The City of the Future Is Hiding in the Arizona Desert
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.
via https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/bj7jjd/arcosanti-city-future-paolo-soleri-arcology