Conform Agentiei pentru Conservarea Energiei (ARCE), Romania trebuie sa incurajeze companiile si cetatenii pentru a investi in surse alternative de energie, astfel ca ponderea energiei electrice produse din resurse regenerabile de energie, fata de consumul national brut de energie electrica sa ajunga la 33% pana in anul 2010. Acest tip de energie nepoluanta este practic, inepuizabila, pe termen mediu si lung, costurile sale fiind mult mai reduse (cu aprox. 40% fata de sursele de energie conventionala), in special in conditiile in care pretul produselor petroloiere sunt in continua crestere. Principalele surse de energie regenerabila in Romania ar putea fi biomasa, energia solara, eoliana si energia geotermala.

Deseurile lemnoase - principala sursa de energie alternativa

Rezervele de biomasa sunt in special deseurile de lemn, deseurile agricole, gunoiul menajer si culturile energetice. Producerea de biomasa nu reprezinta doar o resursa de energie regenerabila ci si o oportunitate semnificativa pentru dezvoltarea rurala durabila. In prezent, in Uniunea Europeana, 4% din necesarul de energie este asigurat din biomasa. La nivelul UE, se estimeaza crearea a cca. 300.000 de noi locuri de munca in mediul rural, prin exploatarea biomasei.

In prezent, in Romania nu s-au dezvoltat tehnologii de valorificare completa a tuturor deseurilor. De exemplu, in momentul de fata, la noi in tara nu exista utilaje specializate in scoaterea cioatelor si a radacinilor, acest potential de deseuri lemnoase neputand fi astfel valorificat cel putin pe termen scurt si mediu. Pe termen lung este necesara realizarea unei analize pentru determinarea oportunitatii de achizitionare a tehnologiilor deja existente pe piata europeana pentru scoaterea si valorificarea acestor cioate si radacini, tinand seama de faptul ca aceasta practica este aplicata la scara larga in tarile nordice ale Europei si in Italia. Tarile europene aplica aceasta tehnologie in cadrul plantatiilor energetice, datorita beneficiului economic pe care il reprezinta utilizarea acestora ca si combustibil si din considerente de pregatire a solului pentru viitoarele plantatii.

Reglementarile cuprinse in legislatia UE in domeniul ecologic, si anume de a se valorifica integral deseurile lemnoase rezultate in urma prelucrarilor primare si secundare, se respecta prin plasarea unor echipamente de compactare stationare in fluxul tehnologic specific, la fiecare agent economic din domeniu.

Avantaje ale valorificarii deseurilor lemnoase– valorificarea produsului rezultat prin comercializarea sa atat pe piata interna, cat si la export;– aplicarea standardelor de calitate si de mediu existente la nivel european;– asigurarea unei protectii ecologice eficiente a populatiei, precum si a apei, a padurii etc.;– reciclarea materialelor;– eliminarea deseurilor de material lemnos de pe suprafetele de depozitare;– asigurarea unor performante de ardere superioare a produselor peletizate, sub aspectul

duratei mai mari de ardere a aceluiasi volum de material, precum si a unei cantitati de caldura recuperate mai mari;– utilizarea eficienta a deseurilor de material lemnos rezultate prin prelucrarea lemnului;– reducerea volumului de depozitare a materialelor combustibile, tinand seama ca volumul unei brichete este de circa sapte-opt ori mai mic decat volumul ocupat de aceeasi cantitate de rumegus inainte de brichetare;– realizarea unei alternative simple pentru producerea caldurii in domeniul casnic sau in intreprinderi din mica industrie;– realizarea de noi locuri de munca;– accelerarea alinierii legislatiei ecologice din tara noastra la cea existenta in domeniu la nivelul UE.

Din analiza prezentata mai sus rezulta necesitatea stringenta de realizare a unor investitii de peletizare a rumegusului. Realizarea unor instalatii complexe pentru obtinerea peletilor din rumegus permite introducerea unei noi atitudini privind problemele ecologice, ca si crearea de oportunitati pentru recuperarea si introducerea in circuitul economic a deseurilor care, netratate corespunzator, ar produce poluari masive ale mediului ambiant, cu repercusiuni negative majore lungi perioade de timp.

Ce sunt peletii?

Peletizarea este o presare mecanica a materialului la dimensiuni mult mai mici si cu densitate mult mai mare. Peletii sunt combustibili solizi, cu continut scazut de umiditate, obtinuti din rumegus, aschii de lemn, sau chiar scoarta de copac, talas si praf de lemn de la instalatiile industriale de prelucrare a lemnului, precum si din copacii nevalorificati din exploatarile forestiere. Rasinile si liantii existenti in mod natural in rumegus au rolul de a mentine peletii compacti si de aceea acestia nu contin aditivi.

Peletii din lemn sunt combustibili ecologici, economici si neutri privitor la emisiile de CO2, in majoritate produs din rumegus si resturi de lemn, comprimate la presiune ridicata fara aditivi pentru lipire. Ei sunt de forma cilindrica, de obicei masurand intre 6-10 mm diametru si 10-30 mm lungime. Fiind un combustibil produs la standarde inalte si comprimat, peletii permit ca transportul lor sa fie economic si sa se utilizeze sisteme complet automatizate in unitatile producatoare de electricitate si caldura, de la cele care deservesc o singura familie pana la cele publice. Cu o dezvoltare rapida a segmentului de piata, ele reprezinta tehnologia cheie pentru cresterea utilizarii biomasei in Europa si intreaga lume. Peletii sunt si o modalitate excelenta de utilizare a resurselor locale si de contribuire la pastrarea mediului inconjurator si prevenirea schimbarilor climatice.

In curand vom lansa un portal dedicat surselor regenerabile de energie (biomasa) din Romania. Obiectivul nostru principal este sa promovam utilizarea pe scara larga a biomasei si a deseurilor lemnoase ca o sursa de energie rentabila din punct de vedere al costului si benefica din punct de vedere al protectiei mediului din Romania.

Orasele din intreaga lume au început să fie iluminate cu ajutorul ledurilor, mult mai economice din punctul de vedere al consumului de energie. Vancouver, Viena sau

Torraca sunt numai câteva dintre localităţile cu un sistem public de lumini generate de leduri. În plus, arhitecţii au început să prevadă clădirile noi cu faţade iluminate prin sisteme speciale de leduri.

În curând, străzile europene vor fi iluminate prin "copaci solari", alcătuiţi din câte zece panouri solare aranjate precum ramurile unui arbore adevărat, care vor fi alimentate de baterii. La rândul lor, bateriile vor alimenta nişte leduri.

"Copacii solari" au fost "inventaţi" de către designerul englez Ross Lovegrove, care spune că spre deosebire de iluminarea obişnuită, cea prin leduri emană mai puţină poluare luminoasă. Noua invenţie cuprinde detectori de lumină astfel încât se stinge şi se aprinde automat la răsăritul sau apusul soarelui.

Pentru prima dată, "copacii solari" au fost "plantaţi" de probă, în octombrie anul trecut, pe strada Ringstrasee din Viena şi au produs suficientă lumină chiar şi atunci când soarele nu a răsărit deloc timp de patru zile.

"Copacii solari" elimină emisiile de carbon

„În curând, «copacii solari»ar putea deveni principala formă de iluminare stradală ce ar putea elimina emisiile de dioxid de carbon şi în acelaşi timp ar reduce simţitor facturile la electricitate pentru administraţiile locale", a declarat Christina Werner, directorul programului de iluminare stradală, citată de site-ul RenewableEnergyAccess.com.

Specialiştii spun că iluminarea prin leduri e cu atât mai necesară cu cât, în 2006, iluminarea stradală a consumat 10% din electricitatea folosită în Europa, adică 2.000 de milioane de KWh. Statisticile arată că de aici au rezultat 2.900 de milioane de tone de emisii de carbon.

„Panourile solare ale copacilor au dat suficientă lumină chiar şi pe timp noros, demonstrând că sunt o formă practică pentru iluminarea stradală", a precizat Christina Werner. Ea a adăugat că administraţia din Viena va decide în curând dacă va instala mai mulţi „copaci solari". „Sperăm că nu numai Viena, dar şi alte oraşe vor folosi energia regenerabilă pentru iluminatul stradal, astfel încât emisiile de carbon să fie dintre cele mai reduse", a mai spus Christina Werner.

Maşina alimentată cu energie solară

Specialiştii spun că nu numai „copacii", ci şi alte obiecte ar putea fi decorate cu panouri solare pe bază de leduri, care să ţină străzile iluminate corespunzător pe timpul nopţii. În prezent, o companie italiană specializată în sisteme de iluminat lucrează pentru transpunerea acestui lucru în realitate.

În plus, designerul englez, inventator al „copacilor solari", împreună cu câteva firme specializate lucrează pentru proiectarea unei maşini care să funcţioneze cu energie solară.

Nu numai Viena a încercat iluminatul „prietenos cumediul", ci şi alte oraşe. Autorităţile din oraşul american Philadelphia au iluminat clădirile reprezentative folosind tehnici diferite pentru iluminarea prin leduri. Au fost alese cinci dintre clădirile de pe Strada Artelor. Autorităţile locale au anunţat că, la primăvară, clădirile de pe Strada South Boat vor fi iluminate în acelaşi fel.

„Oraşele din întreaga lume investesc semnificativ în sistemele de iluminare prin leduri, mai ales că străzile lor devin tot mai animate pe timp de noapte", afirmă Paul Levy, unul dintre directorii firmelor din Philadelphia care produc leduri. Una dintre principalele clădiri ale oraşului, Terra Hall, a fost iluminată printr-un sistem linear de leduri, ce are o durată de viaţă de 50.000 de ore şi e garantat să dureze cel puţin 15 ani.

Ledurile din Torraca economisesc 70% din energie

Chiar şi oraşele mai mici au renunţat la iluminatul clasic în favoarea celui prin leduri. Astfel, Torraca, un mic orăşel din sudul Italiei, a ales de curând iluminarea publică prin tehnologia ledurilor, administraţia locală justificându-şi alegerea prin economisirea a 70% din energia consumată de obicei.

În loc de clasicele becuri, italienii au acum un sistem de leduri care le permite noaptea o iluminare stradală aproape naturală. În prezent ledurile sunt folosite foarte mult pentru clădirile de birouri. Acest lucru se întâmplă cel mai des în Canada, unde arhitecţii sunt specializaţi în arhitectură verde.

De curând, arhitectul James Cheng se lăuda că l-a convins pe unul dintre clienţii lui să ilumineze exteriorul unei clădiri de birouri din Vancouver situată în imediata apropiere a apei în mod diferit. „Cele mai multe clădiri sunt iluminate fie în partea superioară, fie la bază. Noi ne propunem ca locuitorii clădirii să nu fie orbiţi de lumină. Întregul sistem e controlat prin computer, iar spectrul color e conţinut şi dispersat în ceea ce noi numim «port», departe de interiorul clădirii", mai spune Cheng.

Acesta consideră că iluminarea ar trebui să fie parte integrală a clădirii, şi nu numai nişte lumini adăugate ca să arate bine. O altă clădire din Vancouver, situată pe malul apei şi iluminată prin leduri e cazinoul Edgewater. Patrick Cotter, arhitectul care a coordonat renovarea clădirii, spune că programul de iluminare poate fi modificat prin schimbarea luminozităţii şi a culorilor. Specialiştii în eficienţă energetică susţin că pe lângă faptul că iluminarea prin leduri personalizează foarte mult o clădire, ea face economii serioase la electricitate.

Hotel de 60 de etaje cu faţadă luminoasă

Cea mai mare dezvoltare a iluminatului prin leduri are loc în Canada, unde arhitecţii se străduiesc să găsească cele mai sofisticate sisteme de iluminare ale faţadelor imobilelor, înainte ca acestea să fie proiectate. Astfel, anul acesta canadienii îşi vor ilumina cea mai înaltă clădire din Vancouver, hotelul Shangri-La, cu 60 de nivele, printr-un sistem

„verde" de iluminare arhitecturală, denumit Luna. Noul sistem de iluminare a fost conceput special pentru clădiri şi emană o lumină naturală, în special raze ultraviolete.

James Cheng, arhitectul care a proiectat clădirea, spune că sistemul luna absoarbe şi reflectă razele ultraviolete în timpul zilei într-un spectru larg de culori şi străluceşte discret noaptea. „Nu folosim niciun fel de electricitate şi nu există niciun fel de întreţinere a sistemului în afara curăţării ocazionale a întregii clădiri. Un imobil similar, numai că de 65 de etaje, va fi construit până la sfârşitul anului în Toronto", explică Cheng.

Ledul, descoperit de un rus

Oleg Losev a vrut să colaboreze cu Einstein pentru leduri Mulţi dintre oameni cred că ledul a fost descoperit de către cercetătorii americani în anii ’60. Dar, de fapt, dispozitivul pentru iluminat a fost descoperit de către rusul Oleg Losev. Acesta a lucrat toată viaţa ca tehnician în câteva laboratoare de radio sovietice. La mijlocul anilor 1920, Losev a observat emisiile de lumină de la oxidul de zinc şi de la diodele de la redresorul din cristal folosit de receptoarele radio atunci când un curent trecea prin ele.

Chiar dacă nu avea calificare academică, Losev era la curent cu se întâmpla în fizică. Astfel, tehnicianul a folosit teoria cuantelor a lui Einstein pentru a explica acţiunea ledurilor. Cei care l-au cunoscut pe Losev spun că el i-ar fi scris lui Einstein rugându-l să-l ajute să-şi înregistreze invenţia, dar n-a primit niciun răspuns. Tehnicianul rus a murit de foame, la 39 de ani, în timpul blocadei din 1942 de la Leningrad.

Cercetătorii de la Glasgow ne dau speranţe

Chiar dacă sunt folosite mai puţin pentru iluminatul interior din cauză că sunt foarte scumpe, ledurile ar putea înlocui în curând becurile clasice.

Cercetătorii de la Universitatea Glasgow au dezvăluit de curând că au descoperit metoda prin care ledurile să fie folosite şi pentru iluminatul casnic. "Până acum, ledurile nu au fost folosite pentru iluminatul interior al caselor pentru că procesul prin care se făceau găurile din leduri era foarte scump.

În orice caz, credem că am găsit soluţia pentru fabricarea unor leduri mai puternice prin confecţionarea unor găuri în suprafaţa lor, care să le crească nivelul de iluminare, dar care să le facă şi mult mai ieftine", a declarat Dr. Faiz Rahman, directorul de proiect, citat de BBC World.

Durată de viaţă de 100.000 de ore

Denumirea de led este prescurtarea pentru Dioda Emiţătoare de Lumină şi este un semiconductor care emite lumina vizibilă când prin el trece electricitate. Emisia de lumină depinde de electronii care circulă între anod şi catodul diodei.

În funcţie de materialul folosit, culoarea emisiei poate fi roşie, albastră, albă, chihlimbar. Producătorii de leduri spun că un astfel de corp de iluminat poate avea o durată de viaţă de 100.000 de ore, în funcţie de temperatura internă şi de intensitatea puterii.

Pentru o durată de viaţă lungă, temperatura internă a ledului trebuie să se afle sub 120° C, iar puterea trebuie să fie sub 20 mA. Dacă ambele condiţii sunt satisfăcute, producătorii de leduri garantează că, după 100.000 de ore, adică aproape 11 ani de funcţionare continuă, luminozitatea ledurilor va scădea cu 50% din valoarea iniţială.

sursa : Adevarul Verde

De-a lungul istoriei, acoperisurile de iarbă au apărut în acele părti ale lumii unde materialele de constructii erau limitate. „Acoperisul verde“ este considerat a fi un fenomen european, case de acest fel întâlnindu-se în zonele rurale din diferite tări europene.

Potrivit portalului specializat www.urbangardeninghelp.com, în Scotia si Anglia fenomenul pare a avea o mare amploare, în insulele Orkney (Scotia), acoperisurile verzi datând din anii 3600-2500 î.H. Constructii de acest fel se găsesc si în unele tări scandinave, regiuni non-europene cum ar fi Islanda si Groenlanda având o vastă traditie în acest sens. Unele cercetări arată că si în Statele Unite s-a adoptat această solutie pentru acoperisuri, în regiunea Great Plains.

În societatea moderna există o varietate de materiale de constructii, la îndemâna oricui, pierzându-se astfel traditia utilizării plantelor vii ca si material de constructie.

Cu toate acestea, se remarcă un interes tot mai mare, la nivel global, în sensul utilizarii plantelor vii la constructia clădirilor urbane moderne. De ce? Datorită încălzirii excesive a zonelor în care predomină betonul si sticla, si a poluării masive a marilor aglomerări urbane. Pe lângă aceastea, acoperisurile verzi mentin o termperatură mai scazută a clădirilor pe timpul verii, iar adoptarea acestei măsuri la scară largă ar ajuta la izolarea termică, prin reducerea temperaturii la nivelul întregului oras (este demonstrat că zonele rurale sunt cu până la 12 grade mai răcoroase decât zonala urbane, în perioada verii).

Noua, dar arhaica solutie pentru acoperisuri este foarte populară în Europa (10% din acoperisurile plate din Germania sunt acoperite cu vegetatie si 12% în Elvetia) si a început să-si facă loc si pe agenda urbană din America de Nord. În Europa există deja legi ce reglementează activitatea de „înverzire“ a acoperisurilor, unele guverne introducând taxe pe poluare, astfel că proprietarii de case nu ezită să apeleze la aceasta solutie ecologică.

Acoperisul verde este o solutie care are două mari calităti : se măreste zona „verde” disponibilă si în acelasi timp, prin absorbirea umiditătii si radiatiilor din aer, protejează structura acoperisului si ajută la răcirea clădirii prin transpiratia plantelor. Ceea ce în final presupune economii la nivelul solutiilor de răcire ale casei/blocului (aer conditionat).

Concomitent, este prelungită si viata structurii acoperisului prin aceea că variatiile de temperatură la nivelul acestuia sunt mult mai mici. Un alt avantaj este izolarea fonică.

Prin definitie, acoperisurile verzi sunt spatii verzi amenajate din structuri artificiale, dar mai complicate decât o simplă gradină plasată pe acoperis. De regulă sunt cultivate plante ce necesită minimum de atentie si îngrijire, într-un sistem multistrat ce devine, de fapt, o continuare a acoperisului. Sistemul include o membrană specială ce împiedică patrunderea rădăcinilor plantelor prin structura acoperisului, un sistem de scurgere si un mediu de crestere mai usor decât pamântul în care se plantează de obicei plantele (format din pietris, rumegus si scoartă de copac).

Desi la prima vedere par extrem de complicat de realizat, acoperisurile verzi au viată de două ori mai lungă decât un acoperisurile clasice si presupun costuri reduse de întretinere, precum si reducerea costurilor cu izolarea termică a clădirii. Toate acestea pe lângă estetica deosebită.

Sisteme solare pasive

         

Descriere

Procesele naturale de bază folosite în arhitectura solară pasivă sunt fluxul energiei termice asociat cu radiaţia, conducţia şi convecţia naturală. Atunci când soarele luminează o clădire, materialele clădirii pot reflecta, transmite sau absorbi radiaţia solară. În plus, căldura produsă de soare determină mişcarea aerului, care poate fi prevăzută. Aceste răspunsuri de bază la căldura solară au condus la elemente de proiectare, alegerea şi plasarea materialelor, ceea ce poate furniza efecte de încălzire şi răcire în locuinţă.

Această formă de arhitectură datează de la începutul aşezărilor umane şi exemple pot fi văzute peste tot în ţară şi în special în zonele vechi ale oraşului.

Tehnicile solar pasive îmbunătăţesc confortul deoarece previn încălzirea de la soare în timpul verii şi o permit în timpul iernii. Temperaturile din interior sunt de aceea mult mai uniforme, în special dacă se foloseşte şi ventilarea naturală.

Avantaje

Avantajele arhitecturii solar pasive sunt:

reduce încălzirea solară în timpul verii, micşorând necesitatea răcirii; creşte încălzirea solară în timpul iernii, micşorând necesitatea încălzirii;

deoarece se folosesc numai elemente pasive nu se consumă energie şi nu se crează poluare;

eficienţa costului, deoarece elementele pasive au durată de viaţă similară cu cea a construcţiei;

îmbunătăţeşte aspectul clădirii, deoarece sunt folosite elemente arhitecturale tradiţionale;

folosirea redusă a combustibilului fosil; rata redusă de schimbare a climei; nivelul redus de zgomot de la sistemele de aer condiţionat.

Dezavantaje

Dezavantajele arhitecturii solare pasive sunt:

sunt mai bine realizate când o clădire este proiectată cu aceste elemente; clădirea poate să nu fie bine orientată pentru a beneficia de căldura solară iarna; în unele zone protejate nu este posibil să se schimbe aspectul extern al clădirilor; la unele forme de construcţii poate fi dificil să se adauge elemente solare pasive.

CRIZA ENERGETICA! SOLUTII! ORASE ECOLOGICE Experiment sau utopie?

Mihai Surducan [alte articole din rubrica Tehnologii alternative]

(Financial Times) IN MIJLOCUL desertului din statul american Arizona, se gaseste un oras construit doar pe jumatate, ce a atras in ultimii 35 de ani arhitecti din intreaga lume.

Arcosanti - orasul viitorului

Arcosanti este un oras ecologic “experiment” in care nu se gasesc masini, deoarece e proiectat numai pentru pietoni. Cladirile de locuit, mari, compacte, sunt construite in

apropierea unor sere uriase unde sunt cultivate legumele si fructele pentru hrana rezidentilor. Electricitatea e generata cu ajutorul centralelor eoliene si solare, iar apa potabila vine dintr-un rau din apropiere.

Mai putin de o suta de omeni locuiesc acum orasul, o cifra mult mai mica decat numarul de 5.000 pe care il visa Paolo Soleri, arhitectul-parinte al Arcosanti. Dar, de la lansarea din 1970, sase mii de studenti de la facultati de arhitectura au venit sa ajute la construirea sa si sa invete despre proiect. De asemenea, zona atrage 50.000 de vizitatori in fiecare an.

Scopul orasului este de a pastra beneficiile vietii urbane, oferind in acelsi timp un contrast fata de modelul neecologic al suburbiilor americane, considera Mary Hoadley, coordonatorul constructiilor din Arcosanti, care a locuit in acest oras de la inceput, impreuna cu sotul si fiica ei. “Sa traiesti aici e fantastic”, a declarat Hoadley. “Am pornit cu [resursele] energetice ale anilor ‘60, dar proiectul si-a pastrat directia.”

Marirea densitatii de locuitori intr-o zona nu numai ca aduce beneficii mediului printr-un consum energetic mai mic pentru incalzire sau transport, dar permite oamenilor sa faca parte dintr-o comunitate.

Primul oras ecologic functional

Desi orasul e numai pe jumatate construit, ideile lui Soleri au inspirat generatiile urmatoare de arhitecti. Proiectele sale au fost prezentate la Roma anul trecut, iar in curand arhitectul va pleca in China unde urmeaza sa explice filozofia sa numita “arhologie” [“arcology” in text n.r.], o combinatie intre arhitectura si ecologie. E posibil ca urmatorul oras ecologic sa fie gazduit in aceasta tara. China are nevoie de cateva astfel de asezari urbane construite in fiecare an, pentru a mai rezolva din problema demografica si pentru a-si proteja resursele naturale de efectele nocive ale industrializarii.

De fapt, primul oras ecologic functional va fi construit in Dongtan, langa Shanghai, pe o insula situata la gura de varsare a raului Yangtze, oferind astfel un adapost pentru mii de pasari, plante si alte specii pe cale de disparitie. Compania Arup a primit contractul pentru lucrarile de constructie, avand in obiectiv un impact cat mai mic asupra mediului. Energia regenerabila, parte integranta a planului orasului, va fi produsa cu ajutorul unor centrale electrice si termice. In prezent, pe cea mai mare parte a insulei se afla terenuri agricole.

Prima faza va fi terminata pana in 2010, iar succesul va fi incununat cu o expozitie. Guvernul chinez “doreste sa gaseasca metode […] pentru crearea oraselor care se sustin singure”, explica Peter Head, unul dintre directorii de la Arup.

Dongtan, Arcosanti si alte proiecte de acest gen arata ca orase intregi pot fi neutre din punct de vedere ecologic, dar aparitia unor astfel de metropole intampina alte dificultati. Orasele uriase pot fi organizate mult mai greu decat micile comunitati ecologice.

Cartiere ecologice in Europa

Totusi, proiectul chinez nu e singurul. Tot mai multe orase din lume folosesc modelul Arcosanti. In Marea Britanie, Newcastle doreste sa aiba un impact cat mai mic asupra mediului prin incurajarea generarii energiei prin metode regenerabile si prin plantarea de copaci. In SUA, Organizatia Non-Guvernamentala EcoCity Cleveland ajuta oamenii sa traiasca “in echilibru cu natura”.

Municipalitatea din Freiburg, Germania, a construit eco-cladiri transformand astfel orasul intr-o atractie turistica. “Nu cred ca s-ar putea vinde o casa in Freiburg daca nu ar fi benigna din punct de vedere ecologic”, a declarat Bill Dunster de la ZedFactory.

Dar nici Suedia nu a ramas mai prejos. Bo01 (foto) este un cartier ecologic din Malmö, cu scoli, magazine, restaurante, un parc si peste 1000 de rezidenti. Energia vine de la apa, vant si soare, iar consumul de electricitate e restrictionat la aproximativ jumatate din consumul mediu pe tara suedez. Cea mai mare parte a caldurii ce alimenteaza orasul e produsa cu ajutorul apelor subterane.

“Scopul initial a fost sa rezolvam problema zonei industriale [situata] la marginea orasului”, a spus Trevor Graham de la departamentul pentru mediu al proiectului. “Am dorit sa construim orasul de maine - unor oras ce se sustine singur si imbina calitatea vietii, o arhitectura adecvata, planificare urbana potrivita si [care tine cont de] problemele de mediu.”

Trebuie regandita profund urbanizarea si modul de viata in asezarile urmane din perspectiva epuizarii combustibililor fosili. Ca ne place ca nu ne place va trebui sa ne schimbam modul de viata sau vom muri de foame, de sete sau de frig. Orasele acestea ecologice demonstreaza ca o folosire rationala a resurselor poate ajuta un oras sa traiasca decent si fara excese. Problema este cum sa dez-educi o populatie occidentala care sufera de un consumism atroce (este deja o boala psihica clasificata ca atare de specialisti) si sa o readuci la anumite valori. De fapt, intreaga problema a urbanizarii din viitor va fi rezultatul mentalitatilor invingatoare in conflictele de azi. problema e ca ne-am trezit cam tarziu ca suntem in rahat pana in gat. Si oricate orase din astea am face va fi total insuficient pentru nevoile actuale are populatiei din toate zonele lumii.

Arcology Theory

Nudging Space Arcology : Photo : Tomiaki Tamura

Arcology is Paolo Soleri's concept of cities which embody the fusion of architecture with ecology. The arcology concept proposes a highly integrated and compact three-dimensional urban form that is the opposite of urban sprawl with its inherently wasteful consumption of land, energy and time, tending to isolate people from each other and the community. The complexification and miniaturization of the city enables radical conservation of land, energy and resources.

An arcology would need about two percent as much land as a typical city of similar population. Today’s typical city devotes more than sixty percent of its land to roads and automobile services. Arcology eliminates the automobile from within the city. The multi-use nature of arcology design would put living, working and public spaces within easy reach of each other and walking would be the main form of transportation within the city.

An arcology’s direct proximity to uninhabited wilderness would provide the city dweller with constant immediate and low-impact access to rural space as well as allowing agriculture to be situated near the city, maximizing the logistical efficiency of food distribution systems. Arcology would use passive solar architectural techniques such as the apse effect, greenhouse architecture and garment architecture to reduce the energy usage of the city, especially in terms of heating, lighting and cooling. Overall, arcology seeks to embody a “Lean Alternative” to hyper consumption and wastefulness through more frugal, efficient and intelligent city design.

Arcology theory holds that this leanness is obtainable only via the miniaturization intrinsic to the Urban Effect, the complex interaction between diverse entities and organisms which mark healthy systems both in the natural world and in every successful and culturally significant city in history.

The First Generation Arcology (1° GA)

Hexahedron Arcology Model : photo : Ivan Pintar

This is the theoretical definition of a "radical" urban system, rooted in the historical evolution of habitat. It is the view of habitat as a cluster of social, economic, cultural activities and of the kind of life it encourages. The notion of crowding is seen as a sine qua non condition for the inception of the Urban Effect. Thus crowding, far from being a necessary evil, is the imperative any form of life is blessed with because once crowding subsides, the system dies. With it the organism or the association of organisms (the city for instance) breaks down, as parts scatter away (suburbia) returning to the uncrowded surrounding expectant of a novel "crowding together" into the next organism.

The Second Generation Arcology (2° GA)

Two Suns Arcology Concept Model : photo : Ivan Pintar

This phase can be literally described as a splitting of the architectural concepts of the

First Generation Arcologies in half, exposing the core to the sun. This gives a greater voice to the renewable energy of the sun and inserts arcology even more effectively into its own ecological niche. It also makes clear the name of arcology as architecture-ecology.

Arcosanti originally outlined in the mode of the 1° G.A. was subsequently redesigned in the mode of the 2° G.A. The Two Suns Arcology designs represent the majority of work stemming from the second generation concepts.and inserts arcology even more effectively into its own ecological niche. It also makes clear the name of arcology as architecture-ecology.

Arcosanti originally outlined in the mode of the 1° G.A. was subsequently redesigned in the mode of the 2° G.A. The Two Suns Arcology designs represent the majority of work stemming from the second generation concepts.

The Third Generation Arcology (3° GA)

Third Generation Arcology Modular Toy Blocks : Photo : Tomiaki Tamura

The Third Generation Arcology is an attempt at "packaging" so to speak, the Second Generation Arcology. Modular and possibly standardized structures would be articulated in a variety of arrangements and sizes so as to fit specific conditions (the environment, the climate, the culture, the technological conditions, the size of the community, etc.).

Space For Peace 'Ovum' Model : Photo : Tomiaki Tamura

The Fourth Generation Arcology (4° GA)

The Fourth Generation Arcology is the 3° G.A. of land and oceans "taking off for outer space", in as much as the packaging of the 3°G.A. is an anticipation with its many facets and consequences, of the mandatory packaging of the 4° G.A. The 4° GA is represented by writings, graphics and models:

The Hyper Building is an Arcology. In an Arcology, architecture and ecology come together in the design of the city. Arcology is the implosion of the flat megalopolis, the modern city of today, into a dense, complex, urban environment which rises vertically.

The concept of a one-structure system is not incidental to the organization of the city, but central to it. Such an urban structure hosts life, work, education, culture, leisure, and health in a dense, compact system which also puts the untouched open countryside at the fingertips of the residents. The compactness of an Arcology gives 90 percent more land to farming and conservation than today's urban and suburban sprawl. This compactness makes an Arcology a more workable system.

The automobile divides a city by scattering it across the landscape. Greater attention is given to human scale in an Arcology. In it the pedestrian reigns. Distances are measured by walks and minutes. Within it the automobile is nonsensical.

 

In an Arcology energy is used more efficiently than in a conventional modern city. Pollution is a direct function of wastefulness, not efficiency. The increase in efficiency and reduction of wastefulness means a reduction of pollution.

One role of the three dimensional city is to stop the spreading out of suburbia and its perniciuos effects: hyper-consumption, segregation, waste, pollution, and ecological catastrophe. Therefore we must consider not only this initial Hyper-Building: future developments in the area must be considered. All developments surrounding the Hyper-Building must be Arcological.

For reasons of economy, to do more with less, life is always framed three-dimensionally. This imperative can be referred to as the Urban Effect. Since the Hyper-Building is emblematic of the Urban Effect, it is not just an expedient though indispensible proposition: its stands for the ontological dynamics of life itself.

 

World Trade Center New York

The Secular CathedralA transnational structure aiming at a (distance) more equitable consumerism. A habitat for remembering, living, working, learning and “divertimento”.

Part of the divertimento is the battery of slides evacuating the cathedral in 20 minutes or so (20,000 people?).

The mantel generated by the 40 or so slides defines an umbrella parasol of about 400 meters diameter covering a multi-story urban life that the citizens of New York would think about and

the designer-builder would try to satisfy(the analogy with Piero della Francesca generous mantel of mother sheltering the flock of her children).

The circular pond is the speed breaker for the people evacuating the cathedral from most of its stories. The evacuation is pure

gravity effect descent , with no mechanical equipment, no enenrgy use, in fact no need of leg use. It is a very large combination of children’s playground and swimming pool slide, of roller coaster rides and of emergency slides

in air passenger planes.

Time:For instance from floor 30 one can reach a restaurant or shop on Barklay st., West St., Liberty St., etc. in less than one minute. This is part of the appeal to visitors and employees offered by the multi- level grounds of the cathedral.

Magnetic levitation propulsion is suggested for the power driven ascent conveyances. Besides escalators and elevators, gondolas could be propelled on wider slides. Functions:

The first 4-5 floors are of “N.Y., N.Y. format” . The typical busibody going about of the manhattan people. Those floors ring the area and also serve as entrance to the inner- urban celebratory spaces where business, cultural gatherings, concerts, theater let

the visitors commingle, enjoy and learn. This is a multi-story inner space under the cover of slides umbrella-parasol.

A simulacra made of some of the structural segments of the towers might be afloat where the two towers used to be.The remaining floors, 40 to 50, are for transitional activities in financial, economic, environmental, social equity fields of endeavor.

--Paolo Soleri

n nature, as an organism evolves it increases in complexity and it also becomes a more compact or miniaturized system. Similarly a city should function as a living system. Arcology, architecture and ecology as one integral process, is capable of demonstrating positive response to the many problems of urban civilization, population, pollution, energy and natural resource depletion, food scarcity and quality of life. Arcology recognizes the necessity of the radical reorganization of the sprawling urban landscape into dense, integrated, three-dimensional cities in order to support the complex activities that sustain human culture. The city is the necessary instrument for the evolution of humankind." - Paolo Soleri

Arcosanti 5000 Site Plan : Paolo Soleri

ARCOLOGY as exemplified by ARCOSANTI 5000

The most recent reshuffling of space nudging toward a more self-aware speck of reality. I call it the Lean Alternative in contrast to the consumption unlimited of our society.

A process architecture, space organizing itself, aware and use of the sun presence, in moving incrementally (the six phases) into higher degrees of complexity, the urbanizing process.

Each apse exedra leaf "knows" more than the preceding, not out of magic, but out of experience (of the preceding). The enriching experience of a growing urban effect. It is the prototypical instrument adding accesses to the richer sound which the players, residents and guest, might want to employ while growing from 100 to 5000 or so.

--Paolo Soleri

Arcosanti 5000 Front Elevation : Paolo Soleri

 

Arcology: Life in the Big City

by Bob RudnerChicago Arcology Network

Megacities are metropolitan regions of over 10 million, like Tokyo and Mexico City. In comparison, Chicagoland is over 7.5 million, and heading up. Sprawl defines the lay of the land of most big cities, with suburban borders clashing and farmland, forests and wetlands gobbled up by roads, malls, townhouses and corporate entities. With 10 billion people predicted for the year 2050 -- double Earth's current occupancy -- the doubling of the amount of cities and maximizing the use of the land is a critical priority for any sane person pondering the situation.

Of all the subjects raised at the first United Nations-sponsored Habitat conference in Vancouver, Canada, sprawl has received the least attention. Roads, highways, single-family residences, parking lots, commercial and recreational centers have spread people apart. The automobile shapes architecture more than life and people. Our un-recyclable time is dispensed by vehicles which segregate inter-relationships.

Grids made for pre-computer age land designs occupy imaginations over the great potentials humans can create by utilizing telecommunications and computers. Participatory architecture awaits the application of current technology.

Since it is generally accepted that people want a sustainable future, that we desire living things around us and that natural diversity should be conserved, the means to these ends should become a major point of discussion. The highest expression thus far in the visual dialogue of city planning has come from Paolo Soleri, who coined the term "arcology" (shorthand for "architecture for ecology"). In 1970, he published a rich tapestry of his arcologic designs and philosophy called Arcology: City in the Image of Man.

That same year, Soleri founded a school and urban laboratory called Arcosanti, in central Arizona. His writing and dreams attracted thousands of volunteers who by 1976 had built most of the structures now comprising Arcosanti.

Soleri, who studied under Frank Lloyd Wright at Taliesen West, was among the lecturers at Habitat I, which included Buckminster Fuller (inventor of the geodesic dome), 24 years his senior. The two were paired up for their structural genius and were admired by Canadian architect Moishe Safdie of Montreal Expo fame.

A lineage can be seen in the ideals of Wright, Fuller, Soleri and Safdie. Each has exhibited designs which stand in contrast to standard operating procedure. Yet all have suffered being pushed to the fringe. All have been marginalized by professionals whose success was defined by their acquiescence to the norm of modern city design where living spaces are segregated by automobile thoroughfares. Soleri, especially, has fought the status quo of auto-centric architecture.big city of the future will revolve around citizens' familiarity with arcology.

The time to start studying this phenomenon is now. Activists taking on each issue in separate terms are like self-basting turkeys stewing in their own juices. From the looks of things, ecologists have suffered so much burn-out that the thermometer is about to pop out. Bucky Fuller used the term "comprehensivism." If people are to comprehend the urban whole, arcology is the way.

Meliorism -- a naive belief that things will get better on their own -- will only make things worse, as pointed out by Richard Levine, founder of the Center for Sustainable Cities (CSC) at the University of Kentucky College of Architecture. Rather than starting off with compromise, Levine asserts his ideas of "sustainable city implantations" by proposing workable designs for proof. In the mile and a half airspace over the Westbanhof Station yard in Vienna, Austria, the CSC, together with the famed Oikodrome, will be experimenting with its parallel concepts of arcology, what Soleri might call a "retrofit arcology."

The implantation operates with three dimensional public space (as opposed to mere ground level access), and will be up to twelve stories high. The concept is also called "city-as-a-hill," in that it functions as a multi-directional megastructure with life flourishing on its surface for aesthetics and urban agriculture.

Like Soleri, Levine raises landscaping to a higher level by covering his structures with life. Within the implantation is a mix of uses working in a geography of pedestrian

mobility while outskirting the automobile. Of course, solar gain is anticipated by the site's particular seasonal access to sunlight.

CSC has challenged both academic architecture and the so-called "real estate" industry's perpetual suburban townhouse/mall sprawl. Rather than caving into car commercialism's grid dominance over the shape of the land, CSC uses the sun and nature to nurture its designs. And their CAD methods open up democracy by allowing for participatory architecture centered around the computer's malleable anvil.

The politics of arcology will become easier when CAD games replace violent video games. Construction is the opposite of destruction. Creativity in play and work will be augmented when people are vantaged by Internet. Global design charrettes, working with shared models, can allow people anywhere on the network to examine the potentials of architecture and city planning for sustainability.

It must be the grassroots environmentalists and community activists who provide the yeast for such an adventure. As Frederick Douglass put it, "No power is ceded without demand." With a mass base, arcology will achieve its rightful academic status and its place on the estate will become real. All other architecture is merely like rearranging the deck-chairs on the Titanic.

Big city realities are overwhelmingly violent and depressing. It is unreal to plan on more townhouses, cars, shopping malls, waste dumps and highways, etc. Industry needs to be neighborhood-friendly. Independence is evolving into inter-dependence. The aging population needs accessibility, as demonstrated by the disability rights movement. A convergence is at hand, with growing population and technology, shrinking wildlife refuges and wetlands, the dwindling and contaminating of resources and the widespread realization of these problems.

The beauty of the challenge is that we are not far from the solutions. Indeed, they are at hand if only people would reach for them.

Sky City FantasiesFor the Fallen World of September 12, Visions of a Vertical Futureby Erik BaardFebruary 26th, 2002 1:00 PM In New York's last Dark Age—the late '70s—David Byrne sang as a Talking Head that he had to "find a city, find myself a city to live in." He was a Manhattanite then; he's a Manhattanite now. There probably was never a question. But today, as this city struggles to find itself after a terrorist attack, the future of the ultimate 20th-century declaration of place—the skyscraper—has fallen into doubt. Fear has hushed giddy chatter of record-setting skyscrapers from Chicago to India, and revered buildings like the Empire State have begun hollowing out as nervous tenants flee them—and some the city itself—before the other shoe drops.

Though the music, poetry, painting, discourse, and dance in which cultured New Yorkers take justified pride are rarely born in skyscrapers, we're forced to ask again what these steel, glass, and stone behemoths contribute to the life of this city. The atrocities committed by Al Qaeda magnified our awareness of the precious contents of what might appear at first as mere mountains starkly rising from the landscape. Look hard at the Chrysler Building with new eyes, and you can almost pick up the heat signatures of beating hearts—janitors from the Bronx and executives from the Upper East Side, secretaries from Staten Island and grad student temps from Elmhurst. It hits you that the spire isn't the point—skyscrapers are our most profound ingathering of human beings, the mission of the city.

A real, and potentially historic, threat is that fear will snuff out the first glimmerings of a new vision of skyscrapers incomprehensibly tall and massive, yet "green"—self-sustaining structures sheathed in solar cells, run through with wind turbines, recycling their water, and dispersing natural light with elaborate mirror arrays. The Ultima Tower. X-SEED 4000. The Bioclimatic Skyscraper. Sky City 1000. The Tokyo Millennium Tower. The Bionic Tower. The Hyper Tower. A whole "arcology"—architectural ecology—movement. These cities unto themselves would be home to millions of inhabitants who'd enjoy vast open-air wooded parks, giant waterfalls, and automobile-free neighborhoods high above the ground. Not biospheres to shut out a polluted Earth, but our best bet for preserving our environment from cancerous development. Hemp wearers might hate to hear it, but in terms of energy use and consumption of green space, a person living in Trump Tower is already doing the planet more good than an organic farmer in Vermont. A "Sky City" would take that truth to new heights.

"I think proposals for cities within a single building that seem outlandish at the moment are definitely going to come to pass within the next 25 or 30 years," says architect William Pedersen, designer of the anticipated next tallest building in the world, the World Financial Center in Shanghai. Pedersen tells the Voice that the challenge "is if you can bring the street up into the sky."

The biggest dreamers are looking amazingly far through the fog of fear.

"I'm a bit worried about my Orbital Towers after September 11! However, multiple redundancy will enable them to survive—they will need that anyway to cope with the occasional asteroid," says Arthur C. Clarke of the kilometer-wide skyscrapers reaching from Earth into space, a project he envisions in his 3001 installment of the Space Odyssey series. Sir Arthur is perhaps the most colorful living futurist, having foreseen in 1945 the

Tokyo’s proposed Millennium Tower

buildthetowers.org

communications satellite and, later, notepad computers. NASA's on board with the rough concept, as it plans elevators to space to succeed dangerous rocket launches. Researchers developing robots, radically new materials, and nanotechnologies say they might foment a skyscraper revolution to blow our minds.

Right. Every artist has an opus in his head, and Sir Arthur's misfired predictions have included a few doozies. Meanwhile, Byrne isn't pining for a taller skyline. "Skyscrapers are the temples in the American religion. It is a religion that has found converts as far away as Shanghai and Kuala Lumpur, but it is a pretty empty religion at heart. Needless to say, there's a generous amount of male sexual anxiety involved as well, but don't tell that to the architects," Byrne says today, invoking the cliché of skyscrapers as cathedrals of capitalism.

But who looks at the Chrysler Building and thinks of a car company? The twin towers reflected off the night-darkened lower Hudson as the comet tail of Manhattan. "From 40 miles out at sea they would come up like spires over the horizon before you could even see the coastline. They were phenomenal," remembers F. James Wilson, chief boatswain's mate with the U.S. Coast Guard in New York. The great ones surpass their origins in a glance.

Yes, skyscrapers are loudly American. Yes, skyscrapers are arrogant. Yes, skyscrapers have the charged sexuality of blatant totemic phallicism. That's why we love them. They are architectural swing, disciplined but exuberant. The two art forms fruited in the same cities—New York and Chicago—at the same moment; Cab Calloway came to New York from Chicago in time to unleash the jitterbug in the shadow of the newly minted Chrysler and Empire State buildings. America announced a new culture to the Old World, one that couldn't be dismissed as derivative, and for decades New York and Chicago relished the spectacle as they volleyed between themselves the title of the World's Tallest Building.

Still, many urban planners feel they're sailing between the Scylla of soulless vertical gigantism in our cities and the Charybdis of suburban sprawl, with its monotony and automobile fetishism. Jane Jacobs warned against both 40 years ago in her ringing jeremiad, The Death and Life of Great American Cities. While she laments the bloodshed, she has derided the twin towers as having been "predators" that devoured public funds. Jacobs tells the Voice that skyscraper competition is "literally very childish, like children playing with blocks."

She sees a World Trade Center that, like many skyscrapers, was insidiously dehumanizing, a corporate version of the housing project. Ideally, skyscrapers prevent glum office boxes from eating up precious acres

The base of Soleri's new WTCillustration: Arco Design

of pedestrian commons. "They free up space on the ground for things people want and need, like flowers and trees," comments Henry Guthard, chief engineer of the World Trade Center design for the architectural firm Yamasaki & Associates. Jacobs, though, argues the street-level plaza beneath the twin towers was a windswept absence overshadowed by stacks of anonymous cubicles.

Jacobs, who left Greenwich Village for Toronto a generation ago, wields tremendous influence still. Her arguments, coupled with security concerns and thin wallets, could add up to blander skylines. Duke University historian and engineer Henry Petroski posits that the pressure to not stand out—as a target or financial risk—could produce skylines "as flat as mesas."

There's a hunger for something more stirring. In posts to the grassroots www.buildthetowers.org, amateurs imagineered designs that yearn for the heroic.

Skyscrapers have never been just a fad. They've never faded to the margins—and probably won't—because in their American way they continue a much deeper tradition of upward striving, from East Asian pagodas and the ziggurats of Mesopotamia to the pyramids of Egypt, Central America, and Angkor Wat. The last standing shard of the World Trade Center stood as morbid testament to the cultural ties between foes at ground zero: Leading the eyes to smoke and nothingness were pointed arches, a legacy of Arab culture and engineering passed on to Europe.

The symbolic power of skyscrapers to put the world on notice is obviously still potent today. Asia has famously taken up the torch, with the twin Petronas Towers reigning as the world's tallest, albeit by a needle. They're seconded on that continent by the Jin Mao building in Shanghai. A plan for a Korean unification railroad would boast the world's tallest building as its golden spike, and other plans back-burnered by the recession could be revived in a few years' time.

Skyscrapers become the face of a city to outsiders, but do they inspire residents? Would David Byrne have become a Talking Head without the towers that defined True South for Manhattan? "Down El Paso way things get pretty spread out," he sang. "People got no idea where in the world they are./They go up north and come back south./Still got no idea where in the world they are."

Byrne didn't like what he saw out west, and the highway's daughter, the Internet, is a force for decentralization again. In a Wired magazine piece, Steven Johnson, Internet journalist and author of the new Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software, asserts that breaking cities into nodes might cut our losses in the event of a chemical or biological attack, or simply another explosive one. He admires the "distributed density" of the "hill towns of northern Italy."

Johnson doesn't advocate satellite cities of office parks, or even the "garden cities" in which last century's New York planners dabbled. His thesis is that urban vitality can be birthed in hubs of 100,000 moderately neighborly people separated by parkland. New

York started that way, in fact, and we're seeing smaller enclaves once again come into their own as artists and immigrants get priced out of Manhattan. Painters wander the wilds of Long Island City and Williamsburg, and Asian businessmen fly into Kennedy or LaGuardia and do business in Flushing without ever leaving Queens. But Johnson places a lot of faith in technology to weave together the creativity of these myriad street lives. Besides, it's a bit late for New York to revamp itself into vineyard villas. A single neighborhood here can exceed 100,000 inhabitants.

Even so, it takes more than an East Village to raise a Byrne. The twin towers may well have fed off subsidies, but their impact flowed far beyond rent collections. The most talented people in business wanted to be near them, if not in them. If they were trophies, it was to New York's advantage to have such trophies, such lures, to offer. The salaries those workers took in, and the wealth they produced, poured into the city through taxes, restaurant tips to waiters who are really actors, gallery purchases, theater tickets, cash donations to nonprofits, and book sales. That all eventually gets recycled into cover charges at CBGB.

Henry George, a political economist and populist who in the 19th century was twice nearly mayor of New York (Tammany Hall apparently made sure ballots in the first election wound up in the East River, and George died of natural causes days before a predicted victory in the second), would have reveled in our crowded streets, massive libraries, and especially our breathtakingly tall buildings. His landmark work, Progress and Poverty, tossed aside the squeamishness over the press of flesh with which Thoreau marked American philosophy, writing of the city, "Here are the granaries of knowledge. . . . Here intellectual activity is gathered into a focus and here springs that stimulus which is born of the collision

of mind with mind."

Before the invention of the true skyscraper, George eschewed the land-grabbing sprawl for which a disapproving Lewis Mumford later generously coined the term "romanticism of the pioneer." After observing how an egalitarian gold-panning culture in San Francisco morphed into a divided society of barons and landless workers in a mere generation, George wrote that the only just tax is one on speculation. In George's view, a plot of land left vacant in Manhattan still rises in value, because it creates an artificial land shortage that drives rents up. Thus the landlord is imposing a hidden tax on his neighbors.

To correct this, George proposed that land be taxed at its full rental value, but that anything done with the land would be tax-free. That would provide an overwhelming incentive to build ever higher. "A perfect Henry George city might look from a distance like a huge pyramid interrupted by parks" with buildings that decrease in size as they

Plans for the Ultima Tower illustration: Tsui Design and Research

Inc.

recede from the urban center, says Michael Curtis of the Henry George School in Manhattan. George's influence is far greater today in Taiwan because the godfather of that island's government, Sun Yat-sen, was an early admirer, notes Curtis.

What seems to really offend Jacobs and Johnson is the top-down nature of skyscrapers. At street level, Jacobs sees the apparently chaotic web of relationships that becomes a city's sense of self as "organized complexity," while Johnson has popularized the principle of "emergence" for the digital generation. Both ideas are to some extent reincarnations of Adam Smith's "invisible hand," the molding of a greater society from individuals acting in their own interests. Even skyscraper advocates concede that this dynamism doesn't happen in deck upon deck of fluorescent-lighted boxes.

But what, as architect Pedersen asks, if the street could be brought into the sky? We already live a vertical existence—at Rockefeller Center one can emerge from a subway, ascend to an underground shopping and dining concourse, and then ride an elevator directly onto an exposed street-level plaza at the foot of a skyscraper. Imagine the skyscrapers linked in a cat's cradle of pedestrian or conveyor skyways that themselves house shops, and you are suddenly living in a city defined as volume, not cardinal directions.

To take one example among many, Eugene Tsui's two-mile-tall Ultima Tower would have a base more than a mile wide with acres of parkland, and he wouldn't design a single studio apartment for its million inhabitants.

"It should be as if nature grew upward. I emphasize raw forms on each floor. Let spontaneity form how people live—let them create as they would. The whole idea is not to overplan such an environment," he explains. "Landscape an area and let people create a pattern of walkways through actual use, and then pave it." He imagines that human desire for change and assimilation would lead to the seeding of ethnic neighborhoods and shifting artists' havens. A funky Williamsburg on Level 132.

Tsui advocates "evolutionary architecture," the assumption that nature's fierce trials would spawn the most efficient systems. The term also keeps him mindful of the environmental mission of his new city. Before Johnson drew on entomology to validate "emergence," Tsui took lessons from termite mounds to design the Ultima Tower with minimal materials.

Jacobs isn't impressed. "The hanging gardens of Babylon do not satisfy needs for open space. They're boring . . . and there's not enough variety," she says. Even if Tsui prevents micromanagement from turning his city into a cruise ship, where the shuffleboard deck will always be the shuffleboard deck, the temptation in such a semi-enclosed environment would be to keep things tidy. In a "real" city, we're constantly reminded of our past, if only because we so relentlessly wear through the present. Wander down side streets along the waterfront, and inevitably your feet will fall on patches where the

asphalt has peeled back to reveal cobblestones, the tubercled skin of the extinct city. Would a flaneur in the Ultima Tower be rewarded with that sense of place?

Of course, perhaps the biggest obstacle to grand ventures is the cost. "It's only fair to mention that ideas like these have not been built, and for good reason. It's not as if all we need is enough hubris to go ahead," Jacobs notes. She's right today, as she would have been in 1893, when the first half of the Monadnock Building went up in Chicago—a then remarkably tall structure at 16 floors, but made of masonry. With six-foot-thick base walls, it was an economic dinosaur before its doors opened. The steel frame and elevator were already germinating the Skyscraper Age. Flash forward: At this very moment, laboratories are cooking up new materials, omnidirectional elevators, and even nanobots that might one day construct towers atom by atom.

Carbon nanotubes, cigar-shaped molecules with atoms connected in a kind of hexagonal chicken wire, are 100 times stronger than steel, at about one-sixth the weight. "Individual tubes are the strongest, meanest damned thing going," says professor Richard Smalley of Rice University, who in 1996 shared the Nobel Prize in chemistry for work that led to their creation. And theoretically, "you could grow them from Earth to the nearest star." Anticipating Clarke's Orbital Towers, Smalley imagines that rather than building upward, architects might be able to hitch a central pillar onto an orbiting satellite and "drape a skyscraper down."

Just don't look for that anchor in Times Square. Though Western architects have led the vanguard in sky cities for more than a hundred years, the consensus is that such skyscraper dreams will be realized in Asia, where architects and engineers say crowding, cultural acceptance, and government backing may in this century drive humanity's most ambitious construction. Then again, maybe Tsui will get his Ultima Tower in New York Harbor despite the misgivings of Gothamites today.

As Clarke, a transplant from Britain to Sri Lanka, says, "There is no such thing as human nature. It's infinitely flexible!"

Sketch for a new World Trade Centerillustration: Paolo Soleri

CHAPTER 1

Urban Form: Visions and Realities

The suburban sprawl that characterizes almost every American city today creates an enormous list of ills: serious environmental stress, loss of open space, traffic congestion, an aesthetic wasteland, social isolation, monotony, frustration, and an incredible waste of resources. Together, they render sprawl unsustainable and call for alternative urban visions.

Arcology is one such alternative. The brainchild of Italian architect Paolo Soleri, it fuses architecture with ecology by radically reorganizing the current urban landscape into an incredibly dense, integrated, three-dimensional, pedestrian-oriented super-structure. The form, known as an arcology, is designed to improve the quality of life of its inhabitants, and to be highly efficient in the consumption of land, energy, time and human resources. The central tenet of the theory is that cities must miniaturize in order to survive.

What separates arcology from other urban visions is not only its radical proposals, but the fact that an example of the idea is actually being built. Located atop a mesa in the desert of Arizona is Arcosanti, a self-testing school for urban studies and arcology--what Soleri terms ‘an urban laboratory.’ Though not an actual arcology, Arcosanti is the channel through which the theory is developed and promoted. By improving urban conditions and lessening destructive impacts on the earth, Arcosanti serves as a prototype on which future cities may be modeled.

The theory of arcology extends beyond ideas of urban form; it is the design for a wholly new civilization. And America today is indeed becoming an entirely new civilization. Just as society faced enormous changes in its movement from an agricultural society to an industrialized one, so too will it face enormous changes as it enters the next millennium and becomes an information society. The exponential growth of technology is fast bringing America into the information age. Together with economic, social, cultural, environmental and demographic changes, this new age, many futurists predict, will witness the development of radically different settlement patterns and urban societies.

The central question of this thesis thus arises: To what extent do arcologies provide a model on which cities of information age should or will develop? Arcosanti was designed in the 1960s, before fax machines, before MTV, and before the computer; is it still a valid prototype for today’s future cities? Have its principles become more or less valid? This thesis will explore these questions.

Though emphasis is placed on the impacts of technological advances on the information age, the thesis will also acknowledge the impacts of other changes (e.g., demographic, environmental). Likewise, though emphasis is placed on the impacts on urban form, the spatial configurations of fixed elements within an urban region, included will be a discussion of the broader impacts on urban society (e.g., civic life, privacy). The project will focus principally on the economically developed world because it will undoubtedly experience the most significant impending shifts into an information society.

Like the changes forecasted about urban areas, the answer to the central thesis question is highly complex. There are compelling arguments for both sides. Some predict that information technology will lead to a declining significance of place and will thus encourage sprawl, while others predict that such technology will actually increase the importance of social interaction, and thus the importance of cities. With environmental degradation and population explosion, the world's settlement patterns arguably must change if humans are to survive. There are solutions; arcology may be one.

From Cities to Suburbs

Throughout history, cities have been the centers of culture and civilization, and have facilitated the evolution of industry, technology, commerce, the arts, and knowledge. Literacy rates, economic status and life expectancy in cities have consistently exceeded those of rural areas. Today, urban areas provide the framework in which over 2.5 billion people lead their lives. Within the next few years, for the first time in history, the majority of humans will live in urban areas, and much of the remaining population will depend on cities for their economic and social well-being.

Despite their importance and achievements, cities have also been rife with problems. Overcrowding, inadequate sanitation systems, disease outbreaks, crime and violence, pollution, and lack of open space are just some of the problems associated with cities. The nature and extent of these problems, however, have changed dramatically over the twentieth century because of shifting settlement patterns. In America, these patterns can be characterized by two important trends: the increasing concentration of wealth and population in urban areas, and their dispersion throughout the metropolitan region in a process called suburbanization. It is the second change, Paolo Soleri argues, that has rendered our cities unsustainable, inefficient and environmentally and socially hazardous.

Technology has been the main protagonist of this dispersion. Trams, then rail, then most importantly automobiles, provided people with the flexibility to locate their residences further from the urban center. As such, many chose to flee the city with all its inherent problems to the suburbs where they could enjoy the best of the city with the best of the country in a single family detached home: the hallmark of suburbia. Federal policies aided this shift through tax codes that favored homeownership, FHA insured mortgage lending, and the building of the interstate highway system. Local governments contributed to suburbanization through zoning and slum clearance programs.

The result: more than half of America’s population now live in the suburbs (Chinitz, 1996; 1). The attraction of privacy, space and greenery combined with the repulsion of a deteriorating urban center has produced a general decline in the intensity of land uses. Between 1980 and 1994, the city center population of America’s 39 largest metropolitan areas increased by only 1.7 million, while the suburban population of these same areas shot up by 17 million (JCHS, 1996; 10). Today, suburbs continue their ever-growing and ever-outward trajectory.

Problems with Sprawl

The single family home in suburbia is heralded by many Americans as the ‘American Dream.’ It is a sign of progress, personal success, privacy, mobility and freedom. Often with low crime rates and excellent educational systems, suburbia is praised for its green space and proximity to economic and social opportunities. In 1939, it was a vision of a glorious future for Depression-weary eyes as shown in the (in)famous World's Fair 'Futurama' exhibit by General Motors whose cars sped through a 1960 wonderland of broad highways with huge symmetrical interchanges. In 1955, the glory of suburbia was best captured by the image a proud father just home from the office, hugging his smiling wife just out from the kitchen, while they watched their two children frolic on their well-manicured green-carpet lawn.

In 1997, the image of suburbia is one of traffic gridlock, hazardous-air alerts, huge gulfs between rich and poor, and characterless strip malls. Instead of ‘the best of both worlds,’ it can be seen as the physical expression of the privatization of life which has translated into a loss of community, human scale, and countless square miles of land. Referred to as the Los Angeles syndrome, named after the textbook example of urban sprawl, its symptoms include congestion, environmental degradation, pollution, isolation, inefficiency, segregation, boredom and ugliness.

Professor William P. Anderson writes that the "rapid growth in automobile ownership, together with the increase in average auto trip lengths constitute perhaps the most pressing environmental threat of the current age" (Anderson, 1996; 8). Highways and residential developments cut up land, permanently converting areas such as farms, open spaces and ecologically sensitive areas to urban uses. Watering lawns deplete water resources while street runoff pollutes watersheds. The requisite automobile produces noise and visual pollution, creates intractable traffic congestion on highways, depletes nonrenewable energy sources, and pumps pollutants into the atmosphere, depleting the ozone layer and advancing the greenhouse effect.

Much of the environmental destruction caused by sprawl is due to its inherent inefficiencies. More than half of the land in a typical suburb is devoted exclusively to automobiles. Highway construction and road repair drain government budgets, while car insurance and maintenance drain personal budgets. The need to drive long distances translates into a waste of time and a waste of fuel--an inefficiency which produces huge

economic losses. A 1994 report issued by the Bank of America said "unchecked sprawl has shifted from an engine of California’s [economic] growth to a force than now threatens to inhibit growth and degrade the quality of life . . . we can no longer afford the luxury of sprawl" (Bank of America, 1996; 1).

The near-total dependence on the car has created a landscape scaled to the automobile which creates sterile strip developments, uniform tract homes, expansive parking lots, and a loss of chance encounters and meaningful civic life. Further, our heavy dependence on foreign oil complicates our international relations.

Suburbanization is also one of the principal culprits of the problems which face central cities. At first, it was only residences that left the city. Then followed retail establishments, and more recently, offices and business services. This has led to an erosion of the central city’s tax base as well as to a decrease in its economic opportunities. The result is an increasingly segregated inner city blighted by deterioration and abandonment, and troubled with insufficient public services and high rates of crime. Federal programs aimed at remedying the situation such as Model Cities, and the recently passed Empowerment Zones initiative have proved insufficient in reversing these trends.

Suburbs, which are modeled for the nuclear family, are increasingly out of tune with today’s household makeup. They place huge burdens on the increasing share of single-parent families who must continually drive around their children. The aging of the American population means that an increasing percentage of people will no longer be able to drive, and will thus be isolated in their homes. The insufficient stock of single-person housing units means that the increasing proportion of singles must live in homes too big for their needs.

Paolo Soleri has proposed the theory of arcology as a response to all of the above problems. Before discussing this specifics of the theory, however, it is necessary to place it in the broader context of city planning and utopian thinking.

City Planning

Modern city planning had its roots in the industrial revolution. Ebeneezer Howard’s City Beautiful and Garden City movement established the theme of creating a city in which nature would peacefully coexist with industry. Toni Garnier’s Cite Industrielle was the precursor to modernist planning in which residential, commercial and industrial uses were strictly zoned. LeCorbusier’s Radiant City, known as the ‘tower in the green,’ called for a city of high-rises placed in enormous stretches of green space, and connected by massive transportation streams. With its rectilinear shapes and standardized, efficient goals, it was the physical expression of the industrialization of society in a scale far beyond the pedestrian. Frank Lloyd Wright’s Broadacre City is even less pedestrian-friendly. Based on the American homestead and the autonomous individual, his idea is sprawl in the extreme.

Though none of these visions have actually been built, they have all greatly influenced the planning of cities. Cities, however, can never be fully planned because they grow as a result of an infinite set of variables, representing the sum total of all life within and beyond their borders, both human and natural. Nevertheless, they can be partially planned as is most evident in cities such as Brasilia and Washington D.C.. Paris’ Champs Elysees did not just happen, neither did New York City’s Central Park, or Mexico City’s Zocalo. Today, zoning restrictions, urban revitalization and renewal programs, new towns and disparate tax codes are the tools with which planners work.

Utopias

From the mythological city of Atlantis to the technotopian Japanese ‘High-Tech City,’ utopias have always provided an alternative to the problems of the current urban framework. Among the more famous of these are the Renaissance projects of Georgio, Samozzi, ands Fillarte, the highly mechanized cities of Anotonio Sant’Elia, the flying cities of Krutikov, the Archigram Group’s Plug-In City, Urbanisme Volumetrique and the Japanese Metabolists. Dystopian visions dominate the literary world as evidenced through Bacon’s The New Atlantis, Orwell’s 1984, Huxley’s Brave New World, Gibson’s Neuromancer, as well as the film world as evidenced through Fritz Lang’s Metropolis and Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner.

The concept of arcology has often been filed by academics under the 'utopian' heading. However, Paolo Soleri argues quite vehemently that it should not. Utopia, he believes, implies perfection and staticity: two concepts that are foreign to arcology. "The hypothesis of creating an Utopia," he says, "is so full of innocence, I would even say stupidity, that it does not interest me in the least" (Soleri as quoted by Stanishev, 1993).

Predicting the Future

Successful predictions pull from a broad base of fields and present not one simple vision, but a range of alternatives. Perhaps as important as finding the right answers is asking the right questions. However, precaution must be maintained. Gung-ho technotopians who believe technology can solve all human suffering are equally as dangerous as pessimistic technophobic nostalgists who yearn for 'the good 'ol days.'

There would be little point in predicting if there was not the belief that we can influence the development of a better the future. The 21st century holds the promise for massive changes in the way we live. We are not powerless to shape our fates. If we can explore and understand the trends for the future, then we have the chance to avoid the worst that it may offer, and the chance to take advantage of the best. This is the fundamental belief behind the idea of arcology, and the idea of this thesis.

Layout of the Thesis

This chapter has defined the thesis and placed it in the broader context of future predicting, and urban planning, both realistic and utopian. It has provided a brief introduction to the concept of arcology and has defined, chronicled and insulted its principal enemy and raison d'être: suburbia.

Chapter 2, ‘Arcology and the Arcosanti Laboratory,’ introduces Paolo Soleri, and presents his theory of arcology, paying special attention to its ideas of miniaturization and integration, and its impacts on society and nature. It then provides a comprehensive description of the Arcosanti project, examining its purpose, location, design, support, progress, strengths, weaknesses and results.

Chapter 3, ‘Arcology: Solution for the Information Age?,’ begins by defining the terms and trends of the Information Age. It then discusses its possible impacts on urban society and the urban environment. Most importantly, it attempts to answer the central thesis question by presenting both affirmative and negative responses on how these impacts should or will make the theory of arcology more relevant in the Information Age.

Chapter 4, ‘The Future,’ discusses the future of arcology and the Arcosanti project. It presents alternative visions for urban planning and design, and examines some of the hopes and fears for the future. Included is a summary of the results of the thesis.

Arcology and the Arcosanti Laboratory

For the past thirty years, an Italian man has tried to warn America and the rest of the world that the way we now live is going to kill us, physically and spiritually. And he says he has the solution. He's been trying to prove this solution by building a massive pile of concrete on a mesa sixty-five miles north of Phoenix, Arizona.

Who is this guy? What is he thinking? What is this pile? In short, the answers are, respectively, Paolo Soleri, arcology, and Arcosanti. In long, the answers are this chapter.

 

The Creator: Paolo Soleri

 

Paolo Soleri is an architect, philosopher, artist, craftsman, teacher, eccentric and prophet. His work has been praised as glorious, and criticized as ridiculous, by architects, engineers, environmentalists and urban planners, as well as by experts and novices, and optimists and pessimists in almost every other field. By far his greatest achievements have been the development of his theory of arcology, and the construction of its physical manifestation, Arcosanti. Undoubtedly, he will be remembered as one of the most notable urban visionaries of the twentieth century.

Born in Turin, Italy in 1919, Paolo Soleri studied at the Torino Polytechnico from which he was awarded a Ph.D. with highest honors in architecture. In 1947, he came to the United States to spend a year and a half in fellowship with Frank Lloyd Wright. In 1950, he returned to Italy where he was commissioned to design and build a ceramics factory. This association with the ceramic craft provided him with invaluable knowledge that would later contribute to his silt-cast architectural structures and his ceramic and bronze wind-bells. In 1956, he returned to America to settle permanently in Scottsdale, Arizona, where he built his experimental Earth House (a project praised for its organic nature), and completed his Mesa City project: a design of a city of two million people to be housed in an area the size of Manhattan. Though Soleri now denounces this project for its linear expansion and structural separation, the project provided a logical step in the formulation of his theory of arcology.

With the 1969 publication of his book Arcology: The City in the Image of Man, Soleri’s career was forever changed. Henceforth, it would be devoted almost exclusively to propounding his arcological theory and to building Arcosanti. Soleri has since maintained a vigorous career that combines the oversight of Arcosanti’s construction and educational seminars, with architectural research and international lecture tours. Now in his late 70s, Soleri continues this active career. In 1995, he was commissioned to design and build an amphitheater for a nearby community college. Presently, he is designing plans for Japan’s Hyper Building Research Committee, a committee set up to build an enormous, self-contained building in Japan that is based on arcologically-related principles.

Listed among Soleri’s influences are Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Buckminster Fuller and Antoni Gaudi. Perhaps his greatest influence has been his former mentor, Frank Lloyd

Wright, who instilled in him such disillusionment that arcology may be seen as the antithesis of Wright's Broadacre City. Also influential has been Soleri’s hometown of Turin, whose narrow, winding streets and compact houses provided him with an ideal image of urban life. These influences, however, do not nearly explain Soleri’s accomplishments; the rest can only be explained by his highly creative and visionary mind.

   

The Theory: Arcology

 

Arcology is the term coined by Paolo Soleri that describes the concept that embodies the fusion of architecture (arc-) with ecology (-ology). Together, the living and the built interact as an evolved organ to produce a highly integrated and compact, pedestrian-oriented, three-dimensional urban form known as an arcology. An arcology is the direct reaction to urban sprawl. It radically reorganizes urban life into a single mega-structure in an attempt to minimize the use of energy, raw materials and land; reduce waste and pollution; and heighten the interaction and accessibility of the urban environment. A central tenet of the theory is that the city is the necessary instrument for the evolution of man.

Arcologies, however, are not blue-prints for a new urban civilization, but rather a guideline toward a new option. Though he vehemently defends its founding principles, Soleri regards his arcologies not as literal proposals, but as attempts to give form to his architectural theory. His primary concern is the validity of his thesis.

Of Soleri's dozens of books and articles, his thesis is most clearly outlined in part I of his most famous and important text, Arcology: The City in the Image of Man (1969). This is not to say it is a very clear outline; his writing is not always comprehensible. In the book, Soleri reflects his always inventive nature through his arsenal of invented jargon (e.g., auspicable reach, incommensurability), and through his penchant for hyphenation (e.g., pollution-recycling-cost dilemmas, energy-time-space consumption). So dense and odd is

his writing that, at times, it borders on the absurd: "So it is that the present may lose the brittleness of a flaking plane (obsolescence) separating an estranged past from a foreign future and may become instead the powerful thrust of an engrossing past pressing against that which is not yet" (Soleri, 1969; 18). In order to better explain his ideas, Soleri (thankfully) uses diagrams, and taps one of his greatest talents: the ability to draw beautiful and awe-inspiring illustrations.

The Complexity-Miniaturization-Duration Imperative

Arcology: The City in the Image of Man, an unwieldy large book that spans a monstrous four feet when opened, is prefaced with the ironic statement "this book is about miniaturization." Though at first the statement is simply amusing, a closer inspection of the book’s ideas will reveal that the statement is indeed very true; the entire concept of arcology is predicated on the fact that all matter must miniaturize in order to survive ("Miniaturize or die"). From bacteria to God, all life follows this ‘complexity-miniaturization-duration imperative.’ By this Soleri means that all evolved matter must increase in complexity and become more compact in order to continue the process of evolution. Termed the ‘urban effect,’ it allows an organism to efficiently use time and space, reducing its ‘time-space straight-jacket.’

The city, too, may be seen as an organism--one that must follow these basic principles of life. Yet, today’s urban sprawl does not. Instead of acting as a compact and complex organism, it exists as a thin tenuous film, and is therefore, according to Soleri, evolutionary doomed. Suburbia, he says, is "the most consuming, the most wasteful, the most polluting, the most segregative kind of sheltering we can come up with" (Soleri, 1996). He thus offers his arcological principles as an answer.

Though an arcology is often referred to as a mega-structure (mega-), it is actually a miniaturized (mini-) and highly dense city. This is done by taking full advantage of the third-dimension, allowing humans to build a new habitation of between 100 and 500 stories in order to shrink the urban footprint to about two percent of its previous size.

Integration

"Segregation," Soleri writes, "is the most pervasive threat to the dignity and well-being of the individual and the group" (Soleri, 1983; 33). Arcologies combat this by eliminating the automobile, the main protagonist and facilitator of sprawl, from within its shell, and by weaving living, learning, leisure, culture and working together into a cohesive and integrated frame. By locating different areas within a ten-minute walking distance, and designating them for mixed-use purposes, segregation along racial, ethnic, religious, economic, generational and social lines is effectively eliminated.

This is also made possible by dramatically increasing urban densities. A comparison of the densities of today's urban areas and the densities of Soleri's example arcologies demonstrates this significant increase: London has a population density of 11 people per acre, Delhi has 72 per acre, Paris 50, and New York 33, compared with the proposed arcologies Babel Canyon with 948 people per acre, Arcube with 1100, and Hexahedron with 1200.

The Social

Soleri stands in direct opposition to popular thought when he declares not the usual Bauhaus idea of "form follows function," but instead the idea of "function follows form." He substantiates this by noting that his idea is, in large part, the way things work in nature. "A social pattern," he writes, "is influenced, if not directed, by the physical pattern that shelters it" (Soleri, 1969; 31). He incessantly quotes his piano metaphor: "I design the piano (the city) so that the residents can play their music (live their lives)" (personal interview). "Social, ethical, political, and aesthetic implications are left out," he says "as they are valid and final only if and when physical conditions are realistically organized" (Soleri, 1969; 13). An examination of his collected work, however, reveals that he indeed does generate numerous ideas of an arcology’s social implications.

Arcologies will no doubt produce a very different way of living. Soleri believes that they will be instruments to advance human consciousness. He recognizes, however, that social life within mega-structures, because of the constant interactions it engenders, would be an "intolerable babble" without what he calls "equity and congruence" (Soleri in Higbee, 1971). Therefore arcologies are based on a foundation of equity. This has drawn many to compare his arcologies to socialist utopian visions. Indeed, Soleri is a harsh critic of capitalist society. Free enterprise, he believes, is what has made the cities of the United States "a monument to chaos, social savagery, and amorphism" (Soleri, 1969; 7).

Soleri further attacks Western culture as wasteful, inhumane, greedy and too wrapped up in consumerism. A materialistically oriented culture in which consumption is equated with happiness, he believes, is the main protagonist of environmental and social destruction. "Materialism, hedonism, fun," he writes, "they’re good for weekends, but for a nation and a way of life, it’s sad" (Soleri in Banks, 1996). Arcology provides an answer by advocating a life of frugality as "a more effective and equitable path into the future for a limited planet" (Soleri, 1983; 21). Society in an arcology will not be a society of plenty, but a society of enough.

It will also be a society with more leisure time. The miniaturization of the city, by reducing the ‘time-space straight jacket,’ will allow its residents a few extra years of useful and positive time. This time may be further extended, Soleri suggests, by the possibility of robotization freeing humans from the responsibility of labor. With this extra time, residents can participate in cultural and artistic activities. The importance of these is

evident in the arcology designs which devote much of their space to studios and public areas.

The Natural

Three-fourths of the word ar-col-o-gy derives from the word ecology. This highlights the importance of the environment to the theory. Foremost is its willingness to protect and preserve it. By using only about two percent as much land as a comparable typical city, an arcology allows for a far greater preservation of land. This is furthered by the location of arcologies on otherwise unusable and poor unarable land, leaving fertile areas for preservation or crop cultivation.

Surrounding each arcology will be a vast expanse of wild, untouched landscape. Thus, the resident of an arcology will be within walking distance of a beautiful and undefiled landscape so that they may be, at once, a city dweller and a country person. In his writing, Soleri stresses the importance of this human interaction with nature.

Arcologies are designed to promote a benign interaction of human and natural processes. They use renewable energy sources such as wind and the sun in order to reduce pollution and dependence on fossil fuels. Air conditioning and heating will not be generated by expensive machines but by the dulling and harnessing of the sun’s energy.

The Omega Seed

Soleri bases many of his arcological ideas within his theological hypothesis, the ‘Omega Seed.’ This hypothesis concerns the ultimate events in the history of the world in which matter becomes spirit. Here, everything will come together in a conclusive and comprehensive, although remote, reality: the Big Crunch, the opposite of the Big Bang. Arcologies, Soleri believes, are the logical evolutionary step in this process.

Examples

Soleri graphically renders plans for thirty arcologies in part II of his book Arcology: The City in the Image of Man. They float on oceans, are suspended like bridges across canyons, scale cliffs, occupy unused mining pits, and even float in space. The arcologies range in size from Arcollective with a population of 2,000 to Babelnoah with a population of 6 million, with densities that range from 300 to 1,200 people per acre. The last of the thirty arcologies drawn is the most famous: Arcosanti.

   

The Laboratory: Arcosanti

 

Paolo Soleri is not one to be satisfied simply to think, draw and argue; he wants to transfer his vision into stone and flesh. And he has, though only 5% of it so far, with his project named after the Italian words for ‘before things’: Arcosanti. Though built upon arcological principles, it is not an actual arcology, but rather what Soleri calls an ‘urban laboratory.’ It is designed to serve as a research and study center for the social, economic and ecological implications of its architectural and theoretical framework. The central idea behind it is that there "can be no learning without experimentation" (Soleri in Stanishev, 1993). Paolo Soleri writes, "I consider this undertaking as necessary and urgent as any program concerning man" (Soleri, 1969; 119).

Arcosanti's aim is to teach the world ways to improve social conditions while lessening the destructive impacts on the earth. Arcosanti, Soleri believes, "can have the most far-reaching impact on society, environmentally, socially, politically, pedagogically, technologically, culturally and aesthetically" (Soleri in Plagens, 1979). If successful, it will become a model for how the world builds its cities.

Twenty-seven years later, when asked what he has learned from Arcosanti, Soleri responds: "I’ve found out that life is very difficult, and that people have a hard time to live and work together . . . at the same time, I’ve found out that there is no alternative, so more and more I need to convey that suburban sprawl is anti-life" (personal interview).

Location

Arcosanti is located high in the Sonoran desert near Cordes Junction, Arizona, approximately sixty-five miles north of Phoenix. Built on the south-facing wall of a deep

canyon, it rises dramatically against a backdrop of mesas and mountains. Its location is in accordance with the arcological principle of locating on infertile land. Paolo Soleri notes that historically the desert has proved to be a place where new civilizations arise (e.g., Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Hinduism). He says "you can count Arcology as an example of the same thing" (Soleri in Stanishev, 1993). The desert location has the additional benefit of testing the ability of humans to healthfully and peacefully coexist with nature, even within a harsh environment with minimal water supplies and blisteringly hot summers.

Arcosanti, designed for a population of 5,000, occupies only ten acres of a 4,000 acre site, 860 of which are deeded and 3,200 of which are leased state land. The remaining land has been kept in its natural state.

Design

Arcosanti's design has changed several times since it was first included in the book Arcology in which it was a relatively mundane 25-story cubic structure. The energy crisis in the 1970s led Soleri to change his design to a more energy efficient structure that could better utilize solar energy. Continuing experiments and developing ideas led Soleri to change his design yet again into ‘Arcosanti 2000,’ his latest version which includes a massive greenhouse. Soleri does not anticipate changing this design again.

Throughout these changes, Arcosanti has retained its many unique shapes, including Soleri’s signature apse, formed by earth-cast cement and decorated with curving façades and brightly colored designs. Offices, domiciles, public spaces and private areas are patterned so that many kinds of activities can occur simultaneously under one roof.

Arcosanti efficiently harnesses natural power through the use of extensive solar heating and cooling systems and by a series of greenhouses that cling to the wall of the canyon below and act as solar collectors for winter heat. These greenhouses have the additional benefit of providing gardening space for public and private use.

Support  

Arcosanti is a project of the Cosanti Foundation, a non-profit educational organization (president: Paolo Soleri) which serves as the umbrella organization through which Soleri’s philosophical, educational, research and construction work is performed. It derives its funding from visitor’s fees (80,000 annually at $4 each), donations, the sale of T-shirts and Soleri’s books, and revenues from educational-related activities like guided tours and festivals. Additional revenue and help come from the fees for and work from the participants of the Arcosanti Workshop, a workshop designed to be a ‘learning by

doing’ experience in which participants study Soleri’s theories while helping to build Arcosanti.

By far the greatest contributor to keeping the Arcosanti project alive, however, has oddly come from the proceeds derived from the sales of wind bells. Known as Soleri Bells, they are ceramic and bronze bells crafted and embellished by individual artisans, and designed by Paolo Soleri himself. Each year, these bells, which have become the unofficial emblem of Arcosanti, accrue over $1 million in sales in gift shops and museums around the world. Added to the $1 million estimated revenue from everything else produces an annual revenue figure for the Arcosanti project of $2 million per year. When taxes, insurance and wages are deducted, however, the figure greatly shrinks, leaving only $200,000 a year left for actual construction (Economist, 1994).

Progress  

The relatively slim budget of $200,000 per year has resulted in extremely slow progress. Though construction has been continuing for the past twenty-seven years, virtually all of it was completed between 1970 and 1976. Soleri, however, remains committed to completing the project, but he is now asking for less. His hope now is that there will be enough continued interest so that a 'Critical Mass' of about 500 people can be achieved before he dies—just enough to sustain the construction momentum.

Currently, Arcosanti consists of ten buildings which have been constructed by thirty-five hundred people over the past twenty-seven years. Within these are offices, a library, two large arches that provide spaces for public events, a music amphitheater that can seat 600 people, and two apses that serve as solar-heated workshops for crafting the ceramic and bronze bells. Only one multi-story building is open to the public. In it, linked by four narrow flights of stairs, are a visitor’s center, a gift shop, a cafe and a bakery. There are currently about sixty residents and a handful of off-site employees who make up the construction staff, administration and support personnel. Residents are generally those who, during the course of their Workshop, have demonstrated special skills, aptitude or enthusiasm for the project, and who have been accommodated with an available staff position.

Presently, the main construction project is the East Crescent Complex, a three-story building containing greenhouse-heated living and business spaces which will surround the Colly Soleri Music Center.

   

The Prognosis: . . .

 

Arcosanti’s principal strength has been in the attention it has received and sustained for over twenty-five years. This interest, however, has been waning ever since its peak in the mid-1970s. This is so, in part, because of Soleri's inability to communicate his message very clearly; a charismatic leader that wrote and spoke in easily digestable English would no doubt better advance the theory of arcology. The waning interest is also the result of Arcosanti's constrained finances. This explains why progress has been painfully slow. Today, Arcosanti is still only a construction site for a construction site.

Arcosanti has faced problems of public support because of its apparent lack of privacy and its very frugal lifestyle. People find the idea of living in the Arizona summer, crowded and without air conditioning, very unappealing. The elderly, the handicapped and the lazy find the endless flights of stairs to be infuriating. Such a dense environment, most Arcosanti visitors say, is good only in theory. Architecture critic James Shipsky writes "Soleri understands life only on a biological level and reduces it to a bare minimum" (Shipsky, 1982).

The true test of success, however, has yet come. Will Arcosanti fulfill its goal of becoming a model on which to develop future cities? Will arcological principles become more important in tomorrow’s information society? Soleri appears very confident: "we’re the only real thing happening in architecture and planning, and you can quote me on that" (Banks, 1996). Does anyone else agree? These are just some of the questions that I will explore in the next chapter.

CHAPTER 3

Arcology: Solution for the Information Age?

Society is facing the prospect of enormous changes as we enter the 21St century--changes as great, if not greater, than those of the industrial revolution, but telescoped into a far shorter time scale. Buzz phrases like ‘cyberspace,’ ‘the information superhighway,’ and ‘the information age’ are invading our vocabulary with a force that elicits fear, hope and, above all, uncertainty. What will the future hold? What effect will the changing

technology have on our everyday lives? Will humans be able to survive another century? There are billions of new questions. Soon, there will also be billions of new computers, and billions of new people. The new millennium is less than three years away.

Where are we headed? Paolo Soleri says towards imminent destruction unless we change our ways. But is this really so? He formulated his ideas in an age when the walkman was thought of as a distant super-advanced technology. Today, Soleri can walk to one of the computers in the Arcosanti office and, with the stroke of a few keys and the click of a few mouse buttons, he can access detailed street maps of every location in the United States, browse through the Turin webpage, or hold a real-time video conference with an architect in southwestern Tasmania. In fifty years, he will be able to do a whole lot more (if he survives to age 126).

This chapter serves as an updated prognosis of Soleri’s theory of arcology. It will attempt to answer the central thesis question: To what extent should or will arcology become more valid in the Information Age? First, however, it is necessary to define the terms and trends of the information age.

Information Age Terms

New terms are entering the English lexicon every day. As I sit here typing on this 1996 Microsoft Word version 6.0 word processing program, I am constantly reminded via a squiggled red line on the screen, that the word ‘cyberspace’ does not exist; not even a computer program is able to keep pace with the terminology. Below are a few explanations to help the reader keep pace:

Just as past ages were called ‘bronze’ and ‘iron’ after the dominant technology of the times, this period is certain to be known as the information age as unquestionably the current information technology explosion will forever transform the way we live and work. The integration of information and communication technologies into our professional and private lives is transforming our society into the ‘information society.’ This society may be symbolized by the semiconductor chip just as the industrial society could be symbolized by the steam engine.

The information society is characterized by many terms, most of which have been created simply by the addition of the prefix ‘tele-’; the telegraph was just the beginning. The key technology of the information age is telecommunications, the communication system that enables access to and distribution of information. Currently, this is manifested in the form of telephones, fax machines, cellular phones, pagers, and most importantly, computer networks. These manifestations, and those slated for the future, are known collectively as Information Technology, a term which I will, for the sake of frugality (Soleri would be so proud), often refer to as simply IT. The convergence of different types of telecommunications (voice, text, data, and still and moving images) into a single, powerful computer based system is termed telematics.

The activity facilitated by this is, not surprisingly, called teleactivity. Included within this subheading are teleshopping (shopping by using IT), teleconferencing (conferencing by using IT), telebanking (banking by using IT), telesocializing (socializing by using IT), and telecommuting (replacing the home-work commute by working at home by using IT).

These teleactivites are all made possible through the information superhighway, the networking device between computers that allows them to communicate. It is something that can be neither seen nor touched, but can be talked about ad nauseum (e.g., President Clinton’s oft-repeated line that it will "help us build the bridge to the 21St century"). The non-material space that contains all the electronic data linked by this network is called cyberspace.

The internet is by far the largest system that uses the ‘superhighway.’ First developed by the Pentagon and used by the military, then used by academics, it is now also used by companies and individuals worldwide. The most widely used and user-friendly portion of the internet is the world wide web. With just a few clicks of the mouse, a web ‘surfer’ can access information on virtually any topic. Another part of the internet is the system of email, short for electronic mail, which functions much the same as regular mail, but is made of bytes instead of physical material.

The information age is also characterized by virtual reality, a computer-based system that supplies audio and visual effects to project the user into an imaginary three-dimensional environment that provides the impression of reality. Another term important to define is artificial intelligence, the computer-based emulation of the human characteristics of memory, calculation, anticipation, process control and decision making. 

Information Age Trends

The diffusion of IT into all levels of life is transforming our society into an information society. As IT becomes more powerful, more accessible, more diversified, more pervasive and more mobile, it will present society with many new solutions and many new problems. Like electricity and the automobile, it will have impacts that are important in themselves, and even more important in the waves of change they elicit.

Not everyone agrees, however, that there will be such dramatic changes. Writer Mark Surman slams techno-revolutionary fervor, condemning it as sensationalism:

The idea of [the information] revolution feels good because it gives us a sense of specialness, a sense that we’re living through a unique moment in history. . . Unfortunately, this warm, fuzzy, special-moment-in-history feeling is at the tip of a big pile of collective disillusion. . . . In each new technology, we figure that we have found a magic wand that will save us all (Surman, 1994).Utopia expert Howard Mansfield echoes this sentiment by citing the example of the invention of glass as a building material. He writes:

At the end of World War I, one architect wrote: "It is not the crazy caprice of a poet that glass will bring a new culture. It is a fact." German architects wrote fervently about the new material. Bruno Taut proposed entire cities of glass. "Hurray for the transparent, the clear!" he wrote in 1919. "Hurray for purity! Hurray for crystal! Hurray and hurray again for the fluid, the graceful, the angular, the sparkling, the flashing, the light—hurray for everlasting architecture!" (Mansfield, 1990; 2).The introductions of the light bulb, the telephone, radio, television, satellites and cable, he says, have generated similar hype.

But is this all just hype? An increasing number of academics are declaring a firm no. These include Christine Boyer, Stephen Graham, John Naisbitt, Alvin Toffler, Joel Garreau and Manuel Castells. Another, John Gotze, writes "the super-information-highway [sic] . . . seems to be of greater importance to cities than traditional highways ever were" (Gotze, 1996; 4).

Nevertheless, there has been a general lack of academic attention paid to the advent of the information age and its possible impacts on urban areas. Because most information technologies are very new or not yet available, there is little empirical study on how they relate to the city. Soleri, himself, knows very little about this area. He says, "I seem to be one person who is totally outside the web because I don’t have a computer . . . but I am a person who has a strong feeling about what might happen, both in the direction of great, and in the direction of dangerous".

IT has already made a substantial impact on society. Today, computer use has become a normal part of many Americans’ lives. It is almost inconceivable to remember an era in which check processing, payroll accounting, stock exchange trades and airline reservations were handled without computer technology. Will it ever again be possible to call a company without having to endure a computerized touch-tone menu?

We are, however, in only the first stages of this shift into an information society—a shift that will become more pronounced as the first generation which has grown up computer literate, and even computer dependent, is just recently entering the work force. Just two years ago, most of America had never heard of the world wide web. Now, it is on almost every advertisement, and everyone seems to have a web site (e.g., www.arcosanti.org, www.sheckys.com/arcology/toc.htm, www.geraldo.com). Statistics on computer use become outdated after just one year. Already with an estimated 100 million users worldwide, the internet-using population is doubling in size each year, and the amount of information on it is growing several times faster (ECISPO, 1996).

Though individuals in every generation since the Industrial Revolution have felt that they were watching the most rapid changes ever seen in history, to a large extent, they have all been correct.  

 

Arcology in the Information Age

 

The following section is divided under three subheadings—Place, People and Environment. These represent the three principal facets through which information technology may affect the importance and likelihood that arcologies will serve as a model for cities of the information age. For purposes of clarity, these subheadings will include only the most important trends that bear relevance to these changes.

However, because the city and its residents are incredibly complex phenomena that are affected by an infinite set of variables, there is considerable overlap within and among these sections. To quote Soleri, "so many things belong to so many other things!" (Soleri, 1983). Technology affects population which affects urban development which affects food supply which affects global development, etc. It is almost impossible to derive a simple cause-and-effect relationship concerning the future. To again quote Soleri, "no matter where you turn, you are presented with many question marks." The rest of this chapter is an attempt to answer some of these question marks and to apply them to the theory of arcology.

Place

The information age promises to fundamentally alter the qualities, importance, and even definition of place. Because arguably the most striking characteristic of arcologies is their very high densities, it is essential to analyze the projected impacts of information technology on density. Will the cities of the developed world move toward a high-density arcology model as Paolo Soleri reasons they should, or will the process of sprawl long at work in America continue? Are American cities like Los Angeles, Phoenix and Houston aberrations, or a portent of what cities around the world may eventually look like? Will the city as a place of wealth, power, culture and knowledge cease to exist if traditionally city-based functions are performed instead by electronic networks?

Decreasing Significance of Place

Most commentators on the IT-urban link predict the collapse of centralized cities. Perhaps most popular among these is Alvin Toffler who paints an image of a future in which half empty office towers are replaced by fully equipped ‘electronic cottages.’ Cities, he says, have been successful because they have the fundamental advantage of physical proximity which allows for the efficient exchange of goods and services. IT will dissolve the need for this advantage as it will allow efficiency to occur regardless of place. By allowing real-time access to and interaction between almost all aspects of society, IT would thus lead to a declining significance of place. According to Edge City author Joel Garreau:

The implications of these dematerializing technologies are staggering. Their very purpose is to make distance irrelevant. When you start thinking of the potential of these technologies, you begin to wonder why we build cities at all. (Garreau, 1991; 134).With advances in information technology, people will no longer have to go to places because places will go to people. Functions traditionally performed in central locations will be performed on-line from remote locations. While it was once necessary for companies to be centrally located in order to hold committee meetings, they can now hold teleconferences from anywhere. While once students had to trek to a downtown library, they can access all needed information on the web. While once office workers had to drive to work, they can save themselves traffic anxiety and telecommute. Email replaces postal delivery, teleshopping replaces the mall, telesocializing replaces the coffee shop: IT replaces the city.

Most of these IT-urban link commentators say the result will be a great increase in urban sprawl. Just as advances in transportation technology facilitated sprawl, they argue, so too, and to an even greater extent, will the increased usage and capacity of IT. The US Office of Technology Assessment (OTA) report "The Technological Reshaping of Metropolitan America," shares this belief by saying that "technology is connecting economic activities, enabling them to be physically farther apart, reducing the competitive advantage of high-cost, congested urban locations, and allowing people and businesses more (but not total) freedom to choose where they will live and work" (OTA, 1995). The fact that companies will be able to locate themselves anywhere, urban or rural, is highlighted most clearly by the recent choice of Microsoft—widely acknowledged as the future company—to locate its headquarters in the woods of western Washington.

Telecommuting, currently increasing exponentially in use, is often touted as the protagonist of this trend. The OTA report shows that telecommuting is "facilitating an ever more spatially dispersed economy, which in turn is causing metropolitan areas to become larger, more dispersed, and less densely populated" (OTA, 1995). The result would possibly be the realization of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Broadacre City. Trendy terms used for this include ‘megalopolises,’ ‘sprawl towns,’ ‘exurbs,’ and ‘cyurbia.’

The IT-fueled increase in sprawl is already underway. The rural town of Nevada, Missouri, the self-proclaimed ‘First Telecommunity,’ serves as a model for other rural communities to provide themselves with otherwise impossible business opportunities

through the use of IT. Also, for the first time in 200 years, there are more people in the US that are moving to rural areas than there are moving to urban areas.

If these sprawl-inducing predictions of IT prove correct, then clearly our settlement patterns are not headed toward arcology-like urban forms. The continuation of sprawl, however, would strengthen the message of arcology. The enormous list of detrimental effects of sprawl listed in chapter 1 to which arcology is a reaction is likely to become even more pronounced. This would, in turn, make a response even more urgent.

A rigidly defined urban space, however, is not very well suited for a constantly changing information age city. Technology has altered human lifestyles at an accelerating rate since the birth of the industrial revolution; almost all visions of the information age predict this trend will continue. Because the technological changes so far have required major adjustments to human settlement patterns, cities have had to be flexible in order to survive. An arcology’s rigid design, therefore, may prove insufficient to cope with a rapidly changing era. In just 25 years, Arcosanti has undergone several major changes in design; how can any significant change be made to an already built concrete arcology?

On a more extreme level, the decreasing significance of place may render the basis of arcology, the ‘complexity-miniaturization-duration imperative,’ obsolete. Arcology is predicated on Soleri’s idea that only through physical miniaturization can cities become highly-efficient and -evolved organisms. However, it is increasingly evident that real-time information technology may also allow cities to function like organisms. In a speech at Habitat II, Franz Nahrada says that IT holds the promise of a "more coherent use of urban resources by the emergence of a kind of nerve system, that would allow cities to react and behave more like living systems, in real time and in a structured way" (Nahrada, 1996). He continues:

We are discovering that the exchange of information in real time is in fact much more fundamental to the function of every life form than we have previously assumed—and we can learn and achieve very much if we consider the city as an emerging life form of its own. . . . The quick adjustment of every part of the urban organism to environmental changes and internal deficiencies is crucial for its overall duration and sustainability (Nahrada, 1996).Paolo Soleri counters this argument by saying that IT does not satisfy the complexification part of the imperative because computer technology is "complicated but not complex." Coates and Jarratt, however, state that "complexity is an emerging characteristic of almost all human endeavors, institutions, and systems" (Coates, 1992; 20).

There is not, however, a general consensus that information technology will reduce the need for cities. In Telecommunications and the City, Graham and Marvin call the view of a collapsed city "naive, shortsighted and dangerous," saying that it "perpetuates simplistic ideas about cities and telecommunications and undermines the potential for critical and sophisticated policy debates" (Graham, 1996; 377). The history of resilience and adaptability of cities such as Vienna, Osaka and London through centuries, millennia even, of dramatic change is proof that cities can and will persist. The interpretations that they will simply perish because of IT are arguably based on technologically deterministic

ideas that have too narrow a focus. The idea of isolated workers, free from all the pressures of the world is a romantic notion. So too is the notion of a technology that can completely usurp and substitute all the benefits of urban life. There is no reason to think that humans will, for the first time in history, become indifferent to their physical surroundings.

Another strong argument against the collapse of cities is that the choice to live in cities includes a long list of reasons of which economics is only one. The truth is, humans are social creatures who have strong social demands for cultural activities, education, and leisure. It is doubtful that a web-cast of a movie can truly replace the experience of going to the cinema, or that clicking through an on-line retail catalogue can substitute window-shopping. Telepresence will never be able to recreate the feeling of walking in Paris.

Increasing Significance of Place

IT may increase the importance of place. If people are telecommuting from their suburban homes instead of driving to work in the city, they will logically value their surroundings more simply because they will be spending more time within them. A fully suburban or rural existence without the daily dose of city life might drive people mad with boredom. This point may be even more valid in a society in which the efficiency of technology can bring about the prospect of increased leisure time.

Paolo Soleri argues that this prospect will lead to the need for a different settlement pattern. Always the visionary, in 1983, he wrote:

The computer age offers unprecedented access to the integration of the three major components of life—living, learning, working. The habitat grid we have constructed for ourselves in the last 100 years is totally alien to such integration. It will be a long and costly battle to redefine a landscape that enables society to really identify with the habitat it constructs for itself" (Soleri, 1983; 32).Obviously, arcologies would be his suggestion for the redefined landscape.

The US Congress report "Information Technology and the Future of Cities," offers another refutation of the vision of IT-induced sprawl. Its authors argue that improvements in telecommunications will make cities more appealing in the future because they will increase the need for face-to-face interactions by helping people start more relationships and make more contacts. They say, "if face-to-face meetings rise in importance, then more people will try to group together in areas that are easily accessible to their many contacts, and cities will still have an economic role to play in the informational economy" (Gaspar, 1996; 3).

IT may also lead to an increasing feasibility of arcological principles as cities will be better able to locate, as proposed by Soleri, on undesirable and often remote land. An IT-equipped arcology floating in the ocean would thus be as economically feasible in the information age as a city located in an easily accessible harbor.  

People

Information Technology may significantly alter social patterns in the information age. Most relevant to the future of arcology among these alterations are the IT-induced alienation and the blurring of the virtual and real worlds, the loss of freedom and privacy, the homogenization of culture through westernization, and the exacerbation of economic inequalities. Each change may both increase or decrease the importance and likelihood of that arcologies will serve as a model for cities in the information age.

Alienation and the Blurring of the Virtual and the Real

One of the most glaring deficiencies of the IT-sprawl link is that it neglects the emerging societal and human needs which may have the counter-effect of inducing greater urban concentrations. As technology infiltrates almost all aspects of society, people may feel increasingly alienated, which may fuel the greater need for community. The inability to understand IT’s complexity may lead to an increased desire for the more graspable ideas of corner stores and public parks. Already in 1997, scientists can clone sheep; is it too far off that they will be able to clone humans too? This possibility, and the mapping of the human genome among other things, threaten to rob humanity of its mystery and specialness, breaking it down, like the computer, into tiny bits—a threat that may lead to an increased longing for simplicity and human contact. The popularity of nostalgia-based communities, such as those developed by Disney, is evidence of this desire for people to recapture the simpler, more community-oriented, pre-information super-highway life.

In view of the alienation and social isolation possibly brought by IT, the pedestrian-friendly, community-oriented environments of an arcology may provide a more desirable structure for the information age than the auto-dependent suburbs. This may become even more true as the increasing infiltration of the virtual world in the information age may significantly alter our perceptions of reality. As the virtual experience becomes more and more like the real experience, the line between the two may become blurred. This may forever alter the definition of a city from a space of physical places to a space of relationships—a place in which trade, social interaction, entertainment and administration may all take place over an electronic web. John Gotze argues that "the ease of accessibility makes cyberspace a challenge to our understanding of the meaning of public space, and essentially the meaning of urbanity" (Gotze 1996; 14).

The cyber-jargon in use today illustrates the correlation between virtual and urban space: a computer conferencing system is a ‘virtual community;’ a local electronic bulletin board is a ‘public square;’ and the digital networking device is the ‘information super highway.’ In City of Bits, William Mitchell further equates the virtual and urban worlds:

Just as the ancient polis provided an agora, markets, and theaters for those living within its walls, the twenty-first century bitsphere will require a growing number of virtual gathering places, exchanges, and

entertainment spots for its plugged-in populace. . . For designers and planners, the task of the twenty-first century will be to build the bitsphere--a worldwide, electronically mediated environment in which networks are everywhere" (Mitchell, 1995; 1).With the blurring of the virtual and the real through the use of tele-everything, people may become progressively less interested in the physical city, and more interested in what is on their screens. Images would become substitutes for direct experience. Metropolis writer Cathy Lang Ho writes, "as technology makes the nether-reaches of the globe ever more accessible and consumable, our immediate surroundings seem to engage us less and less" (Ho, 1996; 3). In CyberCities, M. Christine Boyer paints a grim picture of this possibility: The contemporary city stands with all its gaping wounds as crime escalates, megacities erupt, blood continues to spill, disease accelerates, and unemployment and undereducation continue. We experience this global urban disruption instantaneously and continuously with every telecasted news report, yet we remain incapable of immediate action, frozen in front of our computer terminals (Boyer, 1996; 11).This prospect may suggest that the desire for arcologies will decrease in the information age because, as people care less about outside problems such as famine and environmental destruction, they become less interested in remedying them. There are obvious dangers involved in this interpretation. Boyer warns of a loss of humanity showing that the stereotypical geek glued all day to the computer screen may not be too far from the stereotype of all humanity. She writes: . . . all our bodily senses seem to get transferred to, plugged into, or downloaded into machines, as our body parts become simple emitters and receivers of information stimuli in a sensorial feedback loop that links our senses of sight, touch, smell and hearing to information flowing through computer banks and simulation programs. . . As cyberspace pulls us into its electronic grasp, we withdraw from the world, reality becomes increasingly immaterial (Boyer, 1996; 11).Paolo Soleri argues of the dangers of this possibility. He says: There is a danger in separating the mind and the body. The obsolescence of the flesh . . . might mean the obsolescence of the brain. . . . Life is not just about communication. If we were pure spirits—if we were angels, there would be no problem with scattering about. There is no angelical [sic] condition that is disembodied and that doesn’t have the need for plumbing.With this, he says that arcologies will become more important in the information age because, "the more the mind tends to abstract into the virtual reality, the more we need an anchorage for the social and cultural nexus." Arcologies attempt to remedy the dangers of the real/virtual blur by fostering a physically and socially close community designed on a human scale. As life becomes less human and human-scaled in the information age, Soleri’s habitat will become increasingly desirable and important.

Loss of Freedom and Privacy

Popular culture touts the information age as an age of freedom. AT&T ‘You Will’ commercials present just one of the many images of a blooming garden of choice and opportunity. Many academics such as Graham and Marvin, however, are wary of this garden. Instead of joyously celebrating IT’s possibilities, they argue that we must protect against its misuse as a method of control and surveillance. As information power increases, the instruments for misusing it become increasingly sophisticated. Privacy may be to the information economy what environmental concerns and consumer protection have been to the industrial society.

Already, privacy is the hot issue concerning the internet. Under the banner of protecting against child pornography, the US government threatens to survey and censor all wired transactions. An active campaign to stop this practice is underway with the rationale that this may be just another step toward the realization of George Orwell’s 1984, or Michel Foucault’s Panopticon. IT’s facilitation of additional steps through the use of smart cards and computerized databanks suggests that there may be an increased yearning for the perceived privacy provided by lower-density settlements. An incredibly dense and crowded arcology may therefore be viewed as an even less attractive option for a future deficient in privacy and freedom. Quite conversely, however, an arcology’s large population may allow for a degree of anonymity not found in suburban areas, which may render arcologies a more attractive option.

Homogenization through Westernization

A key trend predicted for the information age is the continuation and amplification of the process of globalization—the progression of localized activities to a global scale. Just as past improvements in transportation and communication technologies have already contributed to this process, so too, and again probably to an even greater extent, will IT. Only with the use of technology have businesses been able to establish their global networks of production, distribution and financial control. IT will further facilitate this by allowing for the real-time interaction between all parts of the globe. Already, a web connection to a site down the street is just as instantaneous and costly as a web connection to a site on the opposite side of the globe. Increased global communication will be furthered by the development of high-speed transportation technologies, as well as by the developing satellite communications network which has the potential to link everyone on earth, and possibly beyond.

These developments will no doubt make the world economy even more globalized. Today, a man from Zimbabwe can sip Colombian coffee and nibble on a Belgian chocolate while driving an American car listening to Brazilian music on a Japanese stereo system while using gas from Saudi Arabia as he speeds across the French-German border without having to stop. Globalized trade will result in heightened international dependency, and, some suggest, the decline of the nation-state. GATT, EU and NAFTA are just some of the indications in which global trade is heading. The European Union has already developed plans to synthesize its currencies into the Euro; is it too far off that there will someday be a Globo?

Globalization is in many ways synonymous with ‘westernization,’ or more specifically, ‘Americanization.’ The infiltration of western values and civilization into all parts of the world threatens to result in the homogenization of world culture. The jewels of the global economy are typified not by a triumphant mosaic of diversity, but by the shiny yellow arches of McDonald’s. The rise of other national, and multinational chains elicits the frightening prospect of always getting videos from Blockbuster, stereos from Radio Shack, coffee from Starbucks, books at Barnes and Nobles, and light bulbs from Home

Depot—or more terrifyingly, videos, stereos, coffee, books and light bulbs all from Walmart. This homogenization has already progressed in many American cities which look and feel increasingly alike.

Arcologies attempt to quell the homogenization by asserting art and culture into almost all aspects of the urban structure. This is evident through the provision of many studio and performance spaces throughout Soleri’s arcology designs. With the possibility of a more homogenous world culture, arcologies may thus serve as more desirable models for future cities than the traditionally sterile and uniform suburbs. However, any attempt of arcologies to quell cultural homogenization will likely be undermined by the fact that the shells of the arcologies would be rigid and all designed by only one man. This has been one of the most common complaints among architectural critics of arcologies.

Exacerbation of Inequalities

Utopian visions of the information age herald a departure from the social inequalities of capitalism. These visions designate IT as a means to allow equal access to information and participation in the public process, which would lead to decreased segregation and increased equality of opportunity. These visions also show that IT may provide opportunities for economic development in underdeveloped areas and increase employment opportunities for disabled people. Believers in this counter the common criticism that IT is available to only a select few with the argument that television used to be the same way, but is now in the homes of all but a small fraction of Americans.

Many academics, however, do not subscribe to these visions, saying that IT will instead probably increase inequalities and exacerbate segregation. Mitchell writes:

It is pleasant to imagine a nation of networked Aspens and cyberspaced Santa Monicas peopled by bicycle-riding locals, but the obvious danger is that such restructuring will instead produce electronic Jakartas—well-connected, well-serviced, fortified enclaves of privilege surrounded by miserable hyper-ghettos, where investments in information infrastructure and appliances are not made, electronically delivered services do not reach, and few economic opportunities are to be found (Mitchell, 1995; 2).Universal access to IT, most believe, is a remote prospect.

According to Graham and Marvin, "polarization is both reflected in, and supported and reinforced by, the development of electronic spaces" (Graham, 1996; 378). This is true, in part, on an international scale. In addition to homogenization, the globalization of the world’s economy holds the promise for a significant restructuring of power relations. Because IT will enable enterprises to manage effectively over a wider geographical area and to ship jobs overseas, the information age may witness a furthering of the international division of labor.

Improved international communications may also lead to an increased awareness of the extreme international economic inequalities. The extremity can be seen by a comparison of the GNP per capitas of Rwanda and the United States ($400 vs. $27,500), as well as by

the often quoted but always shocking fact that there are more telephone lines in the city of Tokyo alone than in the entire continent of Africa (CIA, 1996; Nahrada, 1996). Increased awareness of this may lead to social unrest, political instability, regional wars and an enormous flow of refugees. This will become increasingly important in the information age as the Third World, now home to the great majority of earth’s residents, will soon also be home to 95% of the population growth expected in the next 30 years (Kennedy, 1993; 32).

Paolo Soleri emphasizes the growing dangers of this inequality by noting that an increasing number of Third World countries are now armed with powerful nuclear and atomic weapons. He asks and answers the following: "If America, a non-tyrant run dictatorship, could drop an atomic bomb on Japan, what is going to happen if a tyrant rules a powerful nation? So much damage!"

The information age also holds the possibility of heightening inequalities on a more local scale. Currently, internet service is primarily used by those in the upper-income levels because it is unaffordable to the vast majority of people. Many academics warn that this is creating a two-tier society, divided between the ‘information haves’ who can successfully exploit all that the new society offers, and the ‘information have nots’ who are marginalized and disadvantaged by their alienation from the information culture. The Telecommunications Act of 1996 may make this possibility even more real by effectively deregulating all communication industries, thereby allowing the market, not public policy, to determine the course of the information superhighway.

IT-spawned inequalities will no doubt be felt most acutely by America’s already distressed inner cities. In the 20th century, motor highways bypassed upper-income communities, exacerbating the troubles of low-income communities; in the 21st century, the information super-highway threatens to bypass low-income communities, again exacerbating the troubles of low-income communities.

The efficiency fueled by IT that undermines the advantages of dense cities may make it increasingly difficult for poorer urban areas to compete without economic development policies designed to offset their comparative disadvantages of crime, poverty and infrastructural inadequacy. The US Office of Technology Assessment found that because of IT-induced sprawl, "the economies of many older, higher cost metropolitan areas and many central cities and older inner suburbs are likely to face further job loss and disinvestment, leading to underutilization of the built environment, potentially reduced central city benefits for industry, increased poverty and ghettoization, and fiscal problems for local governments" (OTA, 1995). The mechanization of work and the continued loss of decent wage manufacturing jobs threaten to further distress America’s poor.

In 1983, Soleri wrote that "the much heralded information-communication revolution will . . . [favor] the onset of an even more pernicious dogma of segregation" (Soleri, 1983). In 1997, he says, "this is even more true today." The promise of increased inequalities in the information age would thus call for a greater urgency for rectification. Arcology does this by simply granting a foundation of equity. This is, in part accomplished through the

universal acceptance of Soleri’s ideal of frugality. Though the feasibility of a foundation of equity is questionable, its principal would, in light of the above, increase in importance.

Environment

The third major way in which arcology may increase or decrease its role as a model for cities in the information age concerns the environment. Humanity faces a future plagued by the increasingly crucial issues of per-capita food production, deforestation, species loss, climate change, acid rain, ozone depletion, desertification, soil erosion, and pollution of land, air and water. Sentiments that these will be solved by information technology may invalidate many of arcology’s principles, while sentiments that IT will exacerbate these problems may make arcologies even more important. A growing concern for the environment and the increasingly strained resources due to population growth may also make arcologies a more important model for the information age.

Benefits of IT

Many technotopians praise IT as the panacea for environmental problems. By increasing efficiency and reducing the need for travel, IT can be seen as clean and environmentally benign. The European Union’s Information Society Forum cites six ways in which IT can contribute to environmental sustainability:

1) their requirement for relatively small amounts of materials and resources in relation to the productivity improvements they deliver; 2) ‘dematerialization’ (e.g. electronic banking) where transactions are conducted without paper; 3) making Third World development less resource-intensive; 4) creating ‘smart’ transport systems, less polluting and more efficient in performance and use of material resources; 5) reducing mobility (e.g., telecommuting) and congestion, pollution and energy consumption; and 6) environmental monitoring by remote sensing (ISF, 1996).There is some evidence to suggest that these are already occurring. One study in California showed that telecommuters reduced the number of personal trips by 27% and vehicle-miles traveled by 77%, which led to emission reductions of 64% for carbon monoxide and 69% for nitrogen oxides (Mokhtarian, 1997; 15). Developments in the transportation industry such as highly efficient speed rail, personal rapid transit and intelligent highway systems, and greater gasoline mileage for, or electrification of, automobiles, may similarly reduce energy consumption, and hence environmental impacts.

If technology continues to find ways of becoming more efficient, there may no longer be the fear of ecological destruction. A more extreme interpretation is the Gaia hypothesis proposed by Dr. James Lovelock which says the we should not worry—the earth will simply adapt and monitor itself to the changes we impose on it. This delightful portrayal

of a clean future may render the environmental benefits of arcologies unneeded, thereby significantly invalidating arcology as a model for information age cities.

Detriments of IT

Though it is tempting to think that the use of an environmentally benign computer will simply replace the commute to work in a polluting car, the evidence suggests that the connection is much more complex. By enabling workers to live in lower-density areas, IT may actually increase automobile travel. Because approximately three-quarters of all car trips are not commutes to work, the move to lower-density areas could potentially offset any environmental improvements. Enhancing the attractiveness of travel by improving its efficiency may encourage more movement, hence more pollution.

The possible IT-induced sprawl would additionally exacerbate all of the other environmental hazards associated with suburban sprawl. The Information Society Forum adds to this the possibility of an IT-induced ‘rebound effect’—the stimulation of new demands for material consumption. These unsustainable developments would render the environmental benefits of arcologies even more important for the future.

Heightened Environmental Concern

Never before have we had so much knowledge of and concern for our environmental impacts, and never before have we been so affected by them. The UN’s 1992 Rio Earth Summit attempted to bring all nations together to develop a comprehensive approach to coordinating human activities for the planet’s long term sustainable future. It signaled the urgency of the crisis. Another UN Conference, The 1996 Second United Nations Conference on Human Settlements, better known as Habitat II, highlighted the importance of the environmental impacts created by urban areas. Its summary report says:

Urban settlements hold a promise for sustainable development and protection of the world’s natural resources through their ability to support large numbers of people at limited cost to the natural environment. Yet, cities are witnessing unsustainable patterns of production and consumption, of land use and mobility patterns, and degradation of their physical structure. They are often synonymous with soil and water pollution, waste of resources, disregard for and destruction of natural resources. Therefore a largely urbanized world implies that sustainable development will depend almost entirely on the capacity of urban and metropolitan areas to manage resource flows and protect the environment (Habitat II, 1996; 106).The growth of our knowledge of, impact on, and concern for the environment all render arcologies more valid for becoming models for cities in the information age. By reducing the impacts of human settlements on the environment, arcologies achieve essentially all of the goals commonly set for the environment. The Habitat II report says that in order to "avoid unbalanced, unhealthy and unsustainable growth of human settlements, it is necessary to promote land-use patterns that minimize transport demands, save energy and

protect open and green space" (Habitat II, 1996; 111). Clearly, arcologies solve all of these objectives.

Current ideas for mediating our environmental destruction are eerily similar to those proposed by Soleri. The Urban Studies report "Urban Form, Energy and the Environment," says that "the least desirable form of urban development from an environmental perspective is low-density suburbanization" (Anderson, 1996; 19). It suggests several changes to the day-to-day patterns of human activities which include a "reduction in household water use, recycling of wastes, acceptance of interior environments that are cooler in the winter and warmer in the summer, and reduced use of private automobiles" (Anderson, 1996; 8).

Other examples of language reminiscent of arcology abound in current discussion on an environmentally sustainable future. In the 1960s, Soleri used the then-rarely-used word ecology to form the -ology of arcology. Today, the other half of the word, eco-, has achieved exalted status and functions as a prefix to scores of 1990s environmentally conscious ideas. His ideas of reducing, reusing and recycling, and his building designs which harness the energy from renewable resources like the sun and wind are the cornerstones of today’s sustainable movement. With a future of dwindling resources and explosive consumption demand, will it be too long before the word frugality will also achieve exalted status? Soleri’s track record so far scores him a few points in the debate.

Population Increase

The pitting of population growth with a limited planet is one of the most obvious ways in which arcologies may become more valid in the future. As medical advancement and the spread of medical education allow for the reduction of infant mortality rates and the extension of life expectancy, the population of the world, now at 5.8 billion, is expected to grow to between 7.6 and 9.4 billion by 2025 (Kennedy, 1993; 22). Though the World Bank predicts the population will stabilize at around 10 to 11 billion by 2050, others predict it will continue to grow to as much as 14.5 billion (Kennedy, 1993; 23).

Ninety percent of this explosive population growth will be housed in urban areas (Kennedy, 1993; 24). Within the next few years, for the first time in history, over half of the world’s population will live in urban areas, a figure that is expected to rise to almost two-thirds by 2050. Though it took all of history until the nineteenth century for a city to reach a population of 1 million, today, just under two centuries later, there are over 300 such cities (Soleri’s Cities). In 1900, it was estimated that there were 218 million people living in urban areas; by 2000, it is expected that 3.2 billion people will be living in urban areas (Gardner, 1982; 54). By 2025, the estimate is for a whopping 5 billion (Bone, 1996; 69).

The increase in population creates severe strain on dwindling resources and places enormous pressures on cities in terms of food, housing, transportation, sewage treatment,

sanitation and water resources. According to the Habitat II report, "in the 1990s, over 240 million people were lacking access to drinking water and almost 400 million were without sanitation in urban areas alone; this number is steadily rising" (Habitat II, 1996; 124). The more people there are, the more mouths to feed, the more land is consumed, the fewer resources there are. The attempt of arcologies to substantially retard this progression by improving efficiency and reducing our consumption of resources through efforts of frugality, will no doubt increase in importance as population increases.

Soleri notes another way in which population growth will make arcologies more valid. He says:

The increase in population has translated into a human habitation that consumes an increasing share of arable land. More and more, people are forced onto arid land. Thus, even more than ever, there is a need to build on the non-arable land as proposed in the arcology theory.By building on non-arable land, arcologies can thus ensure that the arable land remain under cultivation in order to protect against famine.

Globalization as Hyper-Consumerisation

The information age does not hold any real promise for improving our current patterns of consumption that Soleri says threaten to destroy the environment that sustains us. As more of the world’s population becomes aware of western lifestyles through the proliferation of communications networks, more people will want to emulate the western pattern of consumption. Paolo Soleri warns that this spells disaster. "If hyper-consumption is the ideal," he says, "then hyper-consumption is going to destroy us." This is so because Americans today produce more environmental impact as a result of their daily lives than any other society in the history of humankind. As Paul Kennedy notes, "the average American baby represents twice the environmental damage of a Swedish child, . . . thirteen times that of a Brazilian, 35 times that of an Indian, and 280 (!) times that of a Chadian or Haitian because of its level of consumption throughout its life will be so much greater (Kennedy, 1993; 33). If China alone grew to enjoy the wealth that the United States now enjoys, the earth would truly be in trouble. Given this, the frugality proposed by arcologies will become even more imperative if humans are to survive the information age.

 

The Answer

 

Whether or not humans will eventually live in arcology-like settlements may ultimately be a question of human nature. Architectural critic Henryk Skolimwski writes:

Arcologies may be a necessity from the standpoint of the survival of the species. But it may turn out that they are beyond the realm of the possible because of the stupidity of the species which may decide, without deciding, to die rather than to switch (Skolimowski, 1971; 41).One reason for this is that humans do not think long-term. This is so, in large part, because we almost always live for less than a century, a flash in time in the broad scope of existence (though this may change with the possibility of scientific advancements that allow us to live indefinitely). Another reason is that many of our decisions are based on a market that is primarily concerned with short-term economic profit, not long-term human evolution. Still another reason is human greed. Soleri reasons that although greed has always been around, "greed combined with technology, population explosion and a limited planet spells the end of the human species."

Improved technology and scientific knowledge may enable humans to adapt to our defiled environment rather than sacrifice our western luxuries. If our bodies can no longer function in an environment choked in a viscous brown cloud of pollution, then perhaps we will simply download our brains into synthetic bodies that can survive the cloud. Or maybe humans will simply choose to move off planet earth. Just one-hundred miles south of the Arcosanti laboratory is another laboratory: the Biosphere.

Paolo Soleri has already developed plans for the outer-space arcology called Asteromo. He says:

We will have to be tough in space, and probably we will have to generate new genetic variations of ourselves to be able to cope with it. But once we cope with it and transform ourselves, the Universe is open to us, and it's going to be quite an adventure! (Soleri as quoted in Stanishev, 1993).Though these adaptations to the consequences of our lifestyles are not something that most people find appealing, it is uncertain whether anyone would choose to live in such highly cramped quarters so that some oak tree could thrive in Iowa. Perhaps only if the death of humanity was a close and tangible concept would people choose to make this sacrifice. Therefore, arcologies will possibly never provide a model for future urban growth.

So, do arcologies provide a model on which cities should or will develop in the information age? Clearly, there is no clear answer because the future is far too complex and contradictory. A firm yes or a firm no would no doubt be firmly misleading.

Paolo Soleri believes that arcologies are more important and valid today than they have ever been. In a recently produced Arcosanti pamphlet, Soleri writes:

If in the 1960s, arcology was a promising model, in the 1990s, it has become an imperative. This is so on two distinct if converging levels. The first, the expedient level, pitting the size of the planet against the demographic pressure and the quasi-extravagant demand of humankind, and the second, the non-expedient

level, which, to use the same slogan of the 1960s, positions life in the ‘thick of things.’ I add now, only in the thick of things.The first level is fairly straightforward; the second is not. When asked to explain the second level, Soleri simply repeats the phrase several times and proceeds to speak on something unintelligible concerning the Omega Seed. Apparently, time has not changed his difficulty to communicate clearly.

From the evidence presented above, it can be extrapolated that although arcologies will probably be no more realistic in the information age than they were when they were first introduced in the 1960s, their principals will become more important. Changes in the perceptions and significance of place, in social life and societal relations, and in our environmental impacts generally point in a direction in which arcologies would serve as a more valid, if not vital, model for the future.

Arcologies, however, were never meant as a realistic proposal, but rather a guideline toward a new option. They are the means through which Soleri stresses the important trends that he believes threaten the evolution of humanity. Because the predictions for the information age exacerbate these threatening trends, Soleri’s vision should become a more valid model for the future.

So, what can be done so that arcologies will become the model for future cities? What can be done to ensure that humans will not spiral into ecological and social destruction? What are some other alternatives? These are questions for the final chapter.

CHAPTER 4

The Future

It is now 1997 and pre-millennial anxiety is in the air. People shout about Armageddon, people shout about technotopia, and Paolo Soleri still shouts about arcology. "Miniaturize or die!" he bellows to the world from his mesa in central Arizona; "Hyper-consumerism is going to kill us all!" Meanwhile, every minute, the world’s population increases by several thousand, hundreds of acres of land are forever defiled by human greed, and miles of the information super-highway are laid, paving the way for the information age. Very few can hear him.

Soleri has dedicated the majority of his life to bellowing his ideas, which he says are essential to the healthy continuation of the human species. Arcosanti has been the principal means through which he has communicated his ideas. But after more than one-quarter of a century, it is still less than 5% complete. Arcosanti has transformed from a vibrant community filled with hope, aspiration and importance, to a static monument to a 1970s dream now visited by flocks of white-haired, Buick-driving vacationers from California who take pictures of each other with disposable cameras in front of an apse, allowing just enough time to continue their afternoon journey to the Grand Canyon. They

usually leave with a silt-cast Soleri Bell whose chime will eventually echo throughout their gated suburban neighborhoods. Soleri’s dream seems to be all but dead.

But Soleri and a dedicated group of about 60 residents are trying to make sure that the vision does not die. Soleri continues to spread his message through interviews and lectures, while the residents lay concrete foundations for a new Arcosanti recycling center. Progress is slow, but it is still progress. Soleri says his goal is to obtain a ‘Critical Mass’ of 500 people that will be able to sustain interest and build the rest of Arcosanti, but this appears unlikely. "I’m sure I’ll go before [Arcosanti] is completed," says Soleri, age 76. When asked about the direction he envisions for Arcosanti after his death, he says, "the future is always a big question mark, . . . when you have a disappearance of the mind that has come up with an idea, who knows?"

The previous chapter concluded that although arcology will become more important in the information age, it is unlikely that it will actually ever become a model for future cities. The question thus arises of how to spread Soleri’s message more effectively. Aaron, an Arcosanti resident of three years, says "I think that if [Soleri] wants to be remembered as a great architectural philosopher, he needs to find somebody to write for him . . . somebody to translate his work into plain English." Soleri concedes by saying, "I am not very good at communicating my ideas." Another resident, Candice, says "I think the idea of arcology will really take off after [Soleri] dies because that’s when all artists become famous . . . the distance from death makes the ideas more tangible."

Not surprisingly, it has been very difficult to persuade an entire society to change its ways. Arcosanti is, after all, perhaps the boldest living experiment on the planet today. To many architectural historians, however, it has been considered a failure. Yet, judged on its mission to educate, Arcosanti may be seen as a success. Its continued generation of interest since its inception, despite its radical stance, can not be dismissed as failure.

Arcosanti’s mission appears even more essential today as the suburban enemy is encroaching. At night, from atop the highest apse, there is absolute silence. Around is desolate black land, above is an endless star-filled universe, but to the south, just above the next mesa, rises the florescent glow of Phoenix. The longer you stare at it, the more foreboding it appears. One resident, Michael, says "the Phoenix suburbs are going to be [at Arcosanti] soon; they’ll buy up the leased land; Arcosanti will become a Central Park in the middle of the suburbs." Sadly, he will likely be proven correct. New York Times journalist Thomas Egan notes that Phoenix is spreading at the rate of one acre per hour; and, already covering 469 square miles, it surpasses Los Angeles, which has three times as many people, it terms of sprawl (Egan, 1996; 20).

Though the future of the Arcosanti project and the implementation of the theory of arcology appear bleak, Soleri and his entourage are not the only ones with a mission to halt the sprawl.

Alternative Solutions

The growing concern for environmentally- and socially-sustainable human settlements has fueled the development of many projects aimed at meeting arcologically-similar concerns. The example of Civano is representative of these project’s wholly un-radical but market-savvy ideas.

A self-billed ‘model sustainable community,’ Civano is located just two hundred miles south of Arcosanti in a section of Tucson. Like Arcosanti, it is designed to be home to 5,000 residents, to be environmentally benign, and to mix commercial, civic and cultural activity all within an area in which open nature is never further than a ten-minute walk. It, too, aims to be a model for future cities; according to its web page, "the successful development of Civano will demonstrate community design and construction methods that will enable Tucson and other cities to meet the demands of growth without straining the supply of natural resources" (Civano, 1997). However, with its detached houses and broad residential streets, Civano may be viewed as just another variation of suburban sprawl. Perhaps this is indicative of the 1990s: less radical, more realistic.

Other ideas for sustainable communities are also similar to Arcosanti. In an Earth Vision Foundation report, Jim Freeman describes a model sustainable community, again of 5,000 people, with a full range of ecologically sensitive support technologies, configured around a village center with a 1/4 mile radius to the edge of the community (Belknap, 1995; 2).

New Urbanism, the most popular idea now circulating the urban planning field, may also be considered a watered-down version of arcology. According to William Fulton, it has "captured the imagination of the American public like no urban planning movement in decades" (Fulton, 1996; 6). Like arcology, New Urbanism views the decentralized, auto-oriented suburb as a recipe for disaster, and thus proposes the re-establishment of denser, less auto-dependent, more integrated and environmentally aware communities concerned with public and civic life. Its neighborhoods are designed around pedestrian and transit networks, and are committed to the concepts of strong citizen participation and social and economic diversity. Because its precedents are often traditional towns, the movement has been conferred the synonym, ‘neo-traditionalism.’

The development of the widely publicized town of Seaside on Florida’s "redneck Riviera" heralded the beginning of this movement. Today, the movement is led by the husband and wife team of Andres Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, and by California architect Peter Calthorpe. What separates these leaders from Soleri is that they are able to accomplish their goals within the constraints of the economic feasibility determined by the housing market. In doing so, however, they must openly acknowledge and formalize decentralization. The result is realistic, but far from spectacular.

Another group of advocates of arcologically-similar ideas comes from Japan. With its technologically advanced economy, severely constrained environmental resources and enormous population pressures, Japan may be seen as the vision for the world’s future.

Here, much more than in other developed countries, people live according to the principles of arcology. Japan’s cities are very dense and their residents often live a frugal lifestyle in one-room homes with rolled-up futons.

Not surprisingly, it is here where arcologies may most likely be built. The radical ideas of Tokyo’s Teleport City, the Minato Mirai 21 ‘High-Tech City’ and the Makuhari ‘Futuristic Information City’ are indicative of this possibility. In discussing a proposed vertical city of 25,000 in Tokyo Bay, Huw Thomas says that "it is not a case of will someone have to do this, it seems more a case of when will someone do it" (Thomas, 1996; part 5).

Japan’s government has recently convened the Hyper Building Research Committee to design ideas of what is essentially an arcology: a multi-purpose building to house 100,000 residents. One of the committee members is none other than Paolo Soleri. His submission, simply called ‘Hyper Building,’ is one kilometer tall and is divided into two exedrae ("womb-like structures, the female"), and one lingam ("the tower, the male") (HBRC, 1997; 2). Soleri considers the building an updated version of an arcology; it features diagonal and spiral escalators, a system of conveyor belts, 38 helicopter pads, slides for evacuation, several solar power generators, and a Virtual Reality Recreation Park. His Hyper Building, however, appears just as unlikely to be built in the near future as his other arcologies.

There are many realistic alternatives to the fantastic ideas. Portland, Oregon, has been touted as America’s planning success story. With its landscaped streets, innovative parks, efficient light-rail system and well-designed new buildings, Portland has transformed from a mediocre business district into a thriving regional center. This is in part due to the city’s comprehensive land planning law that established a growth boundary to limit urban sprawl in order to conserve natural areas and farmland, preserve the built environment, discourage auto use and encourage public transportation. Similar ideas have also been used in another widely admired planning success story: Curitiba, Brazil.

Other successes in encouraging a denser, more environmentally friendly and socially enriched city have used tools such as urban in-fill and redevelopment, and have established land-use regulations to manage growth. They have promoted mixed-use development and helped implement energy-efficient mass transit systems. Because the plight of America’s inner cities and the growth of America’s metropolitan fringes may be seen as two sides of the same coin, successful cities have provided incentives to re-invest in the central cities and dis-incentives to build on the fringe. Also, because urban form is primarily affected by transportation policies, successful cities have created an urban policy that includes not the construction of additional highways, but the strengthening of pedestrian and transit networks. Similar urban planning policies have reworked the traditional modern zoning laws that segregate land uses, disallow high-density development and mandate wide streets with high numbers of parking spaces.

Success can only come when planning agencies and those with developing power, consider the city as the inseparable sum of the central city, the suburbs and the natural

environment. The failure to treat them as such is endemic to the many problems cities currently face.

The most important and long-term solution for urban problems, many planners argue, is education. If everyone realizes the direction we are headed, the inequalities of the world economic system, the wastefulness of western culture, and the destructiveness of our environmental impacts, then we can take preventative measures before it is too late. Free market capitalism is not the panacea. Neither is information technology.

It is not a matter of whether the earth will survive; it is quite presumptuous of us to believe that we can destroy a planet that has already survived for billions of years. However, it is not inconceivable that we can destroy ourselves. The information age holds many promises that point in both fantastic and miserable directions. Now more than ever, we threaten our livelihood. Solutions are needed for reversing, or at least quelling the destruction of our society and our planet. Arcology is just one of many possible solutions.

Conclusion

This thesis has attempted to answer the question: To what extent do arcologies provide a model on which cities of the information age should or will develop?

Chapter 1 provided an introduction to the thesis, outlining its scope and its goals. By summarizing the development of and the inherent problems associated with suburban sprawl, the chapter highlighted current urban trends, and provided the base to which arcologies are a reaction. It also provided a framework of utopian and realistic proposals in which arcology may be analyzed.

Chapter 2 described the theory of arcology, its protagonist Paolo Soleri, and its physical manifestation, Arcosanti. By synthesizing Soleri’s complex ideas into a comprehensible analysis, the chapter provided insight into the theory which the thesis has attempted to analyze and update.

Chapter 3 described several of the key terms associated with and trends predicted for the information age. It applied these to the work of the previous two chapters in an attempt to answer the central thesis question. The analysis showed that the information age will have complex and often contradictory effects on urban areas. The chapter concluded with the not-wholly exact statement that although arcologies are probably no more likely to provide an actual model for cities in the information age, their principles will become even more valid, if not crucial.

Chapter 4 has attempted to forecast the future of the Arcosanti project and the theory of arcology. It has also reviewed several of the implemented and currently-discussed alternative urban planning solutions that strive for arcologically-similar goals.

Not surprisingly, there is no simple answer to the thesis. The results are not fully conclusive because ideas of the future can never be such. However, this thesis has tried to stress the importance of thinking about the future, showing that it is essential to examine the consequences of our actions and of the developments that are currently underway. We are now changing our society and our world at an unprecedented rate. Just a couple of centuries ago, almost everyone lived on a farm; who knows where people will be living in a couple of centuries in the future. Cyurbia? Arcology? Space?

For now, however, cities appear likely to remain the economic, cultural, political and social centers of civilization, and the home to the majority of the world’s residents. Their transformation will undoubtedly transform society.

The underlying assumption of this thesis is that humans have the power to shape their future. The grim pictures painted by pessimists and the glorious pictures painted by optimists may both become reality. The vital task is to take the best the future offers while trying to avoid the worst. Arcology is just one of many ideas that aim to achieve this. Though the thesis has concluded that arcology will be more important in the information age, it may not necessarily be the best practical idea.

And so, we are left still with an unending list of questions, of which I list only a few: What will be the best idea for the information age? What will people want? Where will people want to live? How will they live? Will information technology solve many of society’s ills? Will science? Will we eventually destroy ourselves? Will people ever want to live in arcologies? Will it be necessary? What will be necessary? What will be most important to us? And, of course: What will the future hold?

Thankfully, these questions are beyond the scope of this thesis.

An Arcosanti Epilogue

After an intensive and inspirational Arcosanti Workshop week, I trudged my way up the mesa and along the dirt road to a chorus of wind bells, bag on back, to meet with the Shuttle U van bound for the Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport. One last 360-degree glance revealed nothing but Arcosanti, empty mesas, a dawn-lit sky and the road. The van came.

Ten minutes down I-17 was a double-sized billboard sitting in front of a massive one-story steel frame, advertising the coming of Phoenix’s newest factory outlet shopping center. In another ten minutes, seemingly from nowhere, an enormous concrete slab crossed over the highway. The van driver explained that it was for Phoenix’s newest outer beltway; it would make it easier to get to I-8 without having to go through downtown. The next twenty minutes were a blur of Arby’s, Best Western’s, Jack in the Box’s and colossal highway interchanges. I arrived at Sky Harbor.

The plane took off and I looked down at the Phoenix landscape. Except for a small cluster of skyscrapers and the lunar-like Camelback Mountain, it appeared just as Soleri described: a tenuous film. It spread over the hills to the east and south, and crept through the mountains to the north like a serpent winding along with I-17. The blanket of speckled beige was broken only occasionally by the candy-green of golf courses and the rugged yellow of the February Arizona land. Rather than being built, Phoenix appeared to have been spread like butter on toast.

And then I spotted Arcosanti below, its camouflaged concrete apses barely visible from thousands of feet above. It was just a speck on the land. Phoenix was so much more powerful.

Three hours later, the plane descended below the clouds into snow-covered Minneapolis. Except for the white, it looked exactly like Phoenix from above: mammoth. Three more hours, I was back in Boston, zipping along I-93.

And three months later, I sit at the computer station and wonder what the future will hold.

A Seaside Arcology for Southern China

By Francis FrickDepartment of Architecture University of Hong Kongfjfrick@hkusua.hku.hk

Abstract

Arcology, or architectural ecology, is a generic name for physical design intervention associated with a temporary, localized decrease in entropy within a defined context. Arcology is a stabilizing design element in the face of environmental, economic, and social change. Such change assumes the possibility of severe food and water scarcity induced by any combination of anthropogenic or natural causes. While arcology addresses interdisciplinary problems in interdisciplinary ways, this presentation highlights its role in urban agriculture (AU) and wastewater bioremediation.

Arcology is urban infrastructure in three dimensions, with architectonic(space-making) attributes, informed by the ecosystem model. It can be built within existing cities or in rural areas. Rapidly emerging problems in China's southern coastal urban areas already provide a need and a context to realize the arcology "seed" design described here. Beside feasibly addressing current problems, arcology's significance and value will probably increase as ecological/resource problems intensify in China and elsewhere. Additionally, Hong Kong is seen as a positive "green" influence for green technology transfer and advanced design services implied by arcology.

Keywords: Arcology (architectural ecology); urban agriculture; wastewater bioremediation; renewable hydrogen systems; China; Hong Kong.

Context

All trends point to China as the world's largest GNP in no more than 2 decades, replete with dire environmental and other implications [1]. Nonetheless, China could feel the multiple effects of resource scarcity earliest, most intensely and with inestimable global repercussions [2,3]. Falling far short of answering current needs, Chinese policymakers, educators, planners and designers could easily face unprecedented instability. Using current construction practice and academic programs as a barometer, the mainland architectural and planning community produces work which can be generalized as simplistic, ecologically ignorant or blindly imitative of mostly American examples now known to be wasteful, destructive and antisocial. Western technologies, when sought after, are invariably poorly chosen because users "fail to think in total systems, only isolated parts"; further, these technologies are often already outdated in the countries of their origin[4]. Improved transfer programs and unique specialists will be sought to implement saner, healthier options alien even to Westerners [5,6].

Food Trends

According to Chinese sources, annual grain production since 1949 increased 3.1% to about 460 million tons in 1995; projected needs will reach 550 million tons by 2010 for 1.4 billion people (390 kg/capita). Population is expected to peak at 1.6 billion by 2030 with a need of 640 million tons of grain (400 kg/capita) [7].

China's food supply comes from a decreasing water supply.o Per capita drinking water supplies in China are 2,340 cubic meters a year, 1/4 of

the world's average. About 80% of discharged water is not effectively treated before release [8];

o More than half of China's rivers and lakes are seriously contaminated, with about 40,000 square kilometers too polluted for fishing [9];

o China's rapid urbanization makes its cities the most vulnerable to prolonged drought in the interior; currently 2/3 of all cities in China already suffer from severe water shortage [10];

o Up to 1996, all official predictions of food supply coming from mainland China consistently neglected the potential effects of climate change. Mainland scientists have finally predicted global warming to decrease crop production in northern China while speeding up evaporation and aggravating water shortages in key cities [11] - but only after 100 top Chinese legislators petitioned central

authorities for immediate action to avert a grain crisis caused by the worst drought and flood in 400 years (both occurring in the same year) [12].

China's food supply comes from a decreasing land supply.o China already feeds 22% of earth's people on 7% of earth's arable land [13]; o 30% of China's arable land suffers from topsoil erosion; 67% of it lies in remote

mountainous areas [14]; o As of September 1996 China's per capita arable land in China stood at 0.1 hectare

(104 ft x 104 ft) [15]. From 1990 to 1994, close to 1% of China's cultivated land was lost to industry each year [16]. If land abuse continues, then China's arable land per capita would drop to 0.07 ha (87 ft x 87 ft)when the population levels off at an assumed 1.6 billion persons [17];

o Between 1986 and 1995, 1.97 million hectares of cropland in China were occupied by nonagricultural use; unplanned or uncoordinated takeovers of arable land for industrial development projects made nearly 133,000ha of farmland idle; excessive residential building, 3.4 million ha. Farmland abuse is traced partly to the lack of a comprehensive land planning policy in China [18];

o According to satellite surveillance, the total urban areas of China's top 31 cities rose 50.2% during this period [19];

o China has recently announced plans to buy or lease land in Brazil to produce additional food [20].

China feeds a growing population which is becoming increasingly urban.

o China's urban population stood at over 350 million in 1995. It is expected to pass 450 million by 2000 [21]. 432 new cities in China between 1995 and 2010 will almost double the 1995 amount [22], housing approximately 60% of China's total population;

o China's Construction Minister Hou Jie says more than 80 million rural migrants (the population of Germany) have arrived in coastal urban areas between 1992 and 1995, [23] from a total pool of 124 million surplus laborers. This surplus will grow to 200 million by 2000 [24];

o Food needs of the cities will likely exceed China's carryover stocks by early next decade; in fact, its cities are due to become so large that even global reserves as presently accumulated, are already inadequate [25];

o Eating five times as much meat than 18 years ago, [26], China has outstripped the USA in red meat consumption and fertilizer use [27]. It has imported 16 million tons of wheat for the first time in 1995 [28], seen against previous annual imports of 11 million tons [29];

o Because farms are increasingly remote from cities, inadequate storage and transportation networks are now responsible for 10% of China's grain losses and 33% of its fresh vegetable losses [30].

o China aims to raise grain output 11% to keep pace with a population growing at the rate equivalent to adding another Shanghai each year [31, 32].Yet China cannot win the trust of analysts who point out published contradictions in grain production estimates [33].

o Meanwhile China promises to become a world leader in greenhouse gas emissions as coal combustion (the main source of acid rain) steps up to fuel its mammoth construction agenda, itself largely based on imported design paradigms of waste, excessive consumerism and suburban sprawl. Environmental degradation in China will continue unchecked until at least 2015 [34]. Government policies stress "damage control"[35] over prevention.

Why arcology in southern China? o The combined effects of interdisciplinary time-bombs are now being felt in

southern China: rural migrant/urban homelessness [36], widespread acid rain [37-39], with economic losses exceeding 2 billion yuan [40], widespread contaminated water [41,42], solid waste accumulation [43], especially in the Pearl River Delta area, which will urbanize to 45% by 2000 [44]. Urban infrastructure, where it does exist, cannot keep up with demand [45]. Hong Kong, dependent on mainland water, is now directly threatened by swelling pollution north of the border [46].

o Interdisciplinary trends in China have been stated. Arcology seeks to address interdisciplinary problems in interdisciplinary ways, potentially in one stroke [47];

o As a general rule, social problems emerge in southern China's coastal areas five to ten years ahead of the rest of the country [48];

o Arcology can address an immediate socio-economic-health problem in southern coastal urban peripheries (where migrants and waste accumulate), and with economic promise;

o Traditional Chinese pragmatism lends itself to a paradigm of frugality not coincidentally embodied by the ecosystem (and arcological) concept;

o By nature of numerous constraints, China offers an initial proving ground by providing initial test conditions, i.e., that which is not frugal will fail from both Chinese pragmatic and arcological perspectives;

o From a design standpoint, local constraints lend themselves to "homespun" structural systems which point toward a feasibly constructed arcology with lower than expected costs. Indigenous structures are then equipped with highly refined component technologies, some of which are imported or obtained through transfer programs.

Arcology and Urban Agriculture

By implication, urban agriculture (UA) asserts that the separation of urban life and non-urban food production is possible only under artificial, subsidized conditions which accelerate entropy. Both arcology and UA anticipate rural agricultural collapse in the event of climate change. Both seek to provide jobs to the jobless. In this scheme, migrant farmers and urban shitters provide mutually needed skills and resources in a self-contained urban ecosystem. UA, as a part of arcology, not only offers employment and nourishment, but also a home.

If UA is a basic tool, then Arcology is a kind of structured toolbox, housing many related "green" subsystems of food, water and energy. UA is built-in, on rooftops and much everywhere else, while often extending into immediately adjacent land, fed by its own wastewater. UA and arcology both draw from the same preindustrial city model which persisted through 97% of recorded human history. This model, based on logistical compactness and self-reliance, becomes crucial in the threat of climate change and scarcity.

Arcology: Background

Arcology (architectural ecology) is a name traced to the work of Dr. Paolo Soleri [49] for a compact, 3-dimensional infrastructure. Arcology is a workable model for human habitation. Overlapping, redundant relationships in 3D allow for efficient energy/material transfer and conversion while enhancing social interaction. The largest arcologies can theoretically reduce the footprint of a city by a factor of 50, eliminating the need for automobiles. An interpretation of biological principle, arcology is miniaturized, complexified, self-effacing, frugal technology operating within a negentropic (entropy-reducing) field. It is not only a means of addressing social and environmental degradation, but a cultural end unto itself, in ways alien to Western consumerist models of urban sprawl and waste.

Cultural bias, economic conservatism, and other difficulties hampered progress at realizing prototypes in the United States, exacerbated by the multiple excesses of the Reagan-Bush era [50]. Growing awareness demonstrates arcology as a near-mature concept coming of age. China's rapidly evolving enviro-socio-economic conditions increasingly justify the construction of modest prototypes, particularly in the urban peripheries of its southern coastal provinces.

Entropy as the enemy

Arcology's explicit goal is to decrease entropy within a defined region. This is normally achieved by biological organisms [51]. Entropy, a term originating from thermodynamics

[52], implies a host of negative correlations attached to our global development paradigm based on Newtonian/Cartesian materialism. Entropy's negative correlations cross ecological, biological, meteorological, hydrological, economic, social, political, psychological and aesthetic boundaries [53]. Arcology reduces entropy by weaving itself into a torn fabric of unanswered needs. Entropy is an interdisciplinary phenomenon. Negentropy (in the form of arcology) is as well.

Sustainability = Interdisciplinarity

It is the fight against entropy that mandates interdisciplinary approaches. Sustainability, in its best meaning, begins with education. Orr [54]and Kline[55] show that classical academic disciplines, never innocent bystanders, have accelerated entropy by refusing to communicate with each other. Arcology explicitly ignores arbitrary boundaries between disciplines.

Design Generals

A seed arcology appropriate for southern Chinese coastal sites in the Pearl Delta River area or Hainan Island is proposed. It is the home for approximately 300 people to start, and centers around an in-house food packaging facility and Integrated Water Center (IWC).

Because this project intercepts flows of residential wastewater which might otherwise flow to industrialized treatment facilities or even the sea, cooperation with city planners and local governments is assumed. Marketable food products come directly from adjacent terraces where urban wastewater is biologically purified, i.e., urban agriculture. Solar and wind electrolysis and wastewater gasification provide hydrogen gas which in turn provides electricity and heat on demand to satisfy resident needs throughout the 15-hectare minimum site.

The structure passively saves energy via bioclimatic adaptation, reflected solar illumination, and reused/recycled materials. The structure contains a small craft marina, hydroponics gardens, filter beds, bioremediation tanks, dry and liquids storage, classrooms, offices, dormitories, a small market plaza and shared, communal spaces. Bio-terraces and algae ponds, linked by a Contour Retaining wall Infrastructure System (CRIS) surround its outer parts. Arcology is a factory, farm, school and community in one, located in the urban periphery where migrants tend to settle. Automobile traffic is limited to delivery and emergency vehicles; pedestrian traffic is the norm in a condensed,

three-dimensional environment. This seed is meant to act as a self-reliant economic unit. The arcological seed not only provides urban infrastructure where none existed previously, but one predicated on the ecosystem model or natural resource cycles [56] Urban wastewater has already demonstrated its economic potential in China and remains largely untapped [57].

Design Particulars

Location. The design has evolved from an early concept originally intended for a south-facing waterfront hillside location in Zhuhai Special Economic Zone [58], but is feasible anywhere along the Pearl River Delta waterfront, most ideally on hill topography (altitude above sea level, 25 m/80ft). Hainan island, China's least developed Special Economic Zone, offers the best opportunities to introduce advanced infrastructural design. Hilly topography 15 meters altitude (minimum) greatly facilitates bioterracing (arcology by definition can create its own topography on flat sites with modifications). In all cases, the design described here assumes a subtropical location between 20 and 25 degrees north latitude, average temperature extremes of 31°C/89°F and 10°C/40°F for summer and winter, a wet season between January and April, and winds largely from the south or southeast (45% of the time). Gross bldg. floor area: m2/ft2 Occupied land area: 6 ha/14 acres. Overall height-length-width of structure: 25m /(80ft) - 150m/(470ft) -80m/(255ft).

Structure. The structure perpendicularly straddles the coastline: half built over shallow water, half built on inclined land. A contour access road, halfway up the hill, penetrates the structure under large portal arches where land and sea sections meet. Largely of poured concrete and brick, the seed arcology accommodates China's construction industry. An integrated network of masonry pylons and connecting arches support all of its interior and exterior spaces. Lateral thrust from central arches are buttressed by flanking arches on both sides, gently carrying all stresses to the seabed. The masonry pylons penetrate a cascading series of concrete sun terraces fanning out over the water. The cascading terraces hold verdant, lush wastewater gardens and filter beds, geometrically radiating from a common origin, the Integrated Water Center (IWC). Principal spaces lie in the cool, shaded, naturally-ventilated cavities below the trays: food packaging, dry/liquids storage, offices and various equipment rooms. The topmost "roof" houses small 'Living Machines', vegetable gardens and classrooms. The cascading terraces functionally and aesthetically unify land residences and ocean workspaces. Containing stairs, elevators or composting toilet/washrooms, vertical pylons stand upon concrete and masonry "finger" piers, resting on the seabed. All are secured pinned by a network of prefabricated or poured in place concrete piles, posttensioned after driving. Here, an arcuated, compressive masonry structure reduces the need for rare, expensive, and energy-intensive steel reinforcement.

Labor/material cost ratios in the South as a rule are the inverse for those in the North. All construction is based on masonry shell/ concrete core elements, eliminating the need for

scarce, costly plywood forms. Arches under construction rest upon temporary brick supports. Site preparation and construction methods favor local labor. High-quality bricks, scavenged from demolished traditional buildings (common with new "development"), offsets the embodied (compounded) energy of construction, which on average is ten times more resource/energy intensive than post-construction occupancy [59]. Construction costs are minimized without compromising aesthetics.

IWC (Integrated Water Center). Dwindling water supplies facilitate an emerging water economy of which IWCs can be an integral part [60]. IWCs maintain normal levels of productivity even if supply dropped below 10 liters per day per capita (ldc). Normal physiological requirements are 2-5 ldc, according to temperature and humidity. Water for bathing, washing, and cleaning purposes consumes a minimum of 15 ldc. An IWC houses cooking and washing facilities, showers, tap water and toilets. Potable water, including ice, would be packaged and dispensed in supermarket-style containers. The heart and brain of the arcology, IWC is a natural social center, located between its main portals and surrounded by lush, verdant balconies of resident housing. It is the metaphorical "hinge" and functional center of the entire design. Transparent water tanks and conduits serve monitoring and educational needs. Residents and visitors can visibly follow water and energy flows through the site, itself a living educational tool.

Filtered, grey, and black water (each with its own storage) is directed through cybernetically optimized loops, dynamically maximizing useful life before recycling through flexible rerouting. Potable water, occasionally from unclorinated city supplies (best for gardens), but mostly from site storage or hydrogen fuel cells, becomes "grey" (after washing or bathing) and "black" (for flushing sewage and/or bioremediation) [61]. Wastewater is directed to bioterraces, aquaculture, bioremediation tanks, filter beds and hydroponic gardens depending on the degree of adulteration. Most site-circulated water would be raw since agri/aqua-cultural needs require nothing better. Sequencing , volume, flow rates and required areas for a 6-day bioremediation cycle are given by Hilbertz et al [62] and Todd et al [63]. Because hydrogen (and therefore electricity) production is directly linked to water use, the IWC is "mission control" for all energy flows as well. Algal, aqua-, pisci-and hydroponic culture, linked in three dimensions (dictated by site topography and physical structure) are all functional components in a densely packed, redundant, synergetic network which borrows directly from historical models [64, 65].

CRIS (Contour Retaining Wall Infrastructure System) Coined by American architect Daniel Liebermann [66], CRIS transcends millennia of accumulated experience in hillside terracing by incorporting multiple infrastructure elements within its mass. Liebermann proposed various types; the masonry shell/concrete core formula is adopted in this project for reasons already mentioned. Here, CRIS acts as a series of 'earth-dams'. It conserves topsoil much needed to support food production[67], stabilizes the site in question, provides seismic-proof foundations for resident domiciles and access road, impounds algal and aquaculture ponds, collects rainwater and provides varied interstitial social spaces, all dictated by hill topography.

Feasibility

A project of this type is feasible in various types of joint ventures with the possibility of initial support from higher authorities. Approximately 80% of the technology required exists either domestically or in foreign companies based on Chinese soil. Initial capital investment costs under several scenarios can be shouldered by local municipalities or higher authorities; arcology is infrastructure, and as such is a normal part of any municipal development agenda. Early assistance should provide for a skeletal renewable hydrogen energy system to facilitate the construction process and site power needs. Enormous substantiation exists on renewable hydrogen systems and economics [68]. Adapting construction to the local culture offsets the costs of highly refined component technologies; immediate implementation is thus possible.

Hong Kong, China's Green Dragon

While Hong Kong presents a priceless developmental model for China [69], it will cease to enjoy its privileged role as "middleman to the West" when China fully open its doors to the world market by 2000. Hong Kong will find its unique place among other cities competing for world attention, especially Shanghai [70].

Since China's Open Door Policy of 1979, industrial enterprises left Hong Kong for cheaper land and labour north of the border[71], allowing Hong Kong to develop its service industries, one of which is advanced design. It is in this sector the author stresses Hong Kong's future promise as China's environmental innovator, or "green dragon"[72]. If promoted by its professional, research and business communities, HK can lead China into the next century [73]. Arcology is already a timely and needed tool.

Notes

[1] Ryan, M; Flavin, C. "Facing China's Limits", State of the World, 1995. (Worldwatch Institute) (1995) W.W. Norton, New York.

[2] Smil, Vaclav. China's Environmental Crisis: An Inquiry into the Limits of National Development, (1993) M.E. Sharpe, New York.

[3] "China is probably the most important country in the world in terms of what happens to the planet" - Dr. Thilo Bode, Executive Director, Greenpeace, "Greenies come in peace", Fiona Holland, South China Morning Post, 20 October 1996, p.11.

[4] Greenpeace executive director Thilo Bode in "Mainland and green group to cooperate", Elisabeth Tacey, South China Morning Post, 11 October 1996, p.5.

[5] Meier, Richard. "Ecological Planning and Design: Paths to Sustainable Communities" (unpublished manuscript), Institute for Environmental Research, University of California (Berkeley), 1993.

[6] "In many cases...technology from the West...is dinosaur technology." (-Thilo Bode, Executive Director, Greenpeace) Fiona Holland, South China Morning Post, 20 October 1996, p.11.

[7]"Beijing sets 5% grain import limit", Ivan Tang, South China Morning Post, 25 October 1996, p.4.

[8] "Priority given to saving endangered resources", Agatha Ngai, South China Morning Post, 4 March 1997, p.10.

[9] "Serious water pollution wiping out aquatic life", Associated Press, South China Morning Post 19 January 1997, p.5, see also Guangming Daily, 18 January 1997.

[10] Ryan, M. et al, 1995.

[11] "Water shortages feared as global warming worsens", UPI, South China Morning Post, 9 January 1997, p.11.

[12] "Call for urgent action to avert grain crisis: Senior leader warns shortage a 'matter of life and death for communist party and country'", Willy Wo-lap Lam, South China Morning Post, 15 July 1996.

[13] "Sino-Brazilian ties boosted by accords (Agriculture cooperation agreement may result in Beijing buying areas of land to produce food)" Agencies, South China Morning Post, 12 November 1996, p. 8.

[14] State Land Administration Bureau Report, [Chinese] 29 March 1997.

[15] "Arable land loss halted, official says", Agence France-Presse, South China Morning Post, 19 September 1996.

[16] "Harvest must keep setting records", Xinhua, Hong Kong Standard (China Review), 30 September 1996, p.6.

[17] State Land Administration Bureau Report, [Chinese] 29 March 1997.

[18] Ibid.

[19] Ibid.

[20] Agencies, South China Morning Post, 12 November 1996, p. 8.

[21] "Helping resolve housing crisis 'matter of world concern'", Agence France-Presse, Hong Kong Standard, 31 December 1996, p.4.

[22] Liang, Chao. "Country to Set Up 432 New Cities in 15 Years", China Daily, 2 June 1995.

[23] 'Population cripples urban development", Reuter, South China Morning Post, 9 October 1996, p.10.

[24] The Ministry of Agriculture notes that China's arable (rural) land requires only 44% of the current total of 450 million laborers to work on; another 28% are engaged in rural industries; and 28% have nothing to do. China still has 100 million ha of uncultivated rural land which could absorb most of this last 28%. Urban agriculture can form a significant portion of that. "A flood of rural workers: China's cities paying for farmers' low profit margins", Zhang Dan, The World Paper, November 1996, pp.1-2, appearing in the Hong Kong Standard, 23 November 1996.

[25] Meier, Richard. "Food Futures in China" paper presented at the International Conference of Urban Ecology, Beijing, November 1994.

[26] "Battle to satisfy awesome appetite (China's vast needs could disrupt the security of world food supplies)", Jennifer Lin, South China Morning Post, 22 November 1996, p.21.

[27] "Giant set to gobble world's resources" (researcher warns of growth dangers), Charles Snyder, Hong Kong Standard, 30 August 1996.

[28] Lin, South China Morning Post, 22 November 1996, p.21.

[29] "Beijing predicts cotton shortage", Agencies, Hong Kong Standard, 16 September 1996.

[30] "Disputed harvest claims behind new target" Tom Korski, South China Morning Post, 19 November 1996, p.5.

[31] Tom Korski, South China Morning Post (Business), 18 March 1997, p.4.

[32] Jennifer Lin, South China Morning Post, 22 November 1996, p.21.

[33] Tom Korski, South China Morning Post, 19 November 1996, p.5.

[34] Smil, 1993

[35] Zhang, Xia. "Just Opening Salvos in the War on Pollution", China Daily, 6 June 1995.

[36] "Environment is Vital to Urban Expansion" Opinion Column, China Daily 11 May 1995.

[37] Wang, Rong. "Acid Rain Still Haunts Guangdong", China Daily 5 May 1995.

[38] More than 40% of China was covered with acid rain as of 1996, affecting even Japan. China's coal-fired plants discharge more than 28 million tons of soot, dust, and sulfur dioxide into the air each year. "Scientists blame roast mutton for acid rain", Tom Korski, South China Morning Post, 12 December 1996, p.10. and "Raining acid on Asia's environment", South China Morning Post, 21 March 1997, p.22.

[39] 50% of Guangdong Province rainfall is acid. "Pollution shocks Guangdong into water clean-up drive", Pamela Pun, Hong Kong Standard, 19 February 1997, p.6.

[40] This loss is according to 1996 figures. "Guangdong vows to deal with pollution", Munn Tam, South China Morning Post, 19 February 1997, p.8.

[41] Wang, Rong. "Guangdong Tackles Water Pollution", China Daily 3 June 1995.

[42] 90% of rivers and lakes in Guangdong have been polluted. Pamela Pun, Hong Kong Standard, 19 February 1997, p.6.

[43] Chen, Y. "Dollars or Degradation", China Daily, 22 November 1995.

[44] Pamela Pun, Hong Kong Standard, 19 February 1997, p.6.

[45] Personal communication, Shenzhen City Planning Research Institute.

[46] "Pollution threat to our drinking water", Lucia Palpal-Iotoc and Maureen Pao, Hong Kong Standard, 11 April 1997, p.1. and "Raw sewage risk to drinking water as pollution soars", Fiona Holland, South China Morning Post, 11 April 1997, p.1.

[47] Soleri, Paolo. Arcology: The City in the Image of Man. (1969) MIT Press, Cambridge.

[48] Personal communication, Dr. Anthony Yeh Gar-on, Assistant Director, Center of Urban Planning and Environmental Management, University of Hong Kong.

[49] Soleri, op. cit.

[50] Personal communication, Arcosanti, Cordes Junction, Arizona.

[51] Asimov, Isaac. Life and Energy. (1962) Avon Books, New York, p.200.

[52] Asimov, Isaac. "What is Entropy", Science Digest 73 (January 1973); Brillouin, L. "Life, Thermodynamics and Cybernetics". American Scientist 37 (October 1949).

[53] Rifkin, Jeremy, with Ted Howard. Entropy Into the Greenhouse World (Revised Edition). (1989) Viking Press, New York.

[54] Orr, David. Ecological Literacy. (1992) State University of New York Press.

[55] Kline, Stephen J. Conceptual Foundations for Multidisciplinary Thinking. (1995) Stanford University Press.

[56] Yeang, K. Designing with Nature: The Ecological Basis for Architectural Design, (1995) Mc Graw Hill, New York.

[57] Ding, Xuemei. "Progress Depends on Efficient Use of Resources" (wastewater recycling), China Daily, 20 October 1995.

[58] Frick, Francis. "A Wave Power Design for China", Sunworld (International Solar Energy Society), June 1993.

[59] Roodman, D.M. "Making Better Buildings". State of the World, 1995 (Worldwatch Institute) W.W. Norton, New York, 1995

[60] Meiera, 1993.

[61] Kourik, R. Greywater Use in the Earthscape. Edible Publications, Santa Rosa, 1988.

[62] Hilbertz, W. et al. "Autotopia Ampere - Building with Sun and Sea", proceedings from IL 41:Building with Intelligence/Aspects of a different Building Culture. Institute of Lightweight Structures, Stuttgart, 1995.

[63] Todd, J. et al, From Ecocities to Living Machines: Precepts for Sustainable Technologies. (1993) North Atlantic Books, Berkeley.

[64] Li, W., 1993

[65] Zhong, G. et al. Integrated Farming/Aquaculture in South China. The Dike-Pond System of the Zhujiang Pearl River) Delta. (1988) Cambridge University Press, New York.

[66] Frick, Francis. "The Ecologics of Terracing and Related Earthworks" (manuscript), University of California, Berkeley, June 1994.

[67] ibid.

[68] Johansson, T. et al, eds. Renewable Energy: Sources and Fuels for Electricity, Chapter 22: Solar Hydrogen (Ogden and Nitsch, eds.), (1993) Island Press, Washington DC.

[69] Representing 22% of China's entire GNP, average per capita income in Hong Kong appears ready to surpass that of the United States shortly after 2000.

[70] Yeh, Anthony Gar-On, Ed. Planning Hong Kong for the 21st Century: A Preview of the Future Role of Hong Kong. (1996) Center of Urban Planning and Environmental Management, University of Hong Kong.

[71] Yeh, Anthony Gar-On and Mak, Chai-Kwong, eds. Chinese Cities and China's Development: A Preview of the Future Role of Hong Kong (1995) Center of Urban Planning and Environmental Management, University of Hong Kong.

[72] "Greens urge action on energy and waste", Linda Choy, South China Morning Post, 21 January 1997, p.4. (Hong Kong could become China's green dragon if business leaders are courageous and intelligent enough to see the need and the potential.)

[73] Currently Hong Kong boasts 11 environmental groups and organizations. A collective academic agenda aims to have Hong Kong match even surpass Tokyo as Asia's intellectual and research capital in less than a

Cîteva argumente în favoarea surselor alternative de energie

Acest articol reprezintă o selecţie de constatări, date, comparaţii referitor la relaţiile dintre energie, mediul înconjurător, schimbare a climei, alternative energetice.

Datele sunt plasate haotic, neavând legătură una cu alta, deoarece au fost colectate din diferite surse informative (ceea ce poate fi o cauză a necorespunderii complete a

cifrelor) la diverse teme, iar fiecare punct necesită o analiză individuală pentru că fiecare reprezintă ceva aparte cu efectul său specific. Citirea acestui articol poate că

nu va fi plăcută, dar, sper, va fi utilă.Deci, sursele alternative de energie:

1. Nu provoacă ploile acide. 2. Nu provoacă eutrofierea apei. 3. Nu produc iradierea (ca în cazul substanţelor radioactive). 4. Nu produc schimbarea climei. 5. Nu elimină CO2, NOx, SO2. 6. La arderea hidrogenului se elimină apă. 7. Sunt renovabile, practic, nelimitate. 8. Rezolvă parţial problema deşeurilor. 9. Este o posibilitate a ţărilor lipsite de resurse energetice tradiţionale de a-şi produce singure energie. 10. Poate fi utilizată practic pretutindeni. 11. Peste 50 ani concentraţia CO2 în atmosferă se va dubla. 12. Poate înlocui, practic, toate tipurile tradiţionale. 13. Energia cinematică a curenţilor oceanici este apreciată cu o mărime de nivelul 1018J. 14. Resursele energetice a oceanului planetar bazate pe diferenţa temperaturii de la suprafaţă şi fund constituie o marime de 1026J. 15. Pe râul Rans (Franţa) funcţionează o staţie electrică bazată pe energia fluxului şi refluxului (deci, e posibil!), care îndestulează pe deplin 2 oraşe cu energie electrică. 16. Un singur automobil, la viteză medie, elimină la fiecare kilometru

peste 2 grame CO2. 17. Autovehiculele sunt responsabile pentru 14% din emisiile de CO2

provenite de la arderea tuturor combustibililor fosili de pe glob. 18. Numărul autovehiculelor este în creştere permanentă (în SUA unei maşini revin 1,7 persoane). 19. În apropiaţii 100 ani temperatura globală va creşte cu 2-5 ºC. 20. În ultimii ani în RM temperatura maximă a solului a fost de 65 ºC, a aerului – 40 ºC – este o urmare a schimbării climei. 21. La producerea unui kWh în atmosferă se elimină 500-1000g de CO2, în dependenţă de combustibilul utilizat. 22. La fermentarea unui m3 de deşeuri vegetale sau animale se poate obţine 20-40 m3 de biogaz cu un randament de 50-80% de metan. 23. Folosind retrofitting-ul (reabilitarea izolaţiei termice) încăperii se poate reduce consumul energiei (pe timp de iarnă) de la cca 200 kWh/m2 la cca 90-100 kWh/m2 (peste 50%). 24. La arderea cărbunelui, produselor petroliere, gazelor naturale se elimină cantităţi enorme de CO2, NOx, SO2 – gaze cu efect de seră. 25. Extragerea cărbunelui provoacă perturbarea solului, schimbarea utilizării terenului şi distrugerea pe termen lung a ecosistemului. 26. Extragerea petrolului provoacă poluarea marină, distrugerea şi reducerea florei şi faunei acvatice şi de litoral. 27. Centralele hidroelectrice provoacă schimbări esenţiale în ecosistemele acvatice, calitatea apei, modifică sedimentarea. 28. Energetica nucleară poluează apele de suprafaţă şi subterane prin minerit. 29. Sursele tradiţionale (petrol, cărbune, gaze naturale) vor fi irosite complet deja în 2100. 30. Creşterea populaţiei la 8 mlrd în 2020 va ridica cererea de energie cu 65-95% comparativ cu cererea actuală. 31. În 2020 cererea anuală de gaze naturale va fi circa 4000 mlrd m3 – aproape cât întreaga rezervă actuală a SUA. 32. Din 2020 consumul zilnic de petrol va fi de circa 90 mln barili – cu 25 mln barili/zi decât în present. 33. În 2020 se aşteaptă dublarea extracţiei cărbunelui (dacă va fi?!) – la 7 mlrd tone/an – mai mult decât dublul rezervelor totale cunoscute ale Canadei sau Angliei. 34. Cererea de energie creşte cu 1,6-2,4% anual. 35. Circa 40% din populaţia actuală nu are acces la energia necesară pentru un nivel de existenţă minim. 36. Utilizarea doar a 1% din energia solară captată de Pământ va acoperi toate necesităţile omenirii în energie. 37. Există tehnologii de utilizare a surselor alternative de energie cu un cost final mai mic decât cel actual. 38. Criza energetică condiţionează criza economică a unei ţări. 39. Rezervele de gaze naturale sunt în continuă scădere. Exemplu: în România – de la 452 mlrd m3 în 1994 la 272 mlrd m3 în 2020 (în condiţiile actuale de consum). 40. La creşterea temperaturii globale cu un 1 ºC nivelul global al mării va creşte cu 6 m. 41. Utilizarea resturilor animaliere la obţinerea biogazului reduce considerabil poluarea apelor cu nitraţi. 42. Anual în atmosferă se elimină 20-22 mlrd tone CO2 (echivalentul arderii 7,5 mlrd tone petrol). 43. În ultimul secol nivelul global al mării s-a ridicat cu 10 cm datorită creşterii temperaturii cu 0,5-0,6 grade centisemale.

 44. Ridicarea nivelului global al mării cu 1 m, provocată de creşterea temperaturii globale, va modifica geografia lumii prin acoperirea cu apă a teritoriilor cu nivel coborât sau micşorarea suprafeţelor acoperite cu gheaţă. 45. Ridicarea temperaturii va modifica radical regimul pluviometric şi eolian, ce pot avea consecinţe asupra distribuţiei termice între ecuator şi poli, atrăgând schimbări în harta zonelor de vegetaţie şi deşertice. 46. Durata medie de staţionare a moleculelor de CO2 până la absorbţia lor în ciclul biologic este de 2-4 ani. 47. Conform WEC (World Energy Council) rezervele mondiale confirmate de gaz metan sunt egale cu cele de petrol, însumând 141×1012 m3, cu o durată de aprovizionare de 65 ani la nivelul consumului actual. 48. Poluarea termică provocată de centralele electrice poate duce la efectul de “înflorire” a apei bazinului. 49. La transportarea energiei electrice pe liniile de tensiune înaltă se produce poluarea electromagnetică a mediului. 50. În perioada 1950-2000 creşterea medie anuală a CO2 este de 0,4%. 51. În următorii 30 ani se aşteaptă o creştere de până la 70% a consumului de energie. 52. În viitorii 20 ani se prognozează o creştere a concentraţiei de CO2 de 25-40%. 53. 55-70% din costul energiei constitue preţul combustibilului (vântul şi soarele, însă, nu costă nimic!). 54. Cantitatea anuală de energie recepţionată la sol este de 600-2600 kWh/m2 în dependenţă de latitudine, altitudine, gradul de acoperire cu nori. 55. Locuitorii R.Moldova au la dispoziţie circa 2000 ore pe an de “soare sănătos”. Astfel, o instalaţie solară de 2-3 m2 va asigura gospodăria unei familii în necesităţile energetice electrice şi termice (sezonier). 56. Un cuptor de sticlă elimină zilnic 1225 kg de SO2. 57. Conform datelor Agenţiei de protecţie a mediului SUA (EPA) jumătate din poluarea auto este produsă de 10% din flota de vehicule – modele învechite şi în stare tehnică proastă (situaţie tipică pentru RM). 58. Vehiculele “curate” (utilizează produse petroliere cu caracteristici ameliorative (cu conţinut suplimentar de O2 de 2%), filtru catalizator la eşapament etc) pot reduce emisiile cu peste 90%. 59. Automobilele electrice reduc emisia de noxe (noxelor) cu circa 95% în zona unde sunt utilizate. 60. Automobilele electrice reduc emisia noxelor cu 20-40% pe lanţul: producere energie electrică – reîncărcare ciclică a bateriei – exploatare vehicule. 61. Un electromobil cu acumulator utilizează 25 kWh la 100 km parcurşi în oraş sau 150 km autostradă. 62. În oraşul Bremen (Germania) sunt utilizate electromobile poştale, ce au o baterie de 650 kg cu o rază de acţiune de 350-450 km. Costul acestui transport se echivalează cu cel Diesel. 63. Firma “Peugeot” (Franţa) a dezvoltat un scooter electric cu baterie Cd-Ni cu o rază de acţiune de 45 km. 64. Un electomobil elimină (comparaţie cu 100% emisii vehicul cu benzină) 4% - CO, 60% - CO2, 10% - substanţe nearse (sunt incluse şi emisiile obţinute la obţinerea energie electrice). 65. Între ‘90 şi ’93 în Europa CO2 emis de transporturi a crescut de la

17,9% la 21,1%. 66. În localităţile urbane, practic, 2/3 din emisia NO2 este datorată transportului urban. 67. Ozonul stratosferic scade cu 3% anual. 68. Anual se elimină peste 7 tone CO2/locuitor Europa (1990). 69. În România ploile acide afectează 3,5 mln hectare de pădure (50% din fondul forestier).

Oraşul ecologic  

Majoritatea populaţiei pământului trăieşte în oraşe. Astfel, dacă vrem să ne ocupăm de problemele legate de deteriorarea ecologică, oraşul trebuie să fie un punct major de interes pentru noi.Conceptul Oraşul ecologic se referă la re-construirea oraşelor bazându-ne pe principii ecologice pentru o sustenabilitate pe termen lung, pentru vitalitate culturală şi pentru sănătatea biosferei Pământului. Crearea unui oraş ecologic în cadrul bioregiunii lui este un lucru natural şi fezabil şi poate conduce la un viitor mai sănătos şi, eventual, mai fericit.Un oraş ecologic este o aşezare umană care permite locuitorilor lui să beneficieze de o calitate ridicată de viaţă prin folosirea de resurse naturale minime.Cele patru puncte principale ale conceptului: 

        Clădirile: Acestea folosesc într-o măsură cât mai mare posibilă energia oferită de soare şi de vânt precum şi apa de ploaie pentru a furniza apă şi energie locuitorilor.

        Biodiversitate: Oraşul este întreţesut cu coridoare de habitat natural diversificate biologic pentru a oferi rezidenţilor acces la natură şi la recreere.

        Transport: Sursele sale de mâncare şi de bunuri de consum sunt furnizate dinăuntru sau din apropiere în scopul reducerii costurilor de transport. În scopul minimalizării nevoii de transport motorizat, majoritatea rezidenţilor săi trăiesc la o distanţă apropiată de locurile lor de muncă, distanţă care poate fi străbătută fie pe jos, fie cu bicicleta.  Mijloace de transport care circulă frecvent leagă centrele locale pentru oameni care trebuie să se deplaseze mai departe. Deţinerea în comun a unei maşini permite folosirea acesteia în caz de nevoie.

        Industrie: Bunurile care se produc în oraş sunt destinate pentru refolosire, remanufacturare şi reciclare. Procesele industriale pe care le utilizează implică utilizarea produselor secundare şi minimalizează mişcarea bunurilor.

        Economie: În scopul unei ocupări totale a forţei de muncă, oraşul ecologic deţine o economie mai degrabă bazată pe muncă decât pe materiale, energie şi apă.

Dongtan, orasul viitoruluiWednesday, 24 January 2007

Un nou oras, construit dupa inalte standarde ecologice, iata unul din marile vise ale arhitectilor chinezi. Constructorii au ales insula Chongming (zona meridionala), un „no man's land”, in care principala bogatie e... „vidul”, asa cum le place localnicilor sa spuna. Partea de sud-est a insulei e acoperita cu mari intinderi mlastinoase, o rezervatie naturala aflata sub protectie internationala.

Aici fac escala pasarile care migreaza intre Siberia si Australia, unele dintre ele, specii rare. Autoritatile chineze au promovat un plan in care urbanizarea sa „rimeze” cu mediul. Daca proiectul se va realiza pana in 2040, mlastinile din Chongming vor purta numele de Dongtan, cel mai mare oras ecologic din lume. Fara emisii de bioxid de carbon in transporturi si cu un consum energetic cu doua treimi mai mic decat in mod obisnuit.

Un exemplu redutabil pentru intreaga planeta. Chongming, cu 1200 kilometri patrati, e cea de-a treia insula ca marime din China. Numarul locuitorilor: 600.000. Partea de sud-est este, asa cum am amintit, rezervatie naturala, in care e imposibil sa-ti imaginezi un oras al viitorului. Unul din indiciile vizibile ale proiectului nu se afla deocamdata pe insula ci... in plina mare. Acolo unde au inceput lucrarile de constructie a unui pod pe cabluri care, prelungit cu un tunel, va lega Shanghai de Chongming.

Orasul ecologic va fi ridicat pe o suprafata de 86 kilometri patrati, adica trei sferturi din suprafata Manhattan-ului. In 2010 ar trebui sa fie finalizat primul oras-martor, cu 15.000 de locuitori. Pentru construirea acestui prim sit, a fost insarcinata o intreprindere semiprivata, dependenta de autoritatile din Shanghai, intreprindere cotata la bursa din Hong-Kong. Locuintele, centrele comerciale si de munca vor fi ridicate foarte aproape unele de altele, favorizand mersul pe jos sau cu bicicleta.

Vor fi amenajate un mare numar de gradini si plantatii, inclusiv pe acoperisurile caselor si imobilelor (ceea ce asigura si o buna izolatie termica si fonica). Pentru producerea energiei vor fi utilizate biomasa, reciclarea deseurilor organice (livrate de biofermele construite in marginile orasului), tehnicile eoliana, solara... Toate procedeele nepoluante, cunoscute in acest sens vor fi agreate, pentru reducerea la maxim a emisiilor de gaze cu efect de sera. Deocamdata, autoritatile din Shanghai se concentreaza asupra perfectarii colaborarii intre oamenii de stiinta si partenerii internationali pentru validarea proiectului.

Unul din scopuri: agricultura biologica in care sunt implicati specialisti de la universitatea din Torino. Pe termen lung, proiectul necesita foarte multi bani, zeci de miliarde de dolari, mult mai mult decat se va cheltui pentru Jocurile Olimpice de la Beijing din 2008. Un investitor irlandez interesat sa se implice in acest proiect a promis 1 miliard de dolari pentru crearea unui important centru ecvestru. La doar trei kilometri de viitorul oras incepe rezervatia naturala. Va fi, evident, protejata dar va deveni si un loc de agrement ecologic.

Proiectul va avea, din pacate, limite indezirabile, si asta din cauza traficului din port si a santierelor navale care vor fi construite in insula vecina Changxin, ce constituie

importante surse de poluare ale caror efecte asupra orasului si rezervatiei sunt greu de evaluat. In plus, restul insulei continua sa fie aprovizionata cu energie de o centrala cu carbune. Pentru modernizarea acesteia se mizeaza pe investitii straine, invocandu-se tratatul de la Kyoto, ratificat de China.

Primele transferuri de tehnologie au debutat pe insula prin constructia unor sere experimentale si a unei unitati de compost. Cat priveste pasarile migratoare, acestea vor beneficia de mai multa hrana, gratie dezvoltarii agriculturii. Se pare ca responsabilii chinezi au fost fascinati de exemplele oferite de europeni, mai exact de proiectul unui oras ecologic aflat in constructie intr-un cartier din Hanovra, care va fi finalizat in 2010, si de un orasel ecologic dintr-un cartier londonez, cu 82 de locuinte, cu birouri, spatii comerciale, sali de spectacol si alte locuri publice, intinse pe o suprafata de 2500 metri patrati in care nu exista nici o sursa de bioxid de carbon.Scandal în jurul oraşelor ecologicede Mihaela Pavnutescu (650 afisari, 2008-01-29)  

Aşezările ecologice prind tot mai mult în ... Profitul uriaş adus de construirea, pe spaţii virgine, a localităţilor cu poluare zero naşte dispute la Londra

Oraşele ecologice par a fi soluţia pentru viitor. O viaţă idilică, uneori, se configurează în spaţii în care emisiile de carbon sunt zero, rondurile cu flori se arată pretutindeni, pistele pentru biciclişti înlocuiesc şoselele, iar panourile solare fac uitate sistemele de încălzire care poluează atmosfera. Petice de pământ, neatinse de poluare, pe care arhitecţii plănuiesc aşezări pentru numai câteva mii de persoane, sunt vânate asiduu de cei care au bani şi vor să respire aer curat, dar şi de cei care vor să facă afaceri din tot ceea ce înseamnă eco.

Englezii se numără şi ei printre cei atinşi de morbul vieţii la ţară, dorind să lase în urmă metropolele murdare şi supraaglomerate, cu toate neajunsurile pe care le presupune traiul zilnic în astfel de locuri în care poluarea de toate felurile devine, pe zi ce trece, din ce în ce mai greu de suportat. Între localităţile Basingstoke şi Winchester se află un colţ de rai pe care se dă una dintre cele mai mari bătălii imobiliare din Anglia, se arată într-un articol din cotidianul britanic „The Independent".

O firmă de construcţii doreşte să înalţe aici un oraş ecologic, în ciuda faptului că acest lucru presupune distrugerea naturii. Nu contează că va fi serios afectat habitatul natural al atâtor plante şi vieţuitoare, ci doar faptul că, în numele ecologiei, care deja este un subiect la modă şi aduce voturi cu nemiluita în campaniile electorale, trebuie exploatat orice mod în care, chipurile, oamenii sunt ajutaţi să trăiască eco şi să mănânce bio.

Planul a fost deja respins de autorităţile locale de patru ori până acum, dar mirajul celei mai mari lovituri imobiliare din ultimii ani îi face pe constructorii englezi să lupte prin orice mijloace pentru a duce la final proiectul oraşului ecologic.

Ce mai contează natura când avem ecoprofit!

Societatea imobiliară îşi susţine cu cerbicie proiectul, în ciuda tuturor protestelor manifestate de guvern şi de ecologiştii englezi. Ea pretinde că terenul vizat este ideal pentru a adăposti 28.500 de oameni, care vor trăi aici la cele mai înalte standarde ecologice.

Sălbăticia locului şi designul propus de constructori, care, spun ei, va fi deosebit, sunt două motive serioase pentru care aceştia îşi susţin ideea de a ridica aici cel mai teribil oraş ecologic din Anglia. Dar toate aceste argumente nu fac decât să stârnească şi mai abitir furia ecologiştilor care sunt, pur şi simplu, îngroziţi de urmările pe care le-ar putea avea asupra mediului excavatoarele şi tot ceea ce presupune un şantier în mijlocul naturii.

Mii de hectare de teren virgin distruse, animale sălbatice puse pe fugă, sute de copaci culcaţi la pământ, gunoaie care ar urma să troneze în locuri neatinse până acum de civilizaţie, fie ea şi una care propovăduieşte protecţia mediului înconjurător!

Afront adus mediului înconjurător

Preşedintele Consiliului Local din Winchester, George Beckett, i-a înştiinţat în scris pe mai-marii săi despre proiect, calificând această iniţiativă ecoimobiliară ca un exerciţiu de cinism şi un afront adus naturii. Tom Oliver, liderul Asociaţiei de protecţie a mediului rural englez, descalifică, la rândul său, această iniţiativă. El spune că un astfel de oraş, aşa-zis ecologic, construit în mijlocul naturii, care trebuie protejată, şi nu distrusă, nu ar reprezenta decât o pată la adresa politicilor de mediu. „Acest proiect nu este decât o născocire a unei companii oportuniste.

Acest oraş eco, odată ridicat, va discredita guvernul şi nu va face decât să şteargă credibilitatea altor societăţi care vor, într-adevăr, să intre în competiţia construcţiilor de acest fel", a spus Tom Oliver. Compania imobiliară merge şi mai departe, oferindu-le preţuri exorbitante proprietarilor terenurilor vizate. Oficial, managerii firmei nu recunosc acest lucru, ascunzându-se sub pretextul confidenţialităţii informaţiilor.Dongtan, un alt Disneyland?China şi Marea Britanie sunt lideri mondiali în ceea ce priveşte construirea oraşelor ecologice. Celebrul, de-acum, „eco-city" Dongtan, care urmează să fie ridicat lângă Shanghai, China, va fi construit de o societate de construcţii chineză în colaborare cu firma britanică Arup, care va asigura partea tehnică de dezvoltare a proiectului.

Oraşul ecologic din China este prevăzut să adăpostească peste 90.000 de oameni până în 2010, iar 90 la sută din deşeuri vor fi reciclate sau refolosite. Dar şi în acest caz există voci care contestă proiectul, susţinând că Dongtan va fi un fel de Disneyland. Dar verdictul în ceea ce priveşte construirea acestui oraş va fi influenţat de alţi factori care ţin

de succesul arhitectonic, de tehnologie, şi nu neapărat de valoarea sa comercială, susţin investitorii.

Oraşul ecologic arăbesc va bate recordul

Nici arabii nu se lasă mai prejos. Ei vor să construiască lângă Abu Dhabi cel mai mare oraş verde de pe glob. Proiectul le aparţine tot englezilor, mai precis arhitectului britanic Norman Foster, care doreşte să ridice aici case ecologice pentru aproximativ 50.000 de oameni. Pierderile de energie preconizate sunt zero, iar despre poluare nici nu poate fi vorba.

Panouri fotovoltaice vor furniza energie, iar oraşul va profita din plin de briza mării. Perimetrul oraşului va fi protejat de neplăcerile provocate de clima deşertică şi de zgomotul provocat de avioanele care aterizează pe aeroportul din Abu Dhabi din apropiere. Maşinile nu vor avea acces în oraş, pentru a reduce la maximum emisiile de dioxid de carbon. Transportul în comun va fi asigurat de maşini echipate cu baterii electrice, pentru care va fi construită o reţea de alimentare cu energie, iar apa va fi reciclată şi folosită pentru udarea plantelor ce vor fi crescute şi folosite, apoi, pe post de biocarburanţi.

Dongtan, oraşul chinez 100% ecologicde Livia Cimpoeru (794 afisari, 2008-01-11)  

Autorităţile chineze şi investitorii britanici vor începe anul acesta construcţia din temelii a primului Eco-city din lume.

China, una dintre cele poluate ţări ale lumii, are ambiţia de a-şi rezolva problemele ecologice într-un stil grandios. În urmă cu doi ani, autorităţile regiunii Shanghai au dat publicităţii un proiect uriaş, care prevede construcţia unui oraş exclusiv ecologic.

Eco-city-ul chinez Dongtan a atras atenţia întregii lumi, fiind în prezent cel mai mare şi mai inovativ proiect urban, menit să reducă la maximum poluarea şi consumul de energie dintr-un oraş.

Pentru locuitorii din Shanghai, cel mai aglomerat şi mai poluat oraş din China, aerul de pe insula învecinată are o calitate neobişnuită: este curat. La numai o oră de mers cu feribotul, satele de pescari şi de agricultori de pe insula Chongming creează o lume aparte, neatinsă de zgomotul infernal şi poluarea masivă din oraşele moderne ale Chinei, relatează „Seattle Times".

Atmosfera e calmă, iar liniştea e întreruptă doar de zgomotul păsărilor migratoare care vin la gurile fluviului Yangtze. Culturi de bostani şi varză se întind pe sute de hectare. „Este ultima bucată de pământ neatinsă de dezvoltare în regiunea oraşului Shanghai. E o comoară", spune Yan Yang, un arhitect originar din Chongming.

Insula a rămas una dintre ultimele mărturii ale trecutului, însă nu peste mult timp ar putea deveni un bastion al viitorului. Pe insulă urmează să se pună piatra de temelie a primului oraş din lume în întregime ecologic, care va avea suprafaţa cât trei sferturi din Manhattan.

Regiunea Dongtan, pe care va fi amplasat oraşul, este unul dintre cele mai importante sanctuare pentru păsările migratoare. Deocamdată, locul este aproape pustiu, primind foarte puţini vizitatori interesaţi de această izolată rezervă naturală.

Model ecologic complex

Numit Dongtan Eco-City (în traducere „plaja din răsărit"), proiectul reprezintă un efort de a canaliza cererea enormă pentru locuinţe şi energie a Chinei într-un mod cât se poate de radical: un oraş de o jumătate de milion de locuitori, care îşi reciclează aproape tot ce înseamnă deşeu, care îşi produce electricitatea din turbine de vânt, panouri solare şi biocombustibili, care asigură transportul public cu autobuze pe hidrogen şi taxiuri cu energie solară. Construcţia oraşului va debuta anul acesta, iar planificatorii oraşului speră să termine prima fază a proiectului în 2010, când Shanghaiul o să fie invadat de vizitatorii World Expo.

Dacă va reuşi, proiectul Dongtan ar putea deveni un model nu numai pentru China, ci pentru întreaga lume. Există, totodată, riscul ca Dongtan să intre în lungul şir al marilor idei care eşuează în practică, un exemplu al modului în care goana nebună a Chinei pe calea creşterii economice poate submina până şi un proiect ecologic grandios. Problemele ecologice ale Chinei şi nevoia masivă de surse energetice au implicaţii globale, de la încălzirea climei la creşterea preţului la petrol şi înrăutăţirea calităţii aerului. Pe de altă parte, ele deschid calea unor soluţi inovatoare.

Soluţia pentru un posibil dezastru ecologic

În 2005, arhitectul ecologist William McDonough şi compania de construcţii britanică Arup au anunţat ambiţiosul proiect urban din delta fluviului Yangtze.

Mai mulţi experţi din Seattle, între care investitori, planificatori urbani şi arhitecţi de clădiri ecologice, sunt implicaţi în proiect. Pentru mulţi dintre ei, Dongtan e mai mult

decât o propunere de business. În opinia lor, doar implicarea tehnologiei de ultimă oră şi lansarea unor idei revoluţionare pentru criza ecologică a Chinei ar putea evita un dezastru. „China are nevoie disperată de un mediu mai curat, nu numai de dragul chinezilor, ci pentru întreaga lume", spune Patrick Tam, responsabil al unei companii mixte de investiţii în proiectul Dongtan.

Consum propriu aproape integral

Amploarea ameţitoare a proiectului depăşeşte tot ce a făcut vreodată Gary Lawrence, fost director de planificare al oraşului american Redmond, de lângă Seattle. Lawrence supervizează strategiile de sustenabilitate urbană ale proiectului Dongtan din partea companiei Arup, angajată de guvernul din Shanghai să proiecteze oraşul ecologic. Compania britanică a mai realizat proiecte mari în China, printre care şi stadionul Olimpic de la Beijing.

Specialiştii trebuie să integreze toate aspectele vieţii dintr-un oraş, precum producerea energiei sau problema deşeurilor, într-un ecosistem funcţional, cât mai puţin poluant. Potrivit lui Lawrence, energia va fi furnizată de turbine de vânt, de reciclarea deşeurilor agricole şi de panouri solare. Centrala electrică din Dongtan va arde o materie primă care se găseşte în abundenţă în regiune: coaja bobului de orez.

Acesta va fi folosit ca biomasă pentru generatoare, în timp ce deşeurile umane vor fi tratate ca o resursă, fiind reciclate în biogaz. Dezvoltarea în trei mari etape a oraşului combină case, birouri şi magazine în mici aglomerări - sistem menit să încurajeze mersul pe jos şi folosirea transportului public. Fiecare locuitor va trăi la maximum şapte minute distanţă de staţiile de autobuze, iar pe străzi vor circula taxiuri silenţioase, alimentate prin panouri solare. Maşinile convenţionale, alimentate cu carburanţi fosili, vor avea pur şi simplu interdicţie de a intra în oraş.

Ambiţiile merg mai departe de simpla economisire a energiei şi reciclarea deşeurilor. Planurile vorbesc despre „fabrici alimentare" urbane, în care legume organice pot fi crescute prin tehnici hidroponice, care folosesc apa din canalizarea oraşului.

Spaţii generoase pentru pietoni

O mare parte din cei 85 de kilometri pătraţi ai oraşului vor rămâne însă ocupaţi de parcuri şi ferme de produse organice. Parcurile şi malurile lacurilor vor fi înconjurate de un spaţiu verde dominat de biodiversitate.

Oraşul are de şase ori mai mult spaţiu pentru pietoni decât Copenhaga, una dintre cele mai aerisite capitale europene.Clădirile vor consuma cu 70 la sută mai puţină energie decât o clădire obişnuită, iar panouri de înregistrare vor fi amplasate peste tot la vedere pentru ca oamenii să ştie câtă energie consumă şi câtă produc.

Niciuna dintre clădirile de locuinţe nu va depăşi înălţimea de opt etaje, iar pe acoperişuri vor fi instalate mici pajişti verzi pentru a izola apartamentele, dar şi pentru a recicla apa uzată. Pe scurt, oraşul va tinde către emisii de carbon minime şi îşi va asigura aproape în întregime sursele de hrană şi energie.

»China are nevoie disperată de un mediu mai curat, nu numai de dragul chinezilor, ci pentru întreaga lume Patrick Tam, responsabil al unei companii mixte de investiţii în proiectul Dongtan

 

Ambiţii mari, riscuri pe măsură

Primit foarte bine de presă în momentul anunţului iniţial, proiectul a început să fie privit cu mai mult scepticism în ultima vreme. În China, până şi cele mai promiţătoare aventuri întâmpină obstacole, unul dintre ele fiind corupţia. Planul Dongtan a fost pus în pericol anul trecut, după ce secretarul Partidului comunist din Shanghai a fost arestat pentru manevrarea ilegală a unor fonduri de pensii.

Cazul a trebuit să fie rezolvat înainte ca terenul să fie transferat de la guvernul din Shanghai către compania investitoare. Compania Arup a primit totuşi asigurări că guvernul va da în curând undă verde pentru începerea construcţiei.

Perspectiva eşecului nu poate fi neglijată. Un proiect mai vechi iniţiat tot de arhitectul William McDonough, care a urmărit construirea unui eco-sat într-o zonă rurală din nord-estul Chinei, s-a dovedit nesustenabil. După patru ani de la începerea construcţiei, proiectul Huangbaiyu s-a lovit de probleme neaşteptate, cea mai mare fiind aceea că niciunul dintre localnici nu-şi putea permite să cumpere vreuna din case, pentru că erau prea scumpe. Şi în cazul Dongtanului, fermierii locali nu-şi vor permite prea uşor o casă ecologică, iar oraşul riscă să fie invadat de chinezi înstăriţi.

Insula legată de lume

Arhitecţi din întreaga lume au vizitat locul, iar primarul Londrei s-a declarat impresionat de proiect, ridicând aşteptările chiar înainte ca prima lopată să se înfigă în pământ. „Dongtan va fi un exemplu la nivel internaţional,

iar toată lumea va sta cu ochii pe noi, lucru care ne încântă, dar ne şi sperie", mărturiseşte Lawrence.

Până acum, zona Dongtan a rămas foarte departe şi izolată de regiunile dezvoltate. Din Shanghai e nevoie de două ore de mers cu metroul, feribotul şi taxiul. Acest lucru se va schimba însă. Un pod şi o autostradă cu şase benzi, programate să fie date în folosinţă în 2009, vor scurta drumul la 40 de minute. Scopul autorităţilor locale este acela de a avea un orăşel demonstrativ de 10.000 de locuitori până în 2010, când oraşul Shanghai va găzdui marea expoziţie internaţională World Expo. În fazele ulterioare, Dongtan va creşte la o populaţie de 80.000 de locuitori până în 2020 şi la jumătate de milion de locuitori până în 2050.

În afară de proiectul Dongtan, guvernul chinez are în vedere construirea altor patru eco-oraşe, însă locaţia exactă a acestora încă nu a fost făcută publică. Experţii cred că adevărata provocare va fi ca aceste oraşe să fi construite în centrul Chinei, în regiuni care au fost poluate de industria grea şi depopulate de milioanele de chinezi care s-au orientat către zonele în dezvoltare de pe coasta Pacificului.