Arcosanti, Paolo Soleri’s Arizona experiment in urban planning

I agree. It quite lived up to and even surpassed my expectations. But this would have been in the 90s. They had a nice little core built and it was a functioning artist colony. I've got a metal tile I bought there on my computer desk right now, as a little reminder of other possibilities.

"He had read about Arcosanti in the 70s I believe and was expecting much more vibrancy, much more activity, and especially much more progress."

That is rather how I felt after touring Auroville a few years ago. So much publicity on the project is from decades ago. You visit, and you find out the project was never completed, successive generations born there have split into disparate factions and there’s sometimes infighting or at least apathy about any common goal, and the surrounding city has boomed so much that the little intentional community in its midst seems like a quirky little cult instead of a guide to the future.

Seriously, though, getting people to sign up to help implement your renegade ideas is kind of the definition of charisma (as in Max Weber) and gurus and cults are just a little further down that road...

My impression of that note in the context is in line with Sartre's intention (or at least according to several highly reputable online sources.) Arcosanti seems set up for free thinking but then is also a highly socialized community so likely very constraining for someone that wants to be individually creative.

Also, what did they do with the garbage?

Okay, finally got a moment of downtime to answer this.

The first thing I'd do differently is to prioritise the development of economic diversity.

One of the most important aspects of cities is the way they create wealth, by facilitating the mutually beneficial exchange of goods and services. The possibility of mutually beneficial exchange depends on having a great diversity of actors doing a great diversity of things; if everybody is doing the same thing, there will be no differences that can be exploited for mutual benefit, and everybody will fundamentally be poor. Company towns based can sometimes appear superficially rich based on exports -- eg., everyone is a silver miner, which brings a lot of cash to town -- but this masks the fact that the city lacks an internal engine for wealth generation, and is thus fundamentally unsustainable.

(My foundation for thinking about urban economics, BTW is Jane Jacobs -- highly recommend "The Nature of Economies" for a quick primer on her philosophy.)

Arcosanti was developed in the absence of a robust economic theory -- in fact I'd say there was a general distain / distrust of economics, as was often found amongst countercultural 1960s types. Economics was regarded as an artificial human construct, the foundation of capitalist/consumerist greed, etc. In place of a meaningful economic theory, Arcosanti was initially developed on the basis of "sweat equity" -- you help volunteer to build it, and then you can live in what you built. But each unit of habitation takes roughly 3-5 person-years to construct, so to make sweat-equity work (in the absence of specialisation, finance, etc), you need to both be an expert in construction and be willing to live in a tent in the desert for 3-5 years.

That was the sort of vision that could inspire people in the early 1970s, but by the late 1970s had thoroughly burned itself out. So Arcosanti morphed into being a company town, whose primary exports were workshops, tours, and ceramic/bronze crafts. Not only does the company-town dynamic strangle actual wealth-generation, but this was a damn thin seam to be mining, and Arcosanti has been struggling to get into first gear ever since.

To avoid this, I'd engage in fairly conventional finance: take out loans, and offer properties for long-term-lease. Sell this to anybody who wanted to live there, whether they were explicitly in the arcology-building business or not. Re-invest the profits in more construction, and try to foster the generation of a complex urban economy full of independent actors from the earliest possible moment.

So that's the first, and most important, thing which I'd do differently.

The second thing I'd do differently -- although somewhat later in its development -- is that I'd try to focus less on design and more on planning. This is critical for the lessons of Arcosanti to be exportable elsewhere. You can't have a single architecture firm designing your whole city: just as you need to be able to accommodate a diversity of economic actors, you also need to be able to accommodate a diversity of infrastructural actors.

In other words, the question that needs to be answered is not "how should the arcology be designed?", but rather "what systems need to be in place to facilitate the emergence of an arcological design?".

Conventional urban planning is based on a 2D grid, with standards for property boundaries, zoning, design standards, interfaces to utility systems, mechanisms for resolving disputes between neighbours, etc. These are grounded in political, legal, and technological systems, which are loose enough to allow for a lot of creativity amongst architects, property developers, etc., but strict enough to ensure relatively harmonious interfaces between them. A physical megastructure -- the city itself -- ultimately emerges out of these systems, but the systems themselves are non-physical.

So, how do these systems need to be changed to facilitate arcological emergence? I don't have an a-priori answer to this: I think a lot of experimentation is needed. But that's where the emphasis needs to be.

First you'd have to convince me that that would be a good idea.

Many of Arcosanti's problems stem from the fact that it's a (small) company town, and is thus unable to model the socioeconomic complexity or governance processes of an actual city. In that sense, it fails in its objective of being "an urban laboratory".

I'm not sure that becoming a company town at scale is necessarily the answer. That said, if Tony Hsieh's vision is expansive enough, maybe you're onto something. Relocating all employees would be a massive process, however. Not sure Arcosanti could absorb that kind of influx quickly -- nor that Zappos would be prepared to go into the infrastructure business to that extent...

> As an organization, I don't have very much faith in the leadership doing much more than barely staying afloat. There's a strong bias for seniority over meritocracy, which over the long term frustrates and deflects talented people with good ideas and favors people who just stick around or have don't have better alternatives.

Upvoted for clearly knowing what you're talking about. :-)

I built some of those foundations, back in the early 90s. Not much to worry about there -- they're tied straight into the basalt bedrock. Concerns about the extensibility and adaptability of the construction are well-placed however.

No, they intercepted the water far enough upstream of their settlements. Let's say you have a pueblo on a 200 ft mesa, above a river that's running at a 4% gradient. Your aqueduct needs a 2% gradient to maintain good flow -- the Hohokam were excellent at maintaining consistent gradients over very long distances -- so what you need to do is build a small check dam 200 / (4% - 2%) = 10,000 ft upstream, with the stone aqueduct wending its way "up" the side of the mesa from there. Ruins of these kind of structures can be seen all over the area.