Human Behavior in Space

Al Globus wrote:

> I'm not too sure what an arcology is. Is is a large, more-or-less
> closed habitat on land?
>

Al,

You have it in a nutshell. Basically its a city in a box. I dont
know what city you live in so Ill use my home town and country as a
model, excuse the length. I have no idea what you know about Australia
but our largest city is Sydney with about 4 million people, Canberra
where I live has about 300,000. About 10yrs ago I lived in Sydney and
my commute to work each day was about an hour and a bit each morning and
the same at night, in that time all I saw was concrete, cars, roads and
cityscape, not what I really wanted first thing in the morning, and I
didnt even live on the fringe of the city. Now in Canberra I travel
about the same distance but it only takes me 15mins and I see forests,
farms and a pleasant river crossing, much better. So living in Canberra
rather than Sydney has the advantages of living in a large country town
and because its the national capital it even has a few of the services
and resources that big cities have but not all of them so there are a
few things I would like to have that I miss out on here, well thats
life.

Urban sprawl is a problem throughout the developed world and soon we are
going to be forced to address it, you should see the article in the
December 2000 edition of Scientific American for a something on it. One
of the problems is that building and maintaining the infrastructure of a
typical suburb is an expensive exercise and then you have to set aside
room for roads and parking places around the shopping centres and so
on. An arcology on the other hand is a high density dwelling that
avoids this type of problem by building up rather than out. If you were
to take all of Canberra and cut it up into squares 2kms by 2kms and then
stacked them on top of each other with a 5 metre gap between them they
would be about 850 metres high. Canberra is a very open city with lots
of green space so in this notional building there would be a lot of
non-habitation space, non-industrial/office space as well as such things
as roads, footpaths (sidewalks to you), stormwater drains, land-fills,
water reservoirs and all the other things that cities need and it would
house 300,000 people. The advantages are that you would not need roads,
elevators, travelators (moving sidewalks) and just walking would be all
that is needed, with the longest average distance in a single trip being
only a kilometre or a ten to twenty minutes. All the infrastructures
would be cheaper and in some cases not needed, the energy used by each
person is lower on average due to less needed for transport and by the
use of large common heating/cooling units that are more efficient and
have a lower cost per unit work. The internal nature of the dwellings
and work spaces means that you dont have to worry about such things as
storm damage and can take advantage of large industrial scale damage
control for such things as fire and earthquake. You can have shopping
and recreation facilities in central locations and the top floor can be
given over to open air sports.
In the interests of fair play Ill have a go at some of the
disadvantages (& give a possible solution at the same time:-); most
people when they argue against arcologies first point to the fact that
they are expensive and as such they are only going to be found in the
richer counties and then only in the up market areas, in a way this is
true but then in poor countries those at the bottom dont get much now
so anything is going to be more expensive and in developed countries
its the initial cost and the fear of change that stop this kind of
development. Strong arcology development would allow a huge increase in
local population and a subsequent impact on the environment, again true
but proper management and use of recycling technologies could overcome
this. People would have to give up a backyard and personal green space,
not true at all, if you look at basic arcology designs they tend to be
simple shapes and this gives a lack of outside surface but Ive seen
complex designs that allow up to 80% of dwellings to have a private of a
semi-private yard, that is a small private yard with a larger common
area shared with 5-10 houses around you. They are an artificial way of
living, Ive heard this argument from a number of people who really seem
serious, I always ask them when they are going to strip naked and live
in a cave.
There are a lot more arguments Ive heard both in favour and against
such projects. If you ever go to Japan you can find a number of
sub-arcologies there, large buildings that house shopping centres,
entertainment, offices, public transport stations and residential units,
it would be possible in this one building to live perhaps 75% of your
life, of course there is nothing to stop you from going elsewhere. The
building of an arcology would be great practice for the building of an
orbital as they share a number of problems and solutions.

There is a good book called Oath of Fidelity by Larry Niven & Jerry
Pournelle which is set in an arcology and is about the problems they
face.

The father of the arcology is Paolo Soleri, the following is from the
Britannica web site;

Darren Brown
Canberra Australia

Soleri, Paolo

b. June 21, 1919, Turin, Italy

Italian-born American architect and designer who was one of the
best-known utopian city
planners of the 20th century.

Soleri received a doctorate in architecture from the Turin Polytechnic
in 1946, and from 1947 to 1949 he worked under Frank Lloyd Wright in
Arizona. He returned to Italy for a time and then in 1955 settled
permanently in the United States, in Scottsdale, Ariz. Beginning in 1959
with his designs for Mesa City (a desert city housing two million
people), Soleri drew up the plans of a series of gigantic urban centres
that extend vertically into space rather than horizontally along the
ground. These megastructures were designed both to conserve the natural
surroundings and to intensify the human activities of living and working
by condensing them spatially. The resulting integrated, total
environments, Soleri hoped, would provide for all the needs of rational,
aesthetic human beings. Soleri coined the term arcology (from
"architecture" and "ecology") to describe his utopian constructions,
which he delineated in drawings of great beauty and imagination. The
exhibition of his drawings and models in major American cities in 1970
brought him widespread public notice. Soleri's Arcology: The City in the
Image of Man (1969) provides a good overview of his ideas and designs.

In 1970 Soleri began to build a version of Mesa City, though not in the
ambitious terms of the original drawings. In Arizona, between Phoenix
and Flagstaff, he began the construction of a single structure called
Arcosanti, which would have a population of 5,000. The work, by unpaid
students, proceeded slowly and was partially financed by the sale of the
ceramic and copper wind bells Soleri produced.