December 2020: Transcript of Arcology Discussion
A series of conversations that took place during a meeting hosted by The Futurist Foundation regarding Arcologies and their place in the lexicon of architecture.
A simple discussion regarding arcologies I did for a futurist project group. Was in line with the lecture I did for another futurist group, so it was a quick back to back.
Nick (Director)
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12/21/2020
While we wait for Rhakon to drop his knowledge on us here is a link of some arcologies currently in progress - https://www.wired.co.uk/article/paolo-soleri-arcologies
WIRED UK
Five real-world arcologies under construction
Italian architect Paolo Soleri, who came up with the concept of the arcology, has just hit his 92nd birthday, so we thought a suitable celebration would be to compile a list of five real-world arcologies currently under construction
Personally I would like to see more sustainable communities before we go all out on an arcology.
Rocketman1999
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Arcologies are definitely interesting, but I feel that to some extent they aren’t well integrated, so to speak.
Nick (Director)
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It would essentially be like rebuilding a new city.
Rocketman1999
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I guess a better way of saying it is that the sustainability of an individual community is only one aspect of a larger issue.
Cyrusxir
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While in principle the capacity to realize an arcology is rather difficult. As a model of central planning, it and it's interlinking systems lend it's self well to OS design principles. By looking to make the various systems modular rather than monolithic, the system can be adapted and modified to scale as technology improves. Might be useful to design service distribution in these things based on quasi crystals and a periodic tiles with each tile/set of tiles being a self contained community.
Cyrusxir
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Then in my opinion it becomes a metric of systematically reducing the number of essential individuals/time needed to make each cell viable while considering the factors of specialization, centralization, and automation.(edited)
Rhakon
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Hello there! I apologize for my tardiness in my facilitation of information regarding this. A while back I created a concept document for a pair of neo-arcologies and I feel this would be a great way of diving into the meat of what an arcology is for people who like this type of thing while I also provide some summaries and descriptions of the various types!
→LINK←
So the arcology dates back to 1969, making it a pretty old theoretical concept for large scale, dense, and as self sufficient as possible human habitation.
There’s been a few other ideas that have piggy backed off this, or have been influenced by the same sustainable design such as the victory cities or the earth cities in the early 90s, but in general the original arcology covers all the territory.
To qualify as an arcology, the structure needs:
1. to be as highly dense as possible.
2. to be as compacted as possible, thus using up the least amount of land as possible.
3. as self sufficient as possible, with natural allowances for the elements that cant be internally sustained by an arcology (hi tech manufacturing for example).
4. this one is an addition I’ve made, but given the ecological focus of the original idea it made sense; to act as a nature regenerator.
So this gives us a lot of wiggle room, since technically a cabin in the woods could qualify as an arcology if it hits all of those requirements - it doesn’t need to be a super gigantic mile high tower that’s mega high tech made out of magic.
You can attain a lot of these goals by reducing the level of luxuries, thus reducing complexity, and by taking advantage of force multipliers provided by technology - AI is a good example that we're seeing in farming all over the Netherlands, turning a very tiny country into one of the worlds top 5 food exporters.
Generally, I prefer to focus my research and work on arcologies that house 5,000 people - this is a good basic population, it allows you to know people without knowing everyone, it gives you some specialization options, its genetically robust, and allows a strong sense of community to evolve.
I also did a lecture on this some months ago, but it is quite long.
Journal Club 30/09/2020 Arcology
Rhakon
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Also, taking a look at the list that Nick posted; Arcosanti will never be completed, as the original purpose has long since been abandoned. Masdar City is definitely not an arcology, as its not mean to be self sustaining as much as its meant to be a technological prestige project (which is very commonly associated with arcologies) ((you can also get into the nitty gritty and look at how transport works within Masdar - the low wage workers commute while high wage workers live there, turning the outskirts into a massive parking lot and defeating the purpose entirely)) Crystal Island again lacks the necessary qualities of a true arcology; it isn’t self sustaining in any degree, it isnt meant to act as a 'city', and it isnt eco regenerative - it, like Masdar, is little more than a prestige project. As for the Vegas Strip this is a weird one to include. It doesnt do anything arcology related and makes me quirk my eyebrows dubiously. Now the Halley Research Station is an interesting one. If we look at it at face value, it does hit the highly compact (for researchers) need, but it isn’t self sufficient with supplies being flown in during the 3 month summer intervals, and it isn’t meant to act as a regenerator for the local environment nor as housing.
TLDR; based on the criteria originally outlined by Soleri and expanded upon over the decades, the Wired article is really mistaken on what does and does not qualify as an arcology - but I would love to see counter arguments or anything else that would say otherwise!
Nick (Director)
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So I don’t think there will be real arcologies in the near future, but a stepping stone to sustainable living and arcologies would be smart cities correct?
Smart Cities World
Singapore tops smart city ranking for second year running
The 2020 Smart City Index measures citizens’ perceptions of the impact that technology has on their lives, surveying them on areas such as governance, health and safety, mobility and opportunities.
They don’t meet all of the criteria, but with some adjustments would be a viable option?
Rhakon
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Mmm they aren’t true arcologies, since they lack the density the really qualify - this is just, well, a normal city with techbro upgrades. It doesn’t have the capacity to handle the needs of its population within its boundaries. This is, however, an entirely achievable objective - if we look at the city organism as a series of energy exchanges, we can find ways to balance out the utilized energy to increase autonomy ie; take a city like Seattle, and convert say, 80% of the energy being wasted right now due to poor building design, bad street layout, inefficient office buildings etc, and convert that energy into urban farms or passive house-standard structures? How much more self-sufficient could the city become?Turn that into desalination plants, and use the grime from it as a biofuel, etc etc there’s definitely ways to take these types of 'smart cities' and make them more efficient, but theyll never approach the efficiency of an actual well designed arcology. I think that the struggle is figuring out where the balance lies, because we usually think of arcologies as these super high tech mega material constructs, when they really aren’t. You could use nothing but existing technology and attain all four criteria. We have the design know how and the technology to do this type of thing with style if we wanted to, its just a matter of will.
Nick (Director)
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Is there any reason why you think an arcology has never been successfully developed?
Rhakon
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Definitely! If we look at the collapse of Arcosanti as an active development project, we see that really, it lacked the kind of planning necessary to make it a community - it had the same problem all the other arcologies have had thus far; they're just glorified building projects. Not spaces for people, not made by a group of people for people with that intention in mind, they either never make it off the drawing board, or they never get finished, like Arcosanti.
Nick (Director)
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Wouldn’t you think that arcologies are a good project for architects in university? I never hear of architects talking about arcologies so I just assume its lack of awareness?
Rhakon
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I think it’s a combination of lack of awareness and the presumption of their material impossibility. When you think 'arcology' what’s the very first image that comes to mind?
Nick (Director)
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Huge mega-structures that are fancy in design?
Rhakon
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Right - so something that then by virtue of what it is would require extremely durable materials right? It’s this vast thing but in reality, it doesn’t have to be a vast thing - we're just used to the idea because of popular culture. If you were to put a five-thousand person arcology every kilometer across the west and east coast of the USA you could house half a billion people (if my math is right cmiiw) so it’s more about people not understanding that you dont have to cram 50 million people into a box, you can still have arcologies that are low or no impact on the environment, that hit all four objectives, that house many billions more humans than exist right now on earth, while using less than 20% of the earths land surface (not counting desert/artic zones) which is what we need to reduce occupation by to try to heal the planet.
If people stop seeing them as monoliths, they’ll be more comfortable with the idea.
MinimumSky5 (Zac)
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12/22/2020
This video thumbnail is a bit closer, still a skyscraper, but something a little more appealing to live in than MegaCity 451, North America Economic Zone.
That number is unintentional, but hilarious!
Rhakon
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Isaac's video is a good introduction to the general concept for sure.
I think he tends to focus a lot more on the “sky high” science rather than the human element, but it works to get the general idea across on what an arcology could be.
If we use his 1 kilometer tall tower, and flatten it, you can build that right now.
MinimumSky5 (Zac)
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He also emphasises that these things do not need to be as densely packed as an office building, and in fact that would be a terrible idea!
Rhakon
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Indeed, his calculations for his mock arcology gave people a huge amount of living space. I tend to follow the same trend.
MinimumSky5 (Zac)
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Even if it's leaniant for space (which I doubt), it helps to stop people comparing these to current buildings, which are just not designed to be anything close to these things.
Rhakon
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Agreed, it’s part of the misconception of arcologies in general. People think they would be stuffed in like sardines, when really they would have essentially houses to themselves.
Nick (Director)
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This kind of ties in with creating an essential housing program. What would a sustainable and livable house look like?
Tiny homes at around 400sq ft are doable albeit not a lifestyle everyone is comfortable with. 600 sq ft seems like more of a livable solution,
Rhakon
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Well, we have to define what 'sustainable' is first: it needs to be separated out from the marketing gimicks and given real tangible terminology.
Nick (Director)
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Food, energy.
Rhakon
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To me, sustainable isn’t just the new green fad, it is what can be built and maintained for 50+ years using lowimpact technologies and, to be honest, I don’t think if we really want to look at a proper aspect of sustainability that we should give an American style individual house the light of day. I know it’s nice to have, but it’s a luxury that we are rapidly approaching the point of being unable to afford. If we had larger scale high density housing that was properly sustainable, then that would, in effect, be a micro psuedo-arcology.
Nick (Director)
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If it’s a modular solution that can be used in high density and an individual home that’s the best of both worlds. Creating a 'micro arcology' would be an amazing step, but it’s about iterating and improving. Let’s say we were to build a pilot project, you would want to make sure that it works on a super small scale.
Creating something that is better than what we currently have is still a positive and would probably warm people/investors/governments up to the idea of giving a full arcology a real go.
Rhakon
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I don’t think investors will ever get behind this, not profit motivated ones in either case - this would represent an economic departure from capture capital which is their modus operandi. There’s lots of examples of people living off grid in their homes, providing all their power, water, and food from the plots of land they work or from whatever sources are local, and theres examples of very small 30-50 people communities that exist in this fashion in places like Alberta and Alaska (my frame of experential reference is only NA) the question becomes how to you create incentive for investment from individuals, governments, or investors if these techniques already exist? It’s like permaculture; everyone knows it’s better than monoculture, but it’s just way too cheap to do single crops. In comparison, on paper, it is cheaper (by orders of magnitude) to build a series of arcologies than it is to have a million corporations slowly build various things in a city to provide services, but, because the economics are intrinsically tied together, there is an active process to depress investment incentive since it would cut profits. I think it’s worth pointing out that ultimately I believe that modular solutions are reasonably attainable if the structure is well designed, and that they can be used to create a lot of internal volume diversity - but that internal space for habitation will still be considerably larger than most humans (3.4 billion or so) have ever experienced and really, the baseline is very large.
Nick (Director)
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As someone who had a choice of buying a house or building a 600 sq ft home I did some research and those homes are profitable. Not at the scale of condos obviously. The only reason I bought an already built home is because of land/development and being in a good location for work. Well governments regularly fund low income living projects - here is one I found in Canada https://www.cmhc-schl.gc.ca/en/nhs/rapid-housing-initiative
Rapid Housing Initiative aims to create new permanent affordable housing for people and populations who are vulnerable.
I think its just a matter of the people applying for these grants build standard low income housing, rather than researching and developing something.
Rhakon
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Perhaps, it’s difficult to really say what any reaction would realistically be if you waltzed up to a government/rich person/investment group and slapped down blueprints for an honest to goodness arcology.
Maybe they would go 'neat lets do it'.
Maybe theyd think it was doomed to fail, hard to guess.
Nick (Director)
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That’s all the time we have, thank you so much for joining us.
Rhakon
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My pleasure!