Of course it is..! Good ideas always are..!
The Oasis Cities concept is inspired by some old and some newer ideas
Paolo Soleri’s ARCOLOGIES
Ebenezer Howard’s GARDEN CITIES
Paul Romer’s CHARTER CITIES
Israel’s KIBBUTZIM
INTENTIONAL COMMUNITIES
Walled MEDIEVAL CITIES
GATED ESTATES
CRUISE SHIPS & RESORT HOTELS
[stextbox id=’info’ caption=’All these concepts have their drawbacks and limitations. ‘]Paolo Soleri’s ARCOLOGIES are far too enormous to be practical. GARDEN CITIES, with their expansive “green spaces”, are too low density. CHARTER CITIES (as proposed by Romer) would have open borders and populations in the millions, like Hong Kong. KIBBUTZIM lack privacy. INTENTIONAL COMMUNITIES tend to be religion -based communes. MEDIEVAL CITIES were compact and defensible, but unsanitary. GATED ESTATES have high levies and are not especially secure CRUISE SHIPS & RESORT HOTELS are pleasure palaces for short-term vacations, not designed for living and working in.
Those unimaginative curmudgeons who dismiss Oasis-Cities as an “old idea” are implying that “since nothing came of your idea when it was first suggested, nothing will EVER come of it”. Whether or not the an idea has been “thought of before” is irrelevant since flying machines, and countless other inventions and innovations, were all “thought of” centuries before they became a reality.
OA-Cities will be nothing like the dystopian “city within a giant building” depicted in sci-fi movies (e.g., “Blade-runner”) – or the fanciful (but never to be built) “futuristic projects” portrayed on “Impossible Engineering” type TV docs. By REDUCING the number of buildings in a city from 100’s of thousands (of many different shapes, sizes, and purposes) to just a few dozen awe-inspiring edifices – each one set amidst an arcadian sanctuary of gardens, ornamental lakes and bucolic woodland – OA-Cities will enormously simplify infrastructure and services provision.
There is much more to the Oasis City idea than the actual building, impressive as that is. The Oasis City concept addresses COMMUNITY, CONSERVATION, CRIME, ECONOMICS, ENERGY SECURITY, ESTHETICS, and more.
“SMARTER THAN THE AVERAGE SMART CITY..!” (says Yogi Bear)
Or, to paraphrase a 1960’s UK late-night TV show…
“NOT SO MUCH A CITY, MORE A NEW WAY OF LIFE”
Someone whose best “argument” is the sneeringly dismissive “old idea” – is blind to what a huge improvement OA-Cities will be over monotonous, sprawling, inefficient, time-wasting, and increasingly crime-plagued OBeCities.
Yes it is an “Old Idea”, so the nay-sayers are right but for the wrong reasons –
[stextbox id=’info’]The idea of a “city within a building” was hypothesised by HG Wells in “The Sleeper Awakes” (1899) where the protagonist awakes after a 200 year sleep (i.e. around 2100) to find that England’s cities and towns had all been replaced by a few “stupendous hotels”. Wells did not describe what these “hotels” might have looked like except, predictably enough, they were very unpleasant places ruled by a despot who employed thuggish Nigerian mercenaries to stifle dissent.
The idea of a “City within a huge building” has cropped up in a number of sci-fi books and movies where they are, as always, depicted as dystopian over-crowded “human hives” inhabited by frightened people who are ruled over by a tyrant and his sadistic “Nazi-style” enforcers.
The most famous advocate of the 3-D city concept was Paolo Soleri (1919-2013) – an Italian-American philosopher-architect who coined the term “Arcology” in his 1969 Magnum Opus – “Arcology, the City in the Image of Man”.
Soleri’s Arcologies were fantastically ginormous, typically intended to house hundreds of thousands or even millions of inhabitants. To illustrate the scale of his intricately hand-drawn Arcology designs, Soleri would superimpose an outline of the Empire State Building, as can be seen in his Babelnoah design.
