Inspiration for Arcology Modeling

It all goes back to the meaning of life, doesn't it? Humans spend inordinate amounts of time looking for love or money or happiness, always trying to get the most out of life - in essence optimizing our existence in some fashion. The optimization part is where simulation can be a useful tool, as we often disagree on what infrastructure improvements we could make in order to make us happier or richer or work not so far from our loved ones. For all the aspirations we've had over the decades of reaching for the stars and developing permanent space colonies, I'm surprised by the relatively little success we've had in improving the efficiency of our lifestyles in our dwellings right here on Earth. As summarized in Table 1.1, the ideal American domicile still typically consists of the single family home, an almost completely isolated pocket of land connected to the rest of the community only by a few wires, pipes, and a stretch of pavement. What goes across these interfaces? And how might they be improved and rearranged by municipal facilities to make the city as a whole more sustainable, flexible, and efficient?

Table 1.1: Municipal home interfaces

Category	Current Interfaces	Potential Future Interfaces Physical

As a first step toward understanding these complexities, let us note that living systems seem to have a natural tendency to miniaturize complexity, both in space and time. A mathematician might draw the analogy that we live on the interesting boundary region of a fractal, often surrounded by vast regions of fairly uniform space. While the sun and stars and most of the universe are beautiful and magnificent only when observed on a scale spanning thousands to trillions of kilometers, I'd surmise that they are not as interesting when studied on a micrometer scale used to observe, say, the inner workings of a paramecium. That's one of the main reasons that, as astronomers, we might search the heavens for deeper understanding of celestial mechanics, but hope to discover other forms of complex alien life. For we could only have hope to interact with other living systems of sufficient complexity that exist on a similar space and time scale as we do. Meanwhile, the progression of life on Earth as a whole apparently strives to fit more and more complexity into the spaces it is able to fill.

If we drew a control volume around an ecosystem, we'd find that it functions as an engine that harnesses existing energy gradients in order to further decrease the entropy of its local area. [25] Through continuing that progress, we've begun to expand the boundaries between which objects of vastly different scales can interact. Lately we've been peering into the inner workings of relatively tiny, fast computing devices, which will soon be governed increasingly by subatomic interactions between quantum particles, which in turn affect what we do with our lives and our global economy. That's amazing. Someday soon, we also expect that the tiny electrical processes that occur in our microchips may go on to help us alter the courses of celestial bodies, perhaps to allow us to produce some kind of pronounced impact (or avoid an impact) in the cosmic ballet of planets. But for now, one of our primary (although not yet fully utilized) uses for our microprocessing technology often is the guidance of the course of our vehicles and information delivery systems.

Influential Literature

The specific concept of the arcology was first introduced in the 1950s by architect Paolo Soleri as the ultimate urban planning solution to the inherent problems of metropolitan growth[42]. Continuing trends in the expansion of metropolitan areas have contributed to explosive growth of low density suburban sprawl, the decay of inner city urban areas, and finally the indiscriminate destruction of natural environments to make room for a human habitat system which is increasingly less efficient, less convenient, less and aesthetically pleasing. The concept of the arcology attempts to reverse those trends by providing a compact city infrastructure that works well and manages to reprocess most of its waste before returning material back to the environment for further reclamation.

What exactly is an arcology by definition? Featured in several science fiction works as futuristic cities, an arcology is more than simply just a colossal structure or superbuilding. The arcology integrates living spaces and working spaces with transportation systems that connect it all together. One of the fundamental differences between arcologies and conventional cities is the emphasis on the effective use of the vertical dimension in city planning. An arcology design would strive to make use of several independent but functionally intertwined layers or horizontal planes, whereas current urban planning focuses more on flat zoning of commercial / residential / industrial areas through processes that result in a more ad hoc placement based on the situational needs and political landscape at the time. Another distinguishing characteristic is the arcology's roots in urban agriculture, meaning deliberate collection and reprocessing of waste byproducts. The arcology might simply be described as what a city would look like if it was designed from the start by competent systems engineers, incorporating modular growth packages, standardized by upgradable interconnects, and fault tolerant, serviceable components. Of course, this feat is easier said than done, but the basic architectural core building blocks and modular techniques have been around. Meanwhile, the fact that the construction of many large city buildings has gradually been consolidated into one or two large developers means that a single party can finally expect to see gains through the extra effort of standardization.

In 1978 George Dantzig and Thomas Saaty (fathers of Linear Programming and the Analytic Hierarchy Process, respectively) got together to write Compact City [17], providing a compelling vision on how this human habitat could work from a technical standpoint. This fascinating book contemplates the feasibility of constructing a livable city of between $\frac{1}{4}$ million to 2 million residents within a 2-4 square mile, 4-8 level cylindrical superstructure. Their proposal addresses many social and financial factors as well as provides major engineering design elements and outlines the major systems and physical characteristics of their ideal proposed layout.

The Modern Metropolis consists of a series of Hans Blumenfeld's essays and articles on urban growth versus urban planning[10]. These treatises generalize how cities have developed and evolved over the decades and centuries, and suggests some design principles for sustaining growth over time. These insights into how to cope with the forces that incrementally shape cities and inevitably stress them beyond their initially planned limits reinforce some of the ideas for flexibility provided by Dantzig and Saaty's design.

Arcologies in the Media

A good experiment in closed-system sustainability is Biosphere 2 [3]. Unfortunately, its primary experiment was widely regarded by the public as a failure[40,11]. The facility has since come under the management of Columbia University as a research lab.

The closest present-day developments resembling arcologies are scattered around the world in various stages of completion. The truest in spirit of arcology projects in existence would include Arcosanti and Cosanti, the experimental communities arranged by architect and founding father of the "Arcology" concept Paolo Soleri himself[2]. These reduced scale experiments in the Arizona desert are currently reported to be hovering around 5% complete after 30 years of development. Like the Biosphere 2, these developments have shifted their focus into acting as urban laboratories[30].

While this apparent lack of enthusiasm and resounding success paints a somewhat bleak outlook, the influence of these spearheading projects is definitely spreading. Large scale proposals have been cropping up more frequently, especially in population-dense Asia. Predictably, the Chinese have a keen interest in the arcology concept, both for expanding high-density urban areas[24], and also in the form of constructing sustainable communities that would address their growing problem with semi-rural slums[45]. Several Chinese and Japanese design firms have been promoting various skyscraper approaches, such as the Ultima Tower[44], Tokyo's Sky City[12], and the on-hold Tokyo Millennium Tower[23] (the latter two are covered in Discovery Channel documentaries [19,18]). Arcology.com has a collection of other notable works and proposals [1].

While excitement about radically redesigning urban forms hasn't quite taken off in practice, other environmentally-friendly initiatives have taken its place. Several publications focus more on modifying the design goals of current city planners to incorporate more alternative forms of transportation. The book and accompanying website Carfree Cities presents several concepts and examples that make urban areas more pedestrian, biker, and transit friendly [16,15]. Most contemporary urban revitalization works take this track of advocating increased use of multimodal transportation in current city design to cope with the strains of present-day metropolitan area growth. Many formerly suburban towns have already been pursuing more pragmatic policies encouraging higher-density mixed-use development. These philosophies go under the monikers of ``New Urbanism'', ``Smart Growth'', and ``Transit Oriented Design/Development''. For example, following successes in implementing this pattern in the Washington DC metropolitan areas of in Rosslyn and Silver Spring [20], plans are underway to build higher density mixed-use population centers off of existing transit stations in Vienna [36,38] and to extend transit to existing office and residential spaces in Tysons Corner [34,22]. We'll likely see more of this type of development in the near future, especially seeing as how the Supreme Court has recently ruled to allow private homes to be seized for mixed use and other commercial development [5]. However, in his article ``The Compact City Fallacy'', Neuman defines how and cautions that higher density and other Smart Growth policies alone will not guarantee that we will meet the goals of sustainable development or even achieve progress relative to previous development patterns [32].