Can we fit ENTIRE cities in a single building? (Arcologies)

when I was a kid I played a whole lot of SimCity 2000 like a lot a lot the original Sim City was revolutionary defining a genre where none had existed before but SimCity 2000 added much more flexibility and depth making it far more fun than its predecessor like all SimCity games it doesn't really end you can keep building forever but once you hit 120 000 people in your city you can build arcologies these massive structures could hold tens of thousands of Sims and included everything to meet their needs like hospitals fire police and education with the density archeologies provided you could create cities with Incredible populations millions of Sims in one region because it was challenging to unlock archeologies because it took a while to get to 120 000 people in your city they became sort of an iconic part of the game I know I was absolutely fascinated by them as a kid I mean the idea of a city within a city a structure with thousands and thousands of people with everything they need in one building it was amazing to me fifth grade me wondered if they were real or just science fiction and would they be the future of cities maybe one could be under construction right now let's go on a journey to learn more about arcologies one that will take us from Arizona to Saudi Arabia to Blade Runner and back to Sim City after the bike Bell foreign Saudi Arabia has begun constructing the line 170 kilometer linear City from the Red Sea toward the interior of the country and it's probably the closest thing we have to a full-scale arcology project under construction when it's finished if it's finished the line will be approximately 500 meters tall with multiple levels of Metro lines helping residents move along this incredibly narrow horizontal City designers claim that every resident will be able to meet their daily needs in a five minute walk and that the entire project will be powered by renewable energy there have been plenty of videos done on the line and there are plenty of Skeptics out there me included I'm not sure a city in the desert like this will ever truly be sustainable nor am I sure it'll ever be totally completed but they say it is under construction so who knows the Saudis bought Golf and invested in a bunch of tech companies so you probably don't want to underestimate them so what makes the line the closest thing we have to a Sim City arcology well to understand that we need to have a definition of arcology and to develop a definition we need to understand a history of the concept arcology was coined by architect Paolo Solari he began his career as a student of Frank Lloyd Wright but eventually set out on his own focus on the idea of how cities could live in harmony with nature in fact the term arcology comes from ecological architecture solar began developing his ideas right at the dawn of the modern environmental movement in fact the first Earth day was celebrated the same year Solari published his Treatise called arcology the city in the image of man in the years that led up to 1970 Rachel Carson published her seminal book Silent Spring about pesticide use the Cuyahoga River caught on fire in Cleveland due to pollution and the earthrise photo inspired everyone to think about the fragility of the planet we share campaigns began to save the whales save the rainforest stop DDT use etc etc but so Larry turned his attention to cities and when he looked at the suburbs he saw things that people were only just starting to figure out the American dream of a house in the suburbs and a couple of cars was incredibly wasteful sprawl ate a precious land and the distances between uses caused traffic and Emissions we are building the most inefficient cities possible in his words scattered life is by definition deprived or parasitic to make matters worse urbanization was happening at a Breakneck Pace worldwide the global population was also growing rapidly the planet went from 3 billion to 4 billion humans in just 14 years 1960-1974. it would only take 13 more years to get to 5 billion more people living in wasteful cities could spell ecological disaster to Solari our colleges could help solve all of those problems and help us live in harmony with nature the real problem he saw was horizontal cities he said we should abandon them and go multi-dimensional instead now this is somewhat obvious as it makes sense that you could house more people in a square kilometer filled with skyscrapers than a square kilometer filled with large lot single-family homes but Solari wasn't just proposing traditional density in his mind the entire structure of a city should be multi-dimensional including Transit way utilities mail Freight everything it should be conceived as a complete whole not as a city growing haphazardly subdivision by subdivision finally the arcology will be surrounded by open natural landscape food production would be handled within the arcology leaving only nature outside now you might see those images and think that they look dystopian or too dense or too modern or whatever but Solari saw the future and he believed that this was ideally designed for human habitation people like to be around other people where social species by nature and having everyone close together he thought would make life better for everyone information would travel faster education would be easier to provide Goods would be easier to provide the systems that we need to survive would be more efficiently provided so Larry's plans ran up against some challenges notably reality he's proposing a fundamentally different way of building cities something so revolutionary it's hard to even picture us doing this didn't stop Solari from trying and he has built in our College in the Arizona desert called Santi it Bears essentially no resemblance to his groundbreaking ideas but sticks to his ideals about sustainable architecture and Urban Design his organization's current Manifesto doesn't discuss the importance of verticality but instead pedestrian scale design Urban Agriculture and basically 15-minute cities or the idea that everyone should be able to fulfill all their basic daily needs nearby so an arcology has been built Arcosanti it is an arcology because the person who developed the term says it is one but I would argue that it's not really I mean it's not even a megastructure by any sense of the definition you could make the case that the city of Whittier Alaska has a better case than solari's own creation no more than 100 people have ever lived in Arcosanti while 272 people live in Whittier and mostly Under One Roof the baggage Towers condominium it's 14 floors and contains condos a bed and breakfast General Store laundromat post office and a school with an indoor park connected via a tunnel but there are plenty of other mixed-use buildings out there just like the baggage town hours but the only difference here is that almost all residents of one town live in one building sort of arcology style now how did solaire's ideas for archaeologists make their way into Blade Runner and SimCity well Solaris own diagrams do look a bit like science fiction some of these look like giant spaceships or space stations and in a way they are his vision for fully self-contained cities that made no impact on the surrounding environment are a perfect concept for space travel if you want to hear more about arcologies in space check out some of the great videos by Isaac Arthur I'll leave a link in the description it's no surprising that science fiction writers picked up on the idea of arcologies and began incorporating them into their work one was William Gibson's Neuromancer published in 1984. other writers had used the concept in the Years prior but he actually used the word arcology multiple times and the popularity of the book helped increase the awareness of the concept even if people didn't know its Origins was Solari then of course came Blade Runner this movie was actually released two years before Neuromancer and gave people a view of what a futuristic art ecology could actually look like together with Neuromancer Blade Runner helped kick off the cyberpunk aesthetic and this concept of megastructure cities will become part of that world how then did this arcology concept move from science fiction into SimCity well the answer I have is rather unsatisfying I'm honestly not sure my best guess is that we'll write the game designer behind the Sim City Games was familiar with Solari Neuromancer Blade Runner or other sci-fi examples of arcologies riots games were all about systems from traffic to power to pipes and land use demand in his research he certainly would have learned about self-contained mega cities and adding them toward the end of a player's SimCity Journey was a nice reward for someone who had themselves mastered Urban systems when I was a kid dropping our colleges in my cities I often wondered is this the future of cities would I be living in an arcology someday well 30 years later and we know now that none of us are living in true arcologies why well remember that population growth chart from before we're we're no longer on the part of the curve where the Earth is adding a billion people every 14 years the UN predicts that by 2100 the Curve will start bending the other way and will reach a peak population at around 10.4 billion people that's still over 2 billion more people than exist today but it's not the kind of population number that's going to make arcology living desirable or necessary so Larry was right to say that City should be denser and take advantage of efficiencies associated with location and access but megastructures are probably a bridge too far that's partly why I'm skeptical of the line it actually resembles an arcology in many ways it truly looks like a megastructure a continuous purpose-built City with all systems designed to create efficiencies instead of going vertical like Solari argued they decided to go in a straight line I guess it simplifies some systems but I'd imagine a circle or sphere would be more efficient as you could theoretically have more destinations closer to you especially if you were at the center of the sphere the line is designed to house nine million people and housing them at a density of 260 000 people per square kilometer is certainly more land efficient than suburban sprawl but the designers have to make life in the line significantly better than living in another normal City it's not like our planet is reliant on our colleges and everyone has to live in one for the population reasons I just mentioned if completed the line could be cool in a cyberpunk future way and that might attract some people it's the closest thing we have to a Blade Runner now that Kowloon walled city is gone but it just doesn't seem necessary and you're still stuck in the middle of the desert I guess for the time being city planners will have to stick to making cities better the old-fashioned way and leave our 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Channel: City Beautiful

Views: 157,548

Keywords: city planning, town planning, urban planning, urban design

Id: sZILAAPdTzE

Length: 12min 26sec (746 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 16 2023