A more recent addition to the Arcology/Paolo Soleri volcabulary/vernacular. Soleri says that reformist thinking is part of the reason that the progressive/environmental/social justice movements are not able to recreate society in their image. He sees reformism as being driven by a piecemeal approach to public policy formulation.
Reformists have been co-opted as they became institutionalized and canonized by prevailing authorities. In this process many good ideas have been rendered and reduced into compromises that have little real impact in making real changes in how things are done. So the result is that after 40 years since the birth of the environmental little has really been done to reduce the unsustainable growth in the consumption of resources at both the national and international levels.
The above mentioned reality of course corresponds both with the rise of environmental degradation and pollution in relation to such measure of CO2 emissions as well as the slow pace of development of projects such as Arcosanti that could be - if scaled out and then replicated on a large global scale - could be seen as real alternatives to current and prevailing, conspicuous consumer driven development and growth models.
So in putting forward Reformulation Soleri present a series of concepts that relate to the rethink of life and the means of production and consumption that present themselves as the bedrock materials of the American Dream. So thus he feels we must look at those things which have led to sprawl, over-consumption and the worship of the car and the single family home, and television and begin to figure out how to design social systems without them. Thus going back to his terminology better kind of wrongness, the idea is that we need to look carefully at what we do so that we don't end up supporting those complex of inter-relationships that support the creation of unsustainable human habitats.
I suggest that he is hinting at something that leads to us to go deeper to the core of how we do business and politics. To say that the personal is the political is what is missing in what most people do. Yet many spiritual leaders such as Gandhi and Jesus Christ suggest that it is only by living the values we want to see in the world that we can begin to see the influence of who we expand beyond ourselves toward the larger communities and the world as a whole.
Thus the conclusion that can be made is that Reformulation in the form of say Lean Linear City can only be successful if the basis for that process is driven by what Gandhi termed Practical Idealism a process by which we learn from the practices of the real world so that we can operate in a way that demands respect and thus it becomes accepted as practical yet is not necessarily forced to depart from our core ideals and values.
So for example Lean Linear City if it is positioned in a truly reformulated model, then it starts with Arcosanti itself as the microcosm for the larger and more ambitious urban renewal effort. A Reformulation of Arcosanti is one in which the basic questions of why it was formed, what it has achieved and why people come are considered in a process that seeks to effectively engage people towards the creation of a Model Arcosanti Project. This then draws Arcosanti closer to the vision of a more sophisticated and fully featured Arcology with the idea a reformulated Arcosanti can then serve as the organizational and infrastructure blueprint for a Lean Alternative, Linear City Development by focusing on the core elements of redesign that need to be considered in such an effort.