It might be pleasing to dream of arcologies, mega-cities, and space colonies – but no one can design the perfect human community
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Arcologies are represented in contemporary culture by towering buildings with their own unique ecological environs, or in science fiction, with its self-contained space stations or hulking mega-structures. Arcologies are littered throughout the work of esteemed science‑fiction authors such as Frank Herbert, William Gibson, Isaac Asimov and Larry Niven. The massive Cooper Station in the space drama Interstellar (2014) bears the hallmark complexity, density and efficiency of conventional arcology. And in SimCity 2000, the popular city-building game, arcologies appear as late-stage futuristic mini-cities contained in a single building; construct enough of one variety, and the buildings blast off into outer space in search of distant planets to colonise, just as Soleri envisioned.
But while sci-fi writers and futurists imagined the triumphant metropolises of the not-so-distant future, Soleri set off to the Arizona desert to actually build one. Soleri wanted to answer a simple question: is it possible to design a utopia? Can the perfect human habitat be engineered by human hands, or does it have to emerge, organically, from the ecological and economic forces far beyond the grasp of a master builder? Soleri would spend the rest of his life trying to find out.
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