Arcosanti

It is entirely possible that these traits of Soleri are at the root of the stagnation of Arcosanti

Many are just individuals in alternative living situations or creative housing, but some are communities or -in-the-making:

Earthship community in Taos New Mexico: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wVp5koAOu9M

Back-to-the-traditional-village in Portugal: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SgfIxUw-wEU

To give a very brief overview of the secret history of Arcosanti: during the 1960s and 1970s, Paolo's radical philosophy took hold with the counter-cultural zeitgeist, leading to a huge influx of energy. At any given time, there might be several hundred people camping in the desert, volunteering for construction. A series of massive music festivals brought in a lot of new blood. But this energy was difficult to manage, and in truth, Soleri himself was not a counter-cultural character. In many respects he was a deeply conservative raised-by-nuns old-world Italian. Giant rock festivals just didn't suit his vibe, and the whole thing felt like it was spinning out of control. In 1978, one of the festivals created a multi-million-dollar liability when a field that had been used for overflow parking caught fire, and hundreds of cars burned.

This is all long before my time, but my understanding is that in the late 70s -- I think it was 1979 -- there was a kind of purge, afterwards remembered as the "Thanksgiving day massacre", wherein an inner circle of managers seized control and informed most of the volunteers that their services would no longer be needed. That made things more manageable, but it was the first of two major steps towards stagnation. The second was in 1983, when Paolo's wife Colly died. From what everyone has told me, she was the real power behind the throne; to the extent that there was any organizational competency at the top of the hierarchy, it came from Colly, not Paolo. When she died, all construction came to a halt, and the population declined to as low as 30 people. I believe 1990 was probably the low point.

Since then, Arcosanti has gone through successive waves of renewal and stagnation, roughly counter-cyclical to the outside economy. The population has oscillated between about 50 and 100 people. When I arrived in the summer of '92, a boom was starting. A recession at that time was pushing people to look for alternatives to capitalism and consumerism and such, and enough of those ended up at Arcosanti to bring it back to life. These people were quite intrinsically motivated; they weren't disciples of Soleri. But few people stayed long; the horizons were just too limited. Arcosanti has never evolved beyond being a company town; you're free to pursue your own initiatives in your spare time, but if you want to do your own thing full-time, you have to leave. So most people with a scrap of ambition, did. That's certainly why I did.

> 1) Can you expand on that? i.e., what would it take for Arcosanti to have succeeded? Just Paolo letting people run with it?

Kind of, yes. Although a more viable philosophy at the core of it would have helped. Paolo had some real insights into the nature of consciousness-emergence at urban scales being driven by complex interactions, and how the design of the physical environment could facilitate that. But he totally failed to realise that the economic environment also needed to be complex; he had no understanding of economics at all. Furthermore, he conceived of cities the way that architects conceive of buildings: as a object to be constructed. He needed to think in terms of processes rather than objects. A city's form is the emergent result of a system of rules, so if you want to change the form, you must change the rules -- not simply stipulate an alternative form, and ignore the rules entirely.

"Letting people run with it" might have sorted a lot of these issues out organically, but it could have been better conceived in the first place.

Ultimately, though, the problem was that Arcosanti was constrained to being a company town, unable to develop the necessary socio-economic complexity to become anything more. The resistance to being more than that came from two places: Paolo and his handful of upper managers. Paolo's reason, I believe, was that he had become comfortable being a sort of Jeremiah character: a prophet whom no one would listen too. He enjoyed saying "I told you so" as the world started to discover the appeal of things he'd been talking about decades earlier. But it's easy to have this attitude when your ideas haven't truly been tested. If Arcosanti had been allowed to develop to critical mass and beyond, then this would be a risk to the sort of ideological purity he enjoyed wallowing in, however lonely.

On the other hand, his core group of upper managers weren't at all ideological, but simply had comfortable lives which they didn't particularly want to see disrupted. Arcosanti growing to its full potential would have knocked them out of a lifestyle which they'd enjoyed since the early 1980s. So they were resistant to change.

As I understand it, however, there's been something of a coup, and those upper managers have just recently -- as of a few months ago -- been kicked out. I'm a bit sad about this, because personally I got along with them well, and Arcosanti's unlikely persistence over the decades is, in large part, due to them. On the flipside, however, Arcosanti's failure to develop into more than it is, is also due to them. It'll be interesting to see what happens now.

> 2) What, if anything, would it take to "revive" Arcosanti today? Money? Visionaries? Kicking people out?

The latter has evidently just happened. The first is definitely required. Not sure about the second; visionaries can be a three-edged blade.

If the current revolution there results in a community wherein people can pursue run their own businesses, live their own lives, and pursue their own agenda -- and if this is coupled to an economic model which facilitates the development of additional infrastructure, that is coherent with the overall masterplan -- then this is as much as I could hope for.

> 3) Why did you live there? Why did you leave? Any interesting stories?

I moved there when I was 16, because I was enamored with Arcology theory and wanted to learn everything I could about it. I left because it was time to go get an architecture degree and start my own career and life, which I knew would be too confined there.

As for interesting stories: yes, loads, but that's for another time. :-)

I like the idea of low-energy and environmental impact living at places like Arcosanti but my wife said no way!

If you search for his work, he did some awesome stuff.