Soleri, Paolo. Arcology: The City in the Image of Man. The MIT Press: Cambridge, MA, 1969.

"This book is about miniaturization."

Paolo Soleri should be must reading for people attempting to address the larger social issues of our day, particularly as they relate to our built environment. Arcology is often perceived as a picture book, full of images of a utopian future, but as with many forward thinkers, just looking at his thought experiments and ignoring his underlying goals does him a great disservice. Paolo Soleri is actually a professed anti-utopian, who defines utopia as the act of giving up, of disavowing the human urge to advance and improve. He is a firm believer on progress, though not its inevitability.

Arcology is not about building cities in a single physical structure, such as they are represented in current works of science fiction and role playing games. This is the view one takes away if one does nothing but look at his images, which are thought experiments of the logical extreme. Rather, Arcology is about the city as a coherent organism, built by man, for man, and therefore in the image of man. It is also about the principle that it needs to be treated as such.

Note that Paolo Soleri very specifically uses the term "man", which, coupled with other views presented in the work, indicates a clear notion of hierarchy on his part. He explicitly states that "man" is the pinnacle of evolution, and implies very heavily that he means "man" and not "human." A failing on his part, but it does not negate the worth of the work if one can read past this failing, and look at his works as a way to get hubris to wrap around itself and tighten its coils into a perfect human aesthetic, rejoicing in its own being in a way that is turned ever more tightly inward, rather than the current trend of allowing hubris to expand our domain ever outward in a vain attempt to overrun everything else. In any event, I will use Soleri's pronouns where I feel they are needed to present him accurately.

Peter Blake, in the forward to the work, sums it up as follows:

What I think he is trying to say is this: there is an inherent logic in the structure and nature of organisms that have grown on this planet. Any architecture, any urban design, and any social structure that violates that structure and nature is destructive of itself and of us. Any architecture, urban design, or social order that is based upon organic principles is valid and will prove its own validity.

Soleri sees two processes advancing life and advancing with life. One is increasing complexity. The other is increasing miniaturization. Put together the progression of life is existence of increasingly greater complexity in increasingly smaller packages. This dialectic of complexity and miniaturization can be best encapsulated in his chain of life, a movement from inorganic form to pure form, or form as being (he has written three entire books trying to explain this chain, and it is hard to explain them in any fewer words than he has):

• structural
• biological
• reflective
• social
• biotechnical
• formal/estheto-compassionate.

Paolo Soleri sees the city as the physical form of the social structure of humanity. In his view, there are two criteria critical of the proper functioning on society:

Society is founded in equity and is constructed on congruence. [p.]

In his view, equity is a uniquely human construct, while congruence is a state of being implicit in nature. Equity is something that has grown out of the human capacity to do wrong. Congruence is a measure of balance. In the context of the social, it is the balance between humans and the environment, something that can only be achieved through global equity and coherence of will. Humans cannot exist congruent to nature without equity, and equity cannot exist without congruence, since incongruence will destroy equity through imbalance.

The only way, in his view, to ensure equity and congruence is through miniaturization, or creating the city in the image of man. This means creating an urban form that is congruent with humans and not with their machines. Perhaps one of the key practical points in this work is that if the purpose of a city is to increase the reaching power on its individuals, in terms of access to resources and culture, then the ideal city is one where all things needs for human existence, both physical and cultural, are within a human distance. A human distance is a distance that can be easily walked, that can be traversed in a reasonably time by a healthy human without the need of mechanical assistance.

Urban densities and structures that allow for community, equity and congruence within their spheres would help to prevent the sprawl that puts them out of congruence with nature and with each other. Megastructures were in during the late 1960s, so Soleri envisioned megalithic towers that could house millions, but his arguments apply just as well to small, compact communities widely dispersed, preserving as much greensward as possible. The argument he is making is not only that we should be able to walk to the theatre, but that all possible resources should be immediately available. In his view, distance is waste, and should be minimized. The only allowance Soleri does make for distance is the suggestion that if we want so much to prove our greatness and dominion over nature, we should prove that we can turn places inimical to a density of life into wonderful places to live and leave the pleasant places free for agriculture. In the end, the final goal is to mix technology with aesthetogenesis (the act of human will and creativity) to create city whose being is almost ephemeral compared to the being of the humans within and the nature without. In many ways, it is a greener and bolder version of Le Corbusier deeply blended with a strong dose of German Romanticism.

His ideas despite a strong element of anthropocentric hubris, are a wonderful read in searching for supporting arguments and ways to think about regionalism and sustainability. Perhaps this is because unlike many other architects, his notion of architecture does not end at the skin of the building, or even the park around it, but rather at the limits of being. There is, in his view, no true limits or end to the project, something to be remembered in undertaking anything that will change our environment.

It should be noted that this is probably the most accessible of Paolo Soleri's books. However, attempting to read it is still a slog. Soleri writes briefly and concisely. A 100 page book written by him is 100 pages of notes, outlines and bulleted lists that need to be expanded upon. This does not distract from his work, but expect to take a long time reading it. There are no spare words to fill the gaps. In any event, the list of quotes below is longer than normal, but Paolo Soleri says a great deal that is hard to encapsulate otherwise.

Some salient quotes:

[...] the massive intrusion of irrelevance is enough sand in the cogs of civilization to spew out evil, in a very pragmatic sense. [preface]

Life's bulk is negated when megalopoly and suburbia are taken as the environmental bulk. [p.1]

Vectorality is the character of living reality, and the care of man is basically a willful or unconscious action with or against it. [p.1]

[The mind is] where the unlimited possible implodes into the finite real. [p.3]

[...] where the ifs are accepted as the best potential, the hows must produce as much as they can, and the whys embody the real motivations. [p.]

The real is the present. The practical is in most cases the past, a frozen imagery of the real not fully becoming. The American dream is the present as practicality rather than the present as real. [p.]

Care is a first person undertaking. The care of the citizen is the sap of the city. But one can care only for that which one loves. Loveableness is the key to a living city. [p.]

Architecture is the physical form of the ecology of the human, the configuration of matter which allows for the best energetic and willful flux. [p.]

Metropolitan existence is a construct of private and public life so articulated as to provide each resident with a plentiful physical and economic access to both. [p.]

The photosynthetic veneer, the vegetal world, must not be overlaid by a man-caused opaque veneer. [p.]

The liveliness of a man's world is hindered by the physical extension of his shelter and the spatial dilution of his institutions. [p.]

The phenomenon then of the city, a congruent, humanized micro-universe sustained by the neonatural layer (the physical structure of the city), is an ultracomplex organism whose centralized brain is the instrument that works for the satisfaction of the thousands of epidermal individual minds bound together by forces of sociality and culture. [p.]

In a society where production is a successful and physically gigantic fact, the coordination and congruence of information, communication, transportation distribution, and transference are the mechanics by which that society operates. It is not accidental that these are also dynamic aspects of another phenomenon, the most dynamic of all: life. [p.]

Swiftness and efficiency are inversely proportional to dispersion. Scattered life is by definition deprived or parasitic. [p.]

The saddest aspect of waste on the energetic side is that no matter how much we produce and install in horsepower, kilowatt hours, gas mains, fuel tanks, coaxial cables, the linkage is inevitably far too tenuous for a truly complex and vivifying society. True life cannot be spread that thin. [p.]

The fullness of man's life may lie in the balance between instinctive longing that reaches down through the flesh of ancestry and an intellectual unrest that seeks an etherealized universe. [p.]

The practical as a frozen likeness of the real is obsolescence. [p.]

The technological could be defined as the substructure of the aesthetic which is essentially "formal," that is to say, the superstructuration engendered by man's compassion on the structure of existing things. [p.]

[Compassion is] the fire that makes the purely just overreach itself into the genuinely human. [p.]

As the universe is structure, the purpose of life is to take hold of it and help it to find its meaning, its form. [p.]

Architecture becomes ecological when a scale and complexity "explosion" occurs, and the sheer physical properties of the organism, together with the potentiality of the life within, become and ecological determinant. [p.]

Man's intensity shapes the natural world into the instrumental world to the point where the "critical temperature" reached, a metamorphosis of the instrumental, makes it into an aesthetocompassionate universe. [p.]

That which can be described can become obsolete. [p.]

The disheartening slowness of any progress toward freedom from need is mainly fruit of a greed out of proportion to any justifiable fear of insecurity. [p.]

[...] land conservation will succeed only if and when man creates beautiful cities wherein he will feel it a privilege to be, live, and work. [p.]

What we need is that in-between structural system by which nature itself is filtered and molded in forms more apt to carry the extreme valence of contemporary man. [p.]

[...] when science moves beyond merely copying nature, it becomes aesthetic, no longer the rational institution of science, but personalized and intimate science. [p.]

Science rejects the non-rational as unreal. In doing so, she puts herself in a position of non-competence in all those fields or things that through existing, inasmuch as they modify the real, do not avail themselves of any computation or any methodological inquiry. [p.]

Life is a study of the improbable, not the statistically average. [p.]

Nothing is purer than sterility and simpler than death. [p.83]