What is Arcosanti: EcoVillage or Intentional Community?
Arcosanti represents an attempt to educate people of the potential that lies within humanity to create cities and communities where the people who live there enjoy a high quality of life, while coexisting harmoniously with the surrounding environment.
While Cosanti Foundation (which manages Arcosanti) does not consider itself or Arcosanti to be a part of the intentional communities movement, there have been attempts to link Arcosanti to both the Intentional Communities and EcoVillages Movements. At one point in the 90s, several residents were able to get it listed on the Intentional Communities website as an intentional community (1). Arcosanti was envisioned as an experiment designed to forward the Arcology vision. The most recent plan for Arcology at Arcosanti (completed in 2000 and referred to as the Arcosanti 5000 Model), envisions an Ecocity of 5000 (2), rather than an Ecovillage or an Intentional Community. This may explain the tendency on the part of Paolo Soleri and his managers to distance themselves from those terms.
Regardless, Arcosanti can be seen a unique form of Ecovillage or experimental community, aspiring to become a fully featured Ecocity. The eco-village could be seen as the beginning of a process leading to the eventual construction of ecocities - a much larger and more complex affair (3). The point is that before you can build more ambitious ecocities or arcologies, you must first figure out how to build sustainable communities. An ecovillage designed under the Arcosanti model would be compressed to allow one to work, play and live within a short distance, negating the necessity of the automobile and allowing mass transit to be used in a most efficient and therefore economical way.
Total Recall of the Past to Sustainably Build for the Future Generations
The aesthetic of the community should inspire people as artistic, creative and innovative beings they are to initiate a process (the process begins by examining the dysfunctional patterns in which art is used in conventional society) leading to the evolution of that community to a higher aesthetic space. Thus the focus is altered away from the various modes of conspicuous consumption that dominate the motivations of most in society today, and towards the creation of a powerful aesthetic space which moves people towards a higher more ecological, artistic and spiritual consciousness.
Paolo Soleri’s Arcology Theories are useful towards educating people of the potential that lies within humanity to create cities and communities where people can live enjoying a high quality of life, while coexisting harmoniously with the surrounding environment. What Soleri terms the urban effect, is the realization that the city has historically functioned as a center for information, knowledge and wisdom. It is the culmination of a learning process that has made civilization what it is today.
Regardless of whether they call themselves Arcologies or not, in the future, ecocities and ecovillages will more fully represent the “urban effect,” because they will design themselves to be ecologically and socially consistent–having nearly “Total Recall” of the past. This includes considering how their actions affect other peoples, the surrounding environment and the future state of things.
This “total recall” involves a total commitment to integrating energy, efficiency and an ecological design process within an aesthetic as well as a systemic design that expresses a reverence for life (see industrial ecology). Such a design process expresses a need to mimic the elegance of natural systems as they work symbiotically to regenerate and recycle all the byproducts of production within living systems to create a system, which is able to perpetuate itself over the long term in a benevolent way.
Wanted: New Models for Humanity that Walk the Talk
The goal of programs like this that exist throughout the environmental movement is to educate people who will assist in the development of alternative economic systems necessary to build a new design philosophy. The emphasis must shift towards learning systems that open our minds to the reality that life is interrelated and intertwined in many complex ways. Thus the need is for us to think in more interdisciplinary ways, so as to embrace a new sustainable paradigm that transforms the mainstream economy.
Places such as Arcosanti have the monumental potential to become new models, where education is a lifelong process. Arcology is the vital human realization, which seeks to encompass interdisciplinary thought. Within the Arcology, the architecture of the community must inspire the people as artistic beings to create a process which leads to the evolution of that community to a higher aesthetic space. The focus is altered away from the various modes of conspicuous consumption that dominate the motivations of most in society today, and towards the creation of a powerful aesthetic space which moves people towards a higher more ecological, artistic and communal consciousness.
Its possible that Arcologies will be but one part of a vast learning experience where the whole world begins to become aware of the necessity of building new more enlightened urban designs. A more enlightened urban effect based on the principle of human rights could allow each individual to fully learn who they are and in the process, become self actualized, benevolent human beings.
The ideal vision of the ecocity, embraces the concepts of Ecological Design, Industrial Ecology and Permaculture. However the aesthetic should not be neglected. Through the development of a powerful, human scale, three-dimensional architecture, the potential of the people within that culture is more fully harnessed through the development of the Urban Effect. Much of what entails the Urban Effect is a learning process, making the city a center for information, knowledge and wisdom.
Reducing Entropy
Francis Frick says Arcology is a way to decrease entropy through an nterpretation of biological principles and concepts. Arcology in his view is a "miniaturized, complexified, self-effacing, frugal technology" operating within a Negentropic (entropy-reducing) field. Frick notes that entropy “is a term originating from thermodynamics that implies a host of negative correlations attached to our global development paradigm based on Newtonian/Cartesian materialism.” Urban agriculture (UA) proponents assert that the separation of urban life and food production is possible only under artificial, subsidized conditions which accelerate entropy. The reintegration of urban life with agricultural production is a vital precondition for sustainability and the survival of our civilization in some radically altered form. This may include the efficent use of sunlight, water and the frugal recycling of biomass/nutrient in high density integrated stacked structures such as put forward both in the Arcology models such as Lean Linear City as well as efforts by UA pioneers like such as Dickson Despommiers and his Vertical Farm models. Arcology assumes that the possibility of severe food and water scarcity—and this means the collapse of rural agriculture production systems due to climate changes—is maximized by current wasteful human economic practices. He sees the survival of human civilization as contingent on our ability to effectively “fight against entropy.” David Orr in his research demonstrates that the classical academic disciplines, “have accelerated entropy by refusing to communicate with each other (4).” Arcology as the antithesis to modern academic practice explicitly ignores arbitrary boundaries between disciplines.
Arcology cities would by their very design philosophy (in theory at least, designed to seek out the most efficient way to use resources to sustain a given human population) are holistic seeking to create an integrated, interdisciplinary systems approach to solving social as well as environmental problems, rather than to seek the compartmentalized approach of modern conventional wisdom. Arcology is not only a means of addressing social and environmental degradation says Frick, “but a cultural end unto itself, in ways alien to Western consumerist models of urban sprawl and waste. Overlapping, redundant relationships in 3D allow for efficient energy/material transfer and conversion while enhancing social interaction (5).” The radical nature of Arcology has clashed with the cultural bias and economic conservatism of the American political economy and this has only made it more difficult to practically implement an idealistic urban Arcology prototype in the United States.
Possible Attributes of an Arcology Themed Ecovillage/Ecocity
Arcology encompasses the multiuse principles of ecological design/permaculture:
Factories creating value added products and material for external distribution.
Use of reused/recycled materials.
Farm/seeking to produce most of its own food.
Hydroponic greenhouse gardens
School/consultancy/think-tank
Classrooms
Offices
Residence
Community/culture
Market plaza
Shared communal spaces
"Revolution Escalating into Evolution"
How do we change the present system which comprises the society? We have to invent the dynamics of change, to suit our unique needs and aspirations. Many feel frustrated by the way that things are, and yet they feel helpless to change the world around them, but even something so seemingly simple as changing themselves, seems so difficult. Humans need to realize the powerful potential that lies within us not only to change ourselves, but to change the world. Personal change and renewal, must remove us from the conditioning that we have undergone as members of the mainstream society, if it is that we strive to reduce the negative socioeconomic trends that now imperil civilization and much of the biosphere. Not only is political and economic change necessary to create a better society, but personal change as well. It is not a either/or proposition, the personal and systemic change exists in a complementary relationship with one another.
We have been trained to think in ways that remove us from the reality that we are part of nature and (even more of a radical of a idea) part of each other. Our actions affect each other, so we must refocus our energy so as to affirm those qualities that affirm life. Therefore when we seek to create alternative communities, we seek to build socioeconomic and cultural systems that do not perpetuate this wrongness, but rather counteract it. For some minimal degree of consistency is vital in what we believe in and what we do. Thus it is key that we not only engage in protest against the wrongs of the existing corporate capitalism system, but that we search for alternatives to this way of life.
Soleri says that, "We had a green revolution; we are in the midst of the silicon revolution; we are in need of a transcendence revolution, a transcendence firmly anchored in the physicality of the real." What this implies is that revolutionary tendencies of the past, while possibly serving some purpose, such as the need to change the prevailing thesis of materialism and greed which defines most "civilized", were primarily indicative of the fact that humanity was anchored in circular motion of stagnation. Revolutionary change, whether political, economic or social, in the past, has only served to mask the truly pronounced lack of substantive change in these periods. Evolution as defined by the evolving transformation of individuals as they seek to develop into higher states of consciousness, is much more radical in that such individuals seek truth and a state of personal balance and harmony within life itself. Such personal transformations could possibly form the basis for a massive social transformation in which people begin to affect others by creating systems that are consistent with their genuine striving for higher values which cherish life in all its forms.
The Arcosanti archotype, and others like it could be used as powerful imagery to persuade the mainstream public of the vital need to change their resource intensive lifestyles. The development and refinement of the Arcosanti vision might form an important element in the creation of organizations, and corporations--or even better, a vast social movement of people who dedicate their lives to this new paradigm of socioeconomic development-- that would go around the world redeveloping, redesigning as well as building new cities, that will employ the alternative technologies in a more integrated and holistic way.
References:
In addition to the IC website there is a companion Intentional Communities Directory: A Guide to Intentional Communities and Cooperative Living in which Arcosanti and other national and global communities are also listed: http://www.ic.org
In 2000 Paolo Soleri completed the Arcosanti 5000 Plan outlining his wish for the future development of Arcosanti to serve as a model for developing even larger Arcology Ecocities around the world: http://www.arcosanti.org/project/project/future/arcosanti5000/main.html
On page 95 of Eco-villages and Sustainable Communities, John L Talbott refers to ecovillages as the first step towards larger ecocity development: http://books.google.com/books/about/Eco_villages_sustainable_communities.html?id=mdpARAAACAAJ
David Orr is a pioneer of the Ecological Design movement. He wrote the book Ecological Literacy in 1992: http://www.ecoliteracy.org/books/ecological-literacy-educating-our-children-sustainable-world
Francis Frick wrote a proposal for "A Seaside Arcology for Southern China" while a architectural student in the Department of Architecture at the University of Hong Kong: http://www.cityfarmer.org/frick.html