Coming from the dense urban context of Italy, where he grew up in Turin, Soleri found American cities to be anathema, their…

“Coming from the dense urban context of Italy, where he grew up in Turin, Soleri found American cities to be anathema, their auto-centric planning “a fathomless sinkhole for immense waste”. Cities designed around cars, he said, had the effect of producing “not mobility, but a hermitage of the single home in an ever-increasing sea of single units, a dreadful flat-land of self-denial, courtesy of the great fiction of self-sufficiency.” Spread people out into “a square-mile thin pancake,” he said, and you end up with “a slimy veneer of organic matter of no use to you or the observer puzzled by the thin, gooey-drip man. Suburbias and exurbias are promoters of ‘slime’.””

– Oliver Wainwright, ‘Arcosanti – the unfinished answer to suburban sprawl’ (2016)