Arcologies promised whole cities in a single building, and mostly stayed fiction
Paolo Soleri fused architecture and ecology in 1969 into one word for a dream: a single towering structure holding homes, shops and farms, needing little from outside. Half a century on, the closest working examples are an Alaskan apartment block, an Antarctic base, and a desert prototype still being built.
What separates an arcology from a merely huge building is intent. It is meant to shrink humanity's footprint on an ecosystem by handling its own power, climate control, food, water purification and sewage for a dense population, and by packing city life into three dimensions so people can walk rather than drive. Soleri wanted most private vehicles gone, along with more frugality and shared resources such as transit and libraries.
Earlier visionaries pointed in related directions. Frank Lloyd Wright's Broadacre City sketched transport, farming and commerce, but it spread flat across a road grid, and critics said it ignored population growth. Buckminster Fuller offered Old Man River's City, a dome for 125,000 people, as an answer to housing problems in East St. Louis. Soleri's own test bed, Arcosanti, has been rising in central Arizona since 1970.
Real attempts tend to stumble. Dongtan near Shanghai missed its planned opening for the 2010 World Expo and may have collapsed altogether. Saudi Arabia's The Line, part of the 500 billion dollar Neom scheme, was pitched as a car-free strip 170 kilometres long and 200 metres wide for 9 million people; digging ran its full length by October 2022, but in 2024 it shrank to 2.4 kilometres for 300,000. Meanwhile Begich Towers quietly houses almost all of Whittier, Alaska, with a police station and grocery inside, and McMurdo Station hosts about 3,000 staff a year while relying on shipments of 30,000,000 litres of fuel annually.
Fiction is where the idea thrives. Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle's 1981 Oath of Fealty moved part of Los Angeles into one, and William Gibson's 1984 Neuromancer gave every corporation its own. Robert Silverberg imagined 75 billion people stacked in skyscrapers called urbmons, where stepping outside counts as madness. Players can build arcologies in SimCity 2000, and the megabuildings of Cyberpunk 2077 carry the same vertical logic.
Source: Arcology
