SoT History
Paolo Soleri in the history of Arcosanti has held little "chit chats" for residents so that they could expand their awareness of his ideas of Arcology and relate them to Arcosanti and the larger world as well.
In 2000 these discussions were opened to the public and repackaged as "School of Thought" (SofT). These discussions were a way for Soleri to interact with people in the community and the general public as well.
One of the unique aspects of Arcosanti is that people can get a chance to get to know and participate in a well known dissident's attempt to create an alternative model of development that addresses what has been one of the key aspects of the counterculture movement which is to challenge the materialism, over-consumption and the sprawl of America and the mainstream social institutions that sustain that worldview.
Soleri has had these weekly discussions on a fairly consistent basis sometimes having interesting topics involving ideas and writings on his mind. Sometimes it might be feature a section of a book he was working on such as his Quadernos.
SofT was integrated into the workshop program as a tool for orienting Workshoppers to Arcosanti and Soleri's ideas and also provide residents as well as visitors chance to dialog with Soleri. Workshoppers and other participants would ask Soleri "Burning Questions" about Arcology, Arcosanti or his work.
As he got older his hearing got worse and it was harder to dialog with him. Compounding this was his long standing reluctance to debate in a non-dogmatic way about his ideas. Misunderstandings and heated debates between Soleri and participants often distracted other participants from the points trying to be made.
After Soleri died, Jeff Stein took over the role of Soleri as the "lead intellectual" in the discussion.
The California Connection
The fact that Arcosanti was relatively close to major progressive leaning cities like LA and SF meant that strong links developed over the years. On occasion a notable person - usually from California like Francis Ford Coppola, Jerry Brown or his friend George Lucas might come over to have a discussion with him. Coppola once spent a weekend at Arcosanti that included his participating in a debate with Soleri at School of Thought. His editor Lissa McCullough would also spent time at Arcosanti from LA and participate in SofT.
Moderators/Facilitators
Usually the event included an trusted aid of Arcosanti provided the role as moderator of facilitator during the discussion between Soleri and the group.
During the early 2000s creative writer, actor and director Ira Murfin was a moderator and contributor to School of Thought.
Lissa McCollough who edited many of Soleri's books also contributed on numerous occasions to the discussion as a noted "Arcology" expert and scholar
Tomaiki Tomura
Mary Hoadley
Cosanti Foundation president Jeffrey Stein has faciliated SofT.
Discussions are usually held on a weekly basis on Weds or Thurs. Workshoppers must attend and community members are encouraged to participate.
Early School of Thought Discussions
The early days of School of Thought, featured some interesting discussions. However, I still found it difficult to go like today because of Soleri's difficulty having real and vigorous debates among intellectuals. Soleri at the beginning had a greater openness to feature other ideas including ones similar to his own. This included a chance to have a series of discussions on between Peter Huber and the authors of Natural Capitalism and in particular Amory Lovins. We were encouraged to read the two books and then offer or debate our take on them with Soleri.
Huber in writing the book Hard Green tried to put himself forward as a “realist environmentalist.” He sought to contrast himself with what he thought were the unrealistic and extremist environmentalist fantasies he found in the environmental and green movements. He seemed to believe that these extremist fantasy views of nature and the human economy were epitomized by the book Natural Capitalism. What Lovins' termed the “Soft Energy Path” involved the use of Solar, Wind and Biosmass to power not only the energy sector but the economy as a whole.
Soleri much to my Chagrin at the time, seemed very sympathetic with Huber at least when it came to his critique of the Soft Energy Path which was of course the major theme of his book Hard Green. Today I find myself re-visiting some of Soleri's assertions. Central to this is a concern of looking to stressed ecosystems all over the planet to provide even more biomass to sustain a boundless human appetite for resources. Without a fundamental change in the way we use technologies in developing a comprehensive alternative to suburban car oriented development how can really be addressing the core problem and find a real solution through that process? However it was not that Lovins was unaware of the resource problem he had authored a famous paper with Germany's Wuppertal Institute about what he termed the Factor 10X solution. Factor 10 referred to the order of magnitude in which we had to reduce our resources consumption footprint to become truly sustainable. Simply put it was the belief that in order to be sustainable, we had to reduce our resource consumption footprint at a planetary scale by about 90 percent consuming only about 10 percent of current levels.
Lovins dreamed of succeeding as an entrepreneur and/or at least consuming one to fund his HyperCar project. Central to his HyperCar was this idea of Tunneling though the Cost Barrier or similarly a Cost Barrier Breakthrough. This is a key concept that he pioneered as an ecological engineer. He believes that products completely redesigned or more precisely re-engineered around a green ethic and engineering mindset can operate at dramatically higher levels of efficiency more than justifying the added costs and expenses. On this level, he does at that level seem to advocate Soleri's Reformulation ethic.
The possible flaw in his thinking is that he does not link such technologies with more of a neighborhood Smart Car approach that might be part of a fundamental change in how we live. Soleri correctly sees the need to reformulate the built environment and the way we think about it transportation and logistics within urban areas. Otherwise any new green technologies will only be offset by increasing consumption in some other area - leading to what is little more than sticking a finger to plug a whole in a leaking dike. Where Soleri parts significantly from Lovins and much of the Green Business Movement is that he sees Car Culture as major problem that can only really be confronted by building more compact cities - Arcologies.
Lovins thinks a lot of progress can be made to reduce consumption and make societies more sustainable can come from the introduction of green technologies for the existing building environment and that includes green car technologies.
Soleri in response to the work of Lovins, sought to put a label on those aspects of society that he felt packaged themselves as "green" - such as the HyperCar - but did not address the core issues that make our society unsustainable - he termed these things a Better Kind of Wrongness.