I’ve gone on about North City, Town Center, density, cottages, transportation… all kinds of stuff along that line, but now I’m just going to roll all the dice. “Sustainability…” as I defined back in “Sustaina-what?” “…is what you get when your household, city, state, and nation all plan, legislate and act as if they were entirely alone and had to be 100% self-sufficient.” To be truly self-sufficient takes land, so let’s talk arcologies! What’s that? Pull up a chair, folks, it’s a good story.

Paolo Soleri (even his name sounds sci-fi) is an architect. He realized early just how wasteful- unsustainable in the modern parlance- the modern, spreading city was, and designed a form to reverse all its spatial evils: Arcology. It’s an invented word combining “architecture” with “ecology”, and it’s the very opposite of sprawl. It proposes to put all the functions and spaces of a city in one coherent structure, eliminating the wholesale destruction of farms, forests, and open space inherent to ‘the burbs’.

Arcosanti.org describes it this way: “An arcology would need about two percent as much land as a typical city of similar population. Today’s typical city devotes more than sixty percent of its land to roads and automobile services. Arcology eliminates the automobile from within the city. The multi-use nature of arcology design would put living, working and public spaces within easy reach of each other and walking would be the main form of transportation within the city.”

He and his disciples have been building Arcosanti, a prototype 5,000-population arcology, out in the Arizona desert by Scottsdale for over forty years. There’s very little budget- mostly from the sale of wind bells Soleri designed and makes- and the work is done all by devoted volunteer labor, but presumably it will someday open for real. The longer it takes to build the less serious it all looks to outsiders, but the more we see of our effects on our natural environment the more seriously I must take it.

The only thing about arcologies I’m not so sanguine about is that Soleri almost always draws them way out in untrammeled wilderness. This is a fault shared with more conventional preplanned ‘New Urbanism’ towns, like Seaside, FL. The residents are supposed to have all the advantages of a town or city but be able to walk straight out into the green. That sounds really attractive and healthy, but I just can’t get behind the concept of doing something so consciously ‘green’ by paving more wilderness, so I’ve invented something I call Evolutionary Arcology. It is a complete, preplanned minicity built incrementally from and into the existing fabric- utilities, buildings, transportation- of a city.

So, does this have anything to do with Shoreline/Lk Forest Pk? I’ve argued all along for increased densities in our cities, and clearly the “Subarea Plans” are a step in that direction, but in truth they are small, timid steps with no obvious hundred-or-thousand-year vision of the future.

Let’s just extrapolate. Say we (the city? feds? private developers? I don’t care) built four arcologies- Town Center, Aurora Village, Richmond Highlands, and Aurora Square. Each is 2% or less of the city’s area and right now houses only a few people. So, the rest of Shoreline is intact- 53,000 people, and each arcology could house that many. Do you realize if Soleri is right and they’re designed well, that’d allow over 250,000 people in Shoreline, without touching all those oh-so-inviolable single family homes! What a spectacular boost to our local economy that would be!

This is a really large-scale example of “infill development” and “appropriate technology”. Each would be a perfect central, high-density node for all levels of transportation out to the rest of the city and region. Each would be a wonderful place to open a business. Or raise kids. Or retire. All those added citizens/taxpayers with only an insignificant additional expenditure by the city per capita. All those additional school kids, but with plenty of new dollars for the district and new schools built right into the new structures.

Soleri is one of those people who can just as easily be seen as a visionary or a crank. Give it another forty years and I suspect he’ll be seen in the same light as we see Buckminster Fuller or Nicola Tesla- that he was righter than anyone thought long before anyone else thought. I think he’s a visionary and I think we need to take his ideas to heart.