An arcology, so far only existing conceptually (with experiments taking place at Arcosanti), is an extremely large building, sufficient to maintain an internal ecology as well as an extremely high human population density. Popular in science fiction, arcologies are generally advocated as solutions to the problems of overpopulation and environmental degradation, as they reduce the footprint of cities. The word arcology is a portmanteau of architecture and ecology.
Most cities spread across the Earth's surface horizontally-covering more and more land. Arcologies would be a 'vertical city'.
The purported need for arcologies
The basic idea of an arcology stems from the idea that urbanization is claiming an excessive amount of space on Earth. (This is a common notion in the environmental movement and green movement. Many other ideas have been proposed to solve this future problem, including: ocean colonization; space colonization; rigidly enforced societal birth control like that practiced in China; rigidly enforced societal death control as seen in Ira Levin's "This Perfect Day," the movie "Logan's Run" or on the television series Star Trek.) An elegant, but little practiced option, is simply to use what land we have more wisely. Many architects and scientists have given serious thought to solutions.
Frank Lloyd Wright's Broadacre City thought experiment
Frank Lloyd Wright pondered "An Organic Architecture" with his Usonian city idea, called Broadacre City. Broadly, his image included dividing up all of America's land equally for each American family, and he goes on to describe transportation, agriculture and commerce systems that would support this idea. While this is an appealing concept, there are problems with Wright's solution. It cannot accommodate real and rapid population growth that essentially shrinks the amount of divisible land available. He assumes a more rigid type of democracy than the current American form. He assumes a more levelled societal playing field where all people, regardless of wealth or lack thereof, have roughly the same amount of home space or business space.
Paolo Soleri's arcology proposal
A further solution for this problem, though with some difficulties of its own, is that of Paolo Soleri, who coined the term 'arcology.' In "Arcology: The City in the Image of Man," Soleri describes ways of compacting our city structures in three dimensions to combat two-dimensional urban sprawl. While this led to many science fiction interpretations of domed cities, Soleri's ideas aren't just the "human beehive" model popular in sci-fi. They also encompass vast differences in societal thinking regarding some of the same things that Wright touched upon in transport, agriculture and commerce. Soleri deepened Wright's ideas of what might specifically need to be done by exploring resource consumption and duplication, land reclamation, elimination of most private transport in favor of public transport and greater use of social resources like public libraries. This concept also emphasizes, in a broader scale, more efficient use of resources and compacting of urban space to preserve the environment.
Some experts speculate that arcologies will become common in the information age. Construction methods for arcologies are being tested at Arcosanti. Otherwise, arcologies are restricted to paper proposals and fictional depictions, such as Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle's Oath of Fealty (novel) or as an element in the computer game SimCity 2000.
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