This Week: Whatever Happened to Arcology?
This week I’ve been reading Paolo Bacigalupi’s near-future Dystopian/Cli Fi masterpiece, The Water Knife. Having written about the global water crisis for years, I’ve enjoyed seeing how a strong storyteller like Bacigalupi imagines the all-too-real threat of things like catastrophic drought in the Colorado River Basin.
I’ll have more to say about the book in the future, but for this week I was also interested in another concept that comes up in The Water Knife: Arcology.
Arcology is a term that coined by the Italian architect Paolo Soleri in the late 1960s to signify a design philosophy that blends architecture and ecology to re-imagine human settlement. “Arcologies” — as Soleri and his followers imagined them — are artfully-designed, super-dense, futuristic towns and cities that would supposedly improve day-to-day life and social relations while radically reducing the human footprint on the environment.
Alas, the closest that arcology has ever come to reality is Soleri’s beloved Arcosanti, a prototype town that Soleri founded in Paradise Valley, north of Phoenix. Soleri and his wife bought the land for Arcosanti in 1956 and used it as a test-bed for his ideas over many years.
Today, after years of experimentation and planned growth, the settlement has only about 80 permanent residents, according to the website, but it receives some 50,000 annual visitors.
Given Soleri’s utopian vision, it’s ironic that the fictional arcologies of The Water Knife are outgrowths of corruption and evil, facilitated by merciless “cutting” of water supplies to the impoverished residents of now utterly dysfunctional suburban communities of Phoenix and Las Vegas.
Whether or not Arcosanti grows to its projected population of 5,000 or continues as a small-scale thought-experiment on how humans can live together sustainably, Soleri’s legacy has had an impact on how we imagine the future.
For a sense of how one of Soleri’s early students has taken his ideas to the world, check out Richard Register at Eco City Builders.
For more on Soleri, check out The Vision of Paolo Soleri: Prophet in the Desert, a feature-length documentary that came out in 2013.
Until next week …
-Lakis
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