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, [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-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
[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>
Via G. Giardini, 15b - 00133 Roma | Italy
--
Eric Hunting
[email protected]
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