My father had been excited and advocating about Arcosanti for years. We visited on a trip through AZ and he left just forelorn and heartbroken. It was somewhat humorous because he went from weeks of not being able to stop talking about it to just silence in the span of the one hour visit.
Great idea, but as with all projects - execution trumps vision.
your father is not alone... a friend of mine visited Arcosanti decades ago and commented that in one of the studios there was a small note on one of the walls that read 'hell is other people'
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.
I liked arcosanti when I visited it. It was very much a small group of people essentially working for the artist though. I think the concept has merit. But this particular example was maybe co-opted for cheap labor.
I say that as that may be something OPs father saw and felt disillusioned. I think even that may be a fine thing. Things have to start somewhere.
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.
The visit would have been around 2011. He had read about Arcosanti in the 70s I believe and was expecting much more vibrancy, much more activity, and especially much more progress than had come to fruition in that time.
I think he came in with excitement and that was confronted by a couple people he met there who were fairly off putting which didn't help matters.
I still think it is a neat idea personally, and put it in league with things like Black Rock City/Burning man where I'm never gonna fault someone for going out and just fucking trying something...but the experience and his reaction (not the place) are still a bit of a joke in our family.
"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.
As someone who grew up in a similar desert. I cannot understand why would anyone choose to build a city right there. Water is crucial. You need lots of it. Plus it is very isolated. Other than Phoenix (1hr), there is nothing there.
The desert is not a uniform place. Arcosanti is half a mile from the third largest river in the state, with very healthy wells. Water is really not an issue there, at the kind of population levels they're targeting.
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...
Hah, you beat me to it! :-) Still happy to answer questions, although this is trending on a particularly bad day, as I'm moving house. Leave a question here, however, and I'll answer it.
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...
Good point about the company town aspect, and I'm sure most Zappos employees wouldn't be thrilled with the move. I could see Hsieh being helpful in a transition/evolution to a governance process that scales to small city based on his experience leading Zappos.
I'm reading through your AMA, but how about, what would you do differently today if designing it from the ground up?
EDIT:
The ama wasn't very long. Also the place seems pretty small, but as someone who doesn't really know anything about it, what was the plan once it breached 5000 people?
Answering this question first; will come back to your other tomorrow.
- Organic waste is composted for the farm.
- Glass is broken down into aggregate for the concrete (glass recycling is barely ecologically justifiable; reuse is better).
- Other recyclable and non-recyclable waste is separated on-site and shipped off-site for a waste-disposal company to handle.
So not overwhelmingly different to other places, in that respect.
Posted an answer for you. As for the move -- I feel like I've spent the last two days in a bar fight. Definitely need to be rich enough to pay for professional movers the next time I do this!
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.
I visited Arcosanti in 2014. On one side, amazing place. On the other, it's a failed project. Soleri stated that it can only be self-sustaining when it reaches 5,000 people. I think it never went above 200, and it's now below 100.
The story is complex, but my understanding is that the main failure point was the local officials not wanting Arcosanti to exist and putting up regulatory barriers.
It's worth noting that Soleri ran the project as a benevolent dictator, and when he fell into the poor health of old age most decisions stopped. He's recently past and left behind a bit of a power vacuum and the other people involved are reorganizing to deal with that. Coming out the other side of that reorg is an opportunity for change and it's too early to assume Arcosanti will stay in it's current form.
They are basically blocked by money. If they could get enough money to pave the road to the property they could get building permits again. They need either a rich benefactor or a group of people interested in buying into the concept (and the leadership capacity to manage that).
Even with paved access and a substantial budget, I'm not sure building permits would be feasible for any future construction. I don't know that they've been singled out by local officials so much as the original designs weren't forward compatible with modern (1980's+) building requirements.
They've done a commendable job of trying to keep up with some modern advancements since the original designs were inked in the 60's. They have fiber optic internet access, some solar panels, and a few ADA-compliant ramps. My concerns would be more about integrity of the foundations. Modern surveying, concrete chemistry, and so on have raised the bar. I think there may have also been problems with routing utility lines with ventilation shafts and not having much of an alternative due to the structures being solid, load-bearing concrete.
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.
> 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.
What you say is interesting. I am currently building a new company that will provide a platform to (among other things) run these types of crowdfunding efforts.
We visited a few years ago. It really is worth seeing in person, particularly if you were already making the drive from Phoenix up to Sedona / Flagstaff / Grand Canyon and can spare an hour or two. One really can sense both Soleri's vision and how far the implementation fell short of his ideals.
By coincidence, we had visited shortly after Soleri died (had no idea until we got there). One of the people we met described Soleri's last visit to Arcosanti a few months prior. My memory's fuzzy now, but I think they said that he had looked around without saying much, then said something like "I'm done," and never went there again. (My apologies for misremembering the quote, it's been a little while and I haven't thought about it very often.)
I visited Arcosanti as a child in the late 70's and then again about 10 years ago. It looked like the city of the future in the 70's. 30 years later it did not seem like it aged well. It's like those Olympic stadiums that fall into disrepair a few years after the Olympics.
I visited Biosphere 2. It's a completely different environment from Arcosanti. It failed to meet expectations despite how much money was invested.
> It's just that at a certain point, the stripmalls and uniform beige housing developments give way to creosote, cacti, and the equally beige landscape of the Sonoran desert.
I spent half my life there. So depressing, except when finally getting out into the natural desert.
"Equally beige" seems harsh of the writer. Phoenix is one of my least-favorite cities, but the Sonoran Desert is absolutely beautiful and far from bland. As you say, the only highlight of Phoenix for me was getting out of it.
I'm not dismissing the idea at all; I'd just like to point out that a lot of the problems we see currently in cities are caused by the presence of a larger number of people.
Where do they get their water from? Don't we currently have (or will have) a huge problem with supporting populations in areas where there is no local sustainable source of water?
The Agua Fria river flows about half a mile away from the site. Although it's rarely above ground, the subsurface flow is the third-largest in the state, and there aren't very many people upstream. Arcosanti has a well and gets all its water from there.
Interestingly, the area is dotted with the ruins of numerous large Hohokam settlements; it's obvious that the population was much greater about 600 years ago than it is today. The Hohokam built some pretty sophisticated aqueducts, one of which is located on the Arcosanti property, which brought water up from the river to the settlements on top of the mesa. At the time, it seems that the rainfall pattern was dominated by small but frequent winter storms, resulting in almost year-round surface flow. But a change in the climate about 600 years ago switched the rainfall pattern monsoon-type: dry in the winter, and flash floods in the summer. The Hohokam aqueduct system couldn't cope with this, and their civilisation collapsed. So it's definitely a point worth being concerned about in that environment.
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.
I visited in 2001. Concretesanti. It would far easier to buy land in Detroit and un-incorporate, or re-incorporate. I wouldn't use it as an argument for or against. It happened, and I am sure there are lots of lessons, but it definitely needed more people, more organic growth. Actually, it did need way more plants. And probably more technical folks.
Great idea, but as with all projects - execution trumps vision.