Eco Celebs OBLIVIOUS to arcologies
Eco-warrior Greta Thunberg, former vice-president Al Gore, Leonardo di Caprio, Bill Gates, King Charles, and David Attenborough. All have written books or made earnest “save the planet” documentaries.
Such “influencers” suggest that if we all make a few rather modest lifestyle changes, the worst climate change projections could be avoided. Nothing epitomised this more than Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth”, which ended with a list of 10 Things You Can Do.
The mind-numbing triviality of Al Gore’s eco-advice – like “keep your tires inflated” and “clean your showerhead” – highlights the futility of any actions that individuals can make..!
If EVERY high consumption citizen on the planet had heeded Gore’s hopeful list of “10 Things”, it would not have made the slightest dent in the problems the movie highlighted.
Why is it that the so-called “Greens” and the many celebrity “save the planet” advocates have never once mentioned, let alone discussed, the amazing potentiality of ARCOLOGIES..?
Perhaps they never heard of the concept? Or perhaps they have but – due to arcologies being portrayed as impossibly gigantic DYSTOPIAN hyper-structures that would be awful places to live in – and would anyway take decades to build and therefore be too expensive..?
Or maybe it’s just a simple LACK OF IMAGINATION..?
Even those who don’t like the idea of 3D cities would surely agree that, if we must build them, it would make much more sense – aesthetically, financially, and practically – to put those 750,000 people in 100 smaller (but still very large) buildings housing 7,500 people each..! Then you could start with just 1 or 2 city modules, adding more as and when required to reach the target of 750,000 people. One of the many advantages of Oasis Cities (small arcologies) is that EVERYONE would be just a short WALK from all facilities, not least of which would be the encircling “Domain” with its pretty lakes and bucolic woodland walking trails. So much more convenient than the long trek that might be needed to exit from the bowels of a Soleri-sized hyper-structure. There is no logical reason that an arcology (in order to qualify as one) must be so enormous as to house a big city load of people in a single building. But, whenever one mentions “arcology” – assuming the person has even heard about the concept in the first place (and most young architects these days probably haven’t) – this is the reaction one can expect. Googling “Arcology” brings up scores of totally impractical gargantuan hyper-structures. WHY..??? A building housing 7,500 people UNDER ONE ROOF – one which incorporates all the facilities of a modest-sized town – would still be an Arcology..! (5,000 might be the minimum population required to provide a good range of services and facilities). 5 Deltapolis-sized habitats (each with a 10 hectare footprint) could comfortably fit into 100 hectares (1km2) and still leave 50 hectares for landscaping and recreational purposes. Which is more recreational space per person – – and far more accessible – than what is provided in conventional OB-cities
Pod PRT systems, like this one at Heathrow T5, are a great idea but expensive to build and operate if done on a small scale. (£6 pp per one-way trip in 2022). They would also be un-necessary within individual Oasis City habitats, as all facilities would be within an easy 5-10 minute walk.
If we can put aside the predictable, yet IMO irrational, fears about “over-crowding”, etc, Arcologies would seem to be the ideal solution to all the big environmental issues which are endlessly discussed, picked-over, and agonised about in the media. To mention just a few advantages – they would conserve LAND, ENERGY, WATER, NATURE, MATERIALS and RESOURCES, not to mention the absurd amount of TIME and energy wasted on COMMUTING.
It bothers me that NOT ONE celebrity with influence in the e/v movement – even STARchitects like Norman Foster, the late Richard Rogers, Renzo Piano or Ken Yeang – seem to be thinking about Arcologies – not even as a POSSIBILITY. To my mind this seems very strange and makes me wonder “what do they know that I don’t?”. But this self-doubt is dispelled as soon as I read a newspaper or magazine article or a TV panel discussion or documentary lamenting on the seemingly insoluble eco-mess we have got ourselves into.
I am left to assume the reason arcologies have never been taken very seriously – and the idea has remained marooned in the realm of Utopianism and Sci-Fi – is that everyone assumes them to be “impossible” buildings and starry-eyed utopian visions of a forever fictional future. PAOLO SOLERI, who coined the term and whose name is forever associated with it, was obsessed with designing enormous structures to house hundreds of thousands or even millions of people – all living in small frugal apartments, most of which would have been located deep inside a stupendously-sized building, and thus with no possibility of a private outdoor patio or the expansive views that are an essential feature of a pyramidal design like Deltapolis. Afaik, only one of Soleri’s designs was pyramidal – a very strange-looking inverted pyramid.
A typical Soleri Arcology – note the Empire State Building at the same scale on the right.
Soleri’s Magnum Opus –
“Arcology, the City in the Image of Man”
(MIT 1969)
intricately hand-drawn visualisations of buildings often so gigantic that a superimposed silhouette of the Empire State Building appears as tiny as a mouse does compared to a man.
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