina; and the Boston Arcology, which, like NOAH, would be a floating habitat; and many others.
Arcologies are a staple of science fiction (see also, this list and this list), and here too it will be impossible to list them all. Oath of Fealty, by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, features the arcology of Todos Santos outside Los Angeles, with conflict between the arcology and the main city a major plot point. Much of Final Fantasy VII is set in Midgar, a decidedly dystopian arcology run by the megacorporation Shinra and powered by Mako reactors, which are draining the planet’s life force. Probably the most famous fictional arcologies are the ones the player can build in SimCity 2000.
For self-contained life support systems, a prominent and infamous exemplar is Biosphere 2, an attempt to sustain a group of researchers in a closed habitat from 1991-1993. The Eden Project replicates ecosystems under geodesic domes in the UK, the Montreal Biodome does this in Canada, and so do the conservatories at the Gardens by the Bay in Singapore. Success of such a project is necessarily for any sustainable human civilization off Earth.
Earthbound extreme environments also necessitate arcology-like arrangements, such as at McMurdo Station in Antarctica, the Halley Research Station, also in Antarctica, and MORPHotel, a floating luxury hotel which, as far as I can tell, is in limbo. Most of the 272 residents (as of the 2020 Census) of Whittier, Alaska live in the Begich Towers condominiums, which include shopping, a school, a post office, a notary, and a church.
Conventional urban development can take on the characteristics of a megastructure. Though there is no pretense of ecological sustainability, it is possible to talk the 4.2 miles of the Las Vegas strip in tunnels or pedestrian skybridges. Calgary’s Plus 15 pedestrian skybridge network consists of 86 bridges, spanning 16 kilometers, is I believe the world’s most extensive skybridge network. These systems are neat experiences, but they are controversial for reasons I would like to discuss another day. Thyssenkrupp’s maglev MULTI elevator might extend the possibilities.
Then there are urban developments that revolve around particular communities and lend themselves to high levels of containment. Examples include universities, military bases, and prisons. Modern aircraft supercarriers have been termed “cities at sea”, and they house 5000-6000 people for months at a time in dense living arrangements, with facilities such as dining halls, shops, doctors and dentists, and others.
Finally, there are mixed use developments that attempt to reduce the need of residents to drive and travel. While they fall short of Soleri’s goals, these are much more practical. A few years ago, a meta-analysis found that fully mixed-use development can reduce vehicle-miles traveled (VMT) by 9% compared to fully segregated development. Of existing mixed-used developments, Hudson Yards in New York City might look the most arcology-like. Some other high-profile projects, like Songdo near Seoul, South Korea and Khazar Islands in Azerbaijan, have struggled to gain traction or been outright failures.
These concepts are all over the map, and that is unavoidable because “arcology” is amorphous. As much as I wish to see arcologies and arcology-like projects thrive, there are some fatal problems.
First is cost. There is a reason that most people live in low-rise housing and spread out where automobiles are widely available: this arrangement is cheaper. Arcologies, especially those that require exotic construction, are expensive. It is not a coincidence that high levels of self-sufficiency are found in only where they are forced, such as on aircraft carriers, in Antarctica, or in prisons.
Second, self-containment simply isn’t a good urban design methodology. Prosperous cities are open, facilitating trade of goods and movement of people. It is no coincidence that Singapore, for instance, a city that urbanists point to as having gotten many things right, is one of the most trade-dependent cities in the world. Consider these studies, showing how highway connectivity, airports, and airports again are important for a city’s economy, and this review of transportation linkage and innovation.
Third, on the related topic of infrastructure, I fail to see the problems that arcologies are meant to address. For the environmental impacts of agriculture, for instance, transportation accounts for a small share of total impact, and for that impact, low-carbon shipping has much more short-term potential than greenhouses, hydro/aquaponics, or vertical farming. Likewise, I fail to see any compelling reason to prefer isolated power networks over the large-scale grids that most of us enjoy now. A lot of this seems to come from the Small is Beautiful aesthetic, which is more romantic than practical.
Fourth, Soleri’s and related proposals require a very high degree of central planning. Jacque Fresco, for instance, denies that his ideas are communism, but I find it difficult to tell the difference. Public ownership and central planning suffer from the calculation problem, lack of work incentive, and corruption. We reviewed many ways in which reality falls short of grand visions, with the gulf between Le Corbusier’s Ville Contemporaine and the performance of the projects perhaps the most obvious.
Fifth, a major headwind for any ambitious urban development, with arcologies being no exception, is a cessation of population growth. According to the UN’s World Population Prospects (which might themselves inflate future population growth), world urban population growth peaked around 2017, and the majority of future growth will occur in Africa. Particularly in Arab countries, I see so many projects, especially NEOM, and I have a hard time imagining that there will be sufficient demand for them.
But the most serious problem is that, once we get past the “that looks cool” factor, arcologies have very little of value to justify the great expense and logistical difficulty. From an article mentioned above,
At the end of his [Buckminster Fuller’s] presentation a member of the audience spoke up. “We don’t need domes, we need jobs.” That particular citizen seems to have had a better understanding of the needs of East St. Louis than the esteemed Buckminster Fuller!
But we ought not be too hard on Fuller. He might have failed to solve East St. Louis’ problems, but so did everybody else.
Quick Hits
In the last 24 hours, there has been a major attack by Palestinian militants, including Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine against Israel. This is a major escalation of long-standing violence and an apparent major intelligence failure.
A couple weeks ago, David Brooks was in Portland, Oregon to talk about his project, Weave. Brooks discussed the “epidemic of loneliness” in the United States. While the problem is very real, and one that I hope to write about in the future, the website and Brooks’ talk gives me more of a sense of the organization’s staff and corporate sponsors than what it actually does, or how one would get involved.
Thursday’s update from the Institute for the Study of War offers some insight as to what Vladimir Putin’s war aims in Ukraine are. Meanwhile, a pro-Kremlin party has come out on top in parliamentary elections in Slovakia, and public support in the United States for aid to Ukraine, while still at a majority, is slipping. Aid will be one of the leading issues in the race for the Speaker of the House, after Kevin McCarthy became the first U.S. House Speaker to be deposed mid-term.
This week marks 25 years with Matthew Shepard was murdered. The killing is one of the most notorious anti-LGBT hate crimes in American history, though a controversial book in 2013 questions whether anti-gay bigotry was in fact the motivation for the killing. Whatever the truth of this particular incident, opposition to homosexuality without devolving into bigotry has proven to be very difficult.