Reflections on arcologies
The first time I encountered the term was while playing Sim City 2000 as a kid. In the game, these massive structures occupying entire city blocks were the ultimate goal for your city, representing a sort of Solarpunk utopia for your richest citizens. Sim City 2000 even had a "hidden" achievement, where if you built enough "launch"-type arcologies, they would all take off for space and end the game. It's the first and last time I saw a real ending in a city simulator.
(Sim City 2000 - The exodus has begun)
Much later, I encountered the concept again in older works, such as Oath of Fealty and Neuromancer. At the time when the idea of arcologies was imagined, it represented a kind of architectural dream, where city and ecology met and blended in harmony. Nowadays, we know better and it's pretty much accepted that an arcology could not work - at least not in its purest form - and our ideas on how cities should be built and developed have moved away from such extreme planning. Well, except perhaps for Neom, which is what a modern arcology would look like if it were designed in the 2020s, and probably one of the many reasons why it shall ultimately fail to achieve its goals.
(The Line - artist's impression)
A City Is Not a Tree was a cornerstone of urban theory, and it is as true today as it was in the 60s. In fact, going one step further, successful cities are often organic rather than planned. Many examples of modern planned community or "new towns" are actual failures at accomplishing what is, in my opinion, the most basic function of a city: a place where people want to live. And the reason for that is very simple: no matter how much experience we have at urban planning, a city is not a static thing, it is alive. It changes and evolves together with the needs of its population. When it is so rigidly planned from the start, it fossilizes around the designers' ideas and quickly becomes incapable of meeting the arising needs of its inhabitants. And that's assuming that the original planners made a perfect job of designing it in the first place, which you know is never true.
So a city is not a mathematical tree, indeed it is closer to a real tree, as in a living organism.
(EPCOT - artist's impression)
Arcologies are not always towering megastructures mind you. In fact, Walt Disney "EPCOT (Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow )" concept was another kind of arcology, just less vertical. Walt Disney is today remembered for its media and theme park legacy, but it would be doing him a disservice to forget that he was a kind of holistic entrepreneur. One of his most interesting ideas at the time was EPCOT, a sort of planned community, built around the idea of mobility and locality.
From all over the community, residents going to their jobs converge by WEDWAY on the center city. Many work downtown, in offices, stores, and shops, but most employees go beyond the city core to their jobs. From the Transportation Lobby, monorail trains carry employees either to the theme park or to EPCOT’s 1,000 acre industrial park.
At this central station in the industrial complex, passengers disembark from the monorail and again board WEDWAY cars that radiate to each facility.
(EPCOT Film, 1966, transcript)
If you see the parallel with Neom, congratulations. The people behind Neom didn't invent anything, they just repackaged these ideas in a way that is more attractive to today's investors.
In the end, the original EPCOT was never built, but it would very likely have suffered the same shortfalls as other "more reasonable" new towns developed in droves in the 60s and the 70s.
Which brings me to my last point for today. A city exists primarily to serve the people living in it. These people form a community, or multiple communities, and you have this symbiotic relationship between the host and the symbiont. There is this misconception that communities are fungible. That you can take a community, move it somewhere else and it will stay the same, or replace it with another community and everything will work the same. This is clearly wrong, as we've seen it countless times on the internet (FanFiction.net => AO3, Twitter => X, Facebook => TikTok), and it works exactly the same way in cities and neighborhoods (e.g., through gentrification).
There's a fantasy popular among technologists and policymakers that community can be engineered. That if you identify the right variables and apply the right interventions, you can produce community on demand. This fantasy has a name in the urbanist literature: it's called "new town syndrome," after the observation that Britain's postwar new towns, carefully designed with all the amenities a community could need, produced widespread anomie and social isolation in their early decades. Stevenage had shops, schools, parks and pubs. What it didn't have was history. The residents had no shared past and no slowly accumulated social capital. They had proximity without context, and proximity without context is a crowd.
(JA Westenberg)
To me, this is the reason why new towns are so soulless. What make the soul of a city are its people and communities. You cannot create a city from scratch, with its roads and houses and buildings and businesses, and expect it to naturally develop a soul. It doesn't work like that. And because these places lack a soul, people don't want to live there. And when they have to, it is just not a pleasant experience.
So where does that leave us with regards to arcologies? Well, as much as I love the Sci-Fi-ness of this idea, and as much as I believe ecology should play a bigger role in urban planning, in my opinion they are a urbanism dead-end. A kind of "utopia" dreamed by urban planners and architects, convinced that they are clever and omniscient enough to be able to design something like that from the ground up and have it work. In one word, hubris.
