I don't see anything wrong with revisiting the arcology concept except that this seems like a return to the idea of the total design solution, leaving no space for the actual inhabitant to participate and no room for the free evolution cities need to avoid eventual dysfunction. This is very much a perpetuation of the professional architect's ideal of perfect and immortal design that is at odds with the reality of the modern urban habitat. So you might assemble some team of multidisciplinary professional experts to do development as a group, but it's still a hermetic process of master-planning that leaves the people who will live in this space out of the process and severely limits what they can and can't do in the future. The most important of the arcology concepts of Paulo Soleri was the one he himself so often ignored; the Linear City. The arcology vision of the future was one of miniaturizing the footprint of the built habitat to a kind of urban web, returning to nature the space we squandered on suburbs and the automobile, confining the human habitat to within a modest fixed distance from a select few transit routes, freely expanding upward and along their length but not outward. But the big monumental 'nodal' arcologies were not really intended to do that job. Indeed, they were never about population management as is so often attributed to them, functioning more as centers of culture than concentrations of population. Like other concepts of the Megastructure movement, they were intended to be a response to the Leisure Crisis once believed to be imminent with Total Automation. The primary arcology was the collective, web-like, Linear City that would eventually span the globe. In Soleri's vision, most of the population was supposed to live at a roughly outer-urban/suburban density in the Linear City that would incrementally subsume the few remaining high-volume transit corridors, internalizing them with the benefit of future electric powered transportation. Located at the crossroads of the Linear City's branches, the nodal arcology was to denote the geographical logistical and cultural 'points of interest' previously represented by old cities. He imagined the nodal arcologies as having limited lifespans because of their monumental nature and monolithic construction, being obsolesced, torn down, and replaced periodically, their populations and functions temporarily absorbed into the Linear City web which, unlike the nodal arco, would never become obsolete because it was perpetually adaptive. But as important as the Linear City was, it didn't appeal as much to Soleri's ego because it never needed the same gargantuan scale of structure, was more functionally generic in architecture rather than totally designed, more freely adaptive within its linear confines, and more under the control of its inhabitants. Later on in life Soleri did finally seem to clue-into the need to better promote the Linear City concept and more of his work began to emphasize this, but it was a bit too late. https://arcosanti.org/sites/default/files/images/LLC%20in%20Fall%207x14.jpg http://www.florence-expo.com/back/imgsup/id2789_img3_IMAG_2.jpg http://arcosanti.org/sites/default/files/images/photo110921d1.jpg http://www.ilgiornaledellarchitettura.com/immagini/IMG2012022216492725_900_7... http://www.archinfo.it/glry/Paolo_Soleri_Sympa_gen_2011/27.jpg I often say that the future of the human habitat may be very much as Soleri envisioned, but without the giant arcologies because, in the digital era, they're redundant in the very context they were intended for. There will probably still be nodal centers of culture, but such scale of structure was never really needed and monumental structures work against the contemporary notion of a cultural cultivator. Culture wants a festival, not a museum or a cathedral. We still think about the city and the built habitat too much as a collection of buildings rather than a social landscape, a stigmergic living infrastructure, a 'backplane' formed by social and logistical attractors. So we tend to engage in over-design. It's like athletic shoes today. They're so over-engineered to an exact model of an idealized human foot that most of them never actually comfortably fit anyone's feet! We don't need urban bonsai. We need an urban permaculture. On 11/13/14, 5:22 AM, [email protected] wrote:
From: *Stefano Serafini* <[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>> Date: Thu, Nov 13, 2014 at 6:56 PM Subject: [P2P-URBANISM] vertical! To: p2p urbanism list <[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>>
Dear friends,
please check it out:
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/rayking/vertical-city-a-solution-for-su...
Sustainability and skyrocketing got married. Of course the book looks like a propaganda pamphlet, but I think we should consider this trend seriously, and not dismiss it with easy jokes. We cannot dismiss these people simply by saying that they are paid by multinational real estate companies, or that they are lobotomized and/or evil. This is not the point.
Of course "urban islands" (or "continents") in the wilderness sound to me like a nightmare - especially considering all we know about neuroergonomics, biophilia, nature-deficit disorder, etc. But possibly this is were the market is leading, helped by the rethoric of "green economy" (I guess that all the industry plants will be settled on Mars, right?).
The authors of the book write down: "Our team is a group of architects, entrepreneurs and visionaries who believe that Vertical Cities are a potential solution to many of humanity's greatest problems. We meet regularly in Portland, Oregon. Our Mission is to create a healthy, harmonious, sustainable and dignified life for everyone through the emerging technologies of Vertical Cities."
We should analyze again the urban future these people are preparing. Why they are doing it, their reasons, their scientific and technological ground, their urban and political ideology, and the reason why things like a "Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat" exists and is funded by somebody.
They look like sharing the same old dream of LeCorbusier, just on a larger scale, where "les machines-à-habiter" become whole cities instead of buildings. Possibly, they reflected about the mistakes brought in by that model, and tried to solve it by transforming cities into (huge) buildings, and buildings into cities.
The main reasons for a vertical growth seem the need for setting more building-free land, in order to preserve "nature" and food production and reduce human footprint. In fact the monstruous urban growth of several metropolises since the '90s seems to substantiate such a point of view. World population is growing and it's becoming urban at a hugely accelerated pace. Are there enough data to corroborate that compact traditional-like cities are a solution out of modern horizontal sprawl? What about land-hungry Countries like Japan?
All the best,
Stefano
Dr. Stefano Serafini
Research director, International Society of Biourbanism www.biourbanism.org <http://www.biourbanism.org/> | www.biourbanistica.com <http://www.biourbanistica.com/> Managing editor, Journal of Biourbanism www.journalofbiourbanism.org <http://www.journalofbiourbanism.org> Tel./fax (+39) 0695190008 - Mob. (+39) 3939426561 [email protected] <mailto:[email protected]> Via G. Giardini, 15b - 00133 Roma | Italy
-- Eric Hunting [email protected]