[P2P-F] P2P-Foundation Digest, Vol 47, Issue 13

[Eric Hunting]

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_700.jpeg

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, p2p-foundation-request at lists.ourproject.org wrote:
> From: *Stefano Serafini* <stefanonikolaevic at gmail.com 
> <mailto:stefanonikolaevic at gmail.com>>
> Date: Thu, Nov 13, 2014 at 6:56 PM
> Subject: [P2P-URBANISM] vertical!
> To: p2p urbanism list <p2p-urbanism-world-atlas at googlegroups.com 
> <mailto:p2p-urbanism-world-atlas at googlegroups.com>>
>
>
> Dear friends,
>
> please check it out:
>
> https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/rayking/vertical-city-a-solution-for-sustainable-living 
>
>
> 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
> stefano.serafini at biourbanism.org <mailto:stefano.serafini at biourbanism.org>
> Via G. Giardini, 15b - 00133 Roma | Italy
>

-- 
Eric Hunting
erichunting at gmail.com

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