An Uber self-driving car hit and killed a woman crossing the street in Arizona, police said on Monday, marking the first fatality involving an autonomous vehicle and a potential blow to the technology expected to transform transportation.
We reached Shadow Belmont. A place deeply familiar with shade. Shade architecture, shaded transport, sheltered time. A cityscape layered with a latticework of porches, pergolas, verandas, galleries, awnings, canopies, umbrellas and trees. From above the city looks like a desert garden. The shade of the high canopy stands on cactimorphic succulent pillars, doubling as public water sources. Closer to the ground, multi-trunked mesquite marquees diffuse light across outdoor kitchens and intimate courtyards. The ubiquitous antennae of the place mingle with soaring ocotillo vines, their cabling protected by dessicated saguaro skeletons. Solar-powered screens radiate the shadow forecast and a cooling breeze. The STA (Shade Traversal Association) maps show real-time shade developments, with roads in direct sun coloured flaming red. The droning of traffic blends into the murmur of slowly adjusting shade structures, punctuating the continuous background hum of insects, psychic noise and ambient communication.
Today, Arcosanti is home to under 100 people and only a tiny fragment of the planned city has actually been built. This isn’t to say that the project is a failure, however. Rather, it points to the magnitude of the problems that Soleri was challenging with his radical approach to architecture and urban planning. “Soleri was confronting the American dream of big cars, and road building and single family houses and urban sprawl,” Stein told me as we strolled around Arcosanti. “Cities are the biggest cultural artefact we make and he wanted to reconstitute the entirety of urban civilization.” In this sense, calling Arcosanti an “urban laboratory” is more than a flattering euphemism—it is a living experiment that is meant to confront a variety of academic disciplines with questions about how they can use their specialized knowledge to think about the way we inhabit space. In addition to a suite of artistic events, such as the annual Form music festival, Arcosanti regularly hosts university students in disciplines ranging from media studies to natural history in an effort to push the limits of what is possible with arcology ever further. Today, Arcosanti is the closest thing to a real arcological city that exists in the US. For the most part, arcological innovation seems to be happening elsewhere.