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

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Arcologies-self-contained mega-cities-have appeared in Sim City, Bladerunner, and sci-fi novels. Where did this idea come from, and will we all be living in an Arcology someday?
Isaac Arthur video on arcologies: • Arcologies
Resources on this topic:
www.organism.earth/library/do...
Paolo Soleri, Arcology: City in the Image of Man
simcity.fandom.com/wiki/Arcology
jfsdigital.org/wp-content/upl...
search.informit.org/doi/epdf/...
www.nytimes.com/2012/02/16/ga...
www.arcosanti.org/arco-agrite...
www.bbc.com/future/article/20...
Produced by Dave Amos, Hannah Woolsey, and the fine folks at Nebula Studios.
Written by Dave Amos and Hannah Woolsey
Select images and video from Getty Images.
Black Lives Matter.
Trans rights.

[@Alex-cw3rz]

In a way you could say some of the largest Cruiseships around are like their own city in one structure

[@Alex-cw3rz]

So I'd say that is the closest to an achology we have right now, all it's missing is a school although "kids zone" type things they have could be classed as something similar. The doctors area is also quite small for the number of people on board because it's just for holidays. You could also say it's missing municipal buildings such as a Town Hall etc. Which again you could say is fulfilled by bits and people on the ship already. Such as the help desk, the captain is the mayor I guess and things like rubbish and clean water and sewage have people dealing with them.

[@AceSkates]

also they pollute way more than the idea of an arcology @@Alex-cw3rz

[@NothingXemnas]

With how small some villages can be and remain functional (populations frequently under 300 people), a cruise ship with 1000 passengers or more can very well be functional as a human settlement. Afterall, now the vast majority of the passengers are workers, not just tourists living in leisure.

[@totalpartykill999]

i live and San Diego and have seen those ships up close. you are not wrong.

[@russianbear0027]

There was a concept for actually building and or converting one of them into a permanent settlement. I remember reading about it in the late 90s or early 2000s with some pretty concept art. I don't think anyone has really tried it seriously besides the weird nft boat from a few years ago which was more a scam than anything actually meant to be sustainable

[@TheRunningJoker]

I read somewhere that shopping malls were supposed to be like this but the apartments and grocery stores never made it into the final version.

[@EcceJack]

Hmm, yes, that rings a bell - I remember a large structure in London which is only residential these days, but was meant to also be a shopping centre originally, to have both uses in the one place.

[@EcceJack]

...actually, having said that, I'm pretty sure the Battersea Station, uhhh, gentrification (and also major rebuild) will be (is? Don't know how far along they are with building the thing!) a mix of retail, residential, and even business

[@antonburdin9756]

We have some in Canada: Oakridge Mall in Vancouver is currently under construction, Park Royal in West Vancouver has some old and new housing and Richmond Center has some residential towers, probably their more.

[@Desmaad]

AFAIK, Champlain Mall in Dieppe, NB (which we regularly went to) has always had a grocery store. In my experience, malls without grocery stores are rare.

[@stickynorth]

Yes, I believe even Victor Gruen the modern father of suburban shopping centres wanted them to be modern/modernist town centres with attached housing, offices, etc. Most were just never developed like that which is a real shame... Canada is embracing the concept of TOD's aka Transit Oriented Developments which to some extent are like large singular structures... especially if they are connected by +15/Pedways... Plus almost every older mall that is failing is either being modified to become this live/work/play hub or being knocked down and replaced by one...

[@brianr4054]

SC2000: I tried to fill the entire map with archologies, but I ran out of memory (8MB) and the computer crashed.

[@barryrobbins7694]

That sounds like an accurate simulation.

[@timmysworld3859]

Oh, that brings back memories

[@travcollier]

Do you remember SimTower? I really wanted Maxis to make the next logical step... SimArcology

[@dustintacohands1107]

Yeah I tried to do the same and my PlayStation could not handle it.

[@kma3647]

I remember seeing a plan that would get you up to 10 million population with perfectly placed arcos. Fun times!

[@goliathsteinbeisser3547]

I think arcologies face the issue of all 'I can fix all those problems all at once'-ideas. If use, population or priorities change, the arcology might have a hard time adapting. A city is modular, it can change a lot with time. If everything is one massive structure, repair and maintenance of the frame become ever more complex with time. Better to have many smaller parts that can be exchanged and function separately and independently from each other.

[@brokkrep]

Just looking at architecture of these mega-structures, and you see how fast they go out of fashion. Better timeless designs, that also look good, when the current hype is over

[@Hatsuzuki808]

They also have the overkill problem. Just going from single-family sprawl to medium or high density mixed use would take a big bite out of a lot of the problems we're facing now. Going all the way to city-in-a-box megastructures is flat-out unnecessary.

[@d0lph1n63]

the real problem is how do you prevent something like the governments and societies of cyber-punk stories from coming into existence. Just because somethings designed to work in theory doesn’t mean it will work in real life. Not everyone is going to be able to find their perfect job, people with aspirations for wealth or power or the desire to control others aren’t going to disappear, and good luck finding anyone who doesn’t discriminate against anyone else for things they can’t control, even AIs aren’t immune that. Look at the movie metropolis (the original one not the anime) where you had a privileged class living the good life whereas those said privileged deemed undesirables were just barely scrapping by while being terrorized and mistreated by the privileged. if you want a more modern version look no further than the Bioshock franchise.

[@RecklessFables]

There is also the problem that they would absolutely enable the powerful to control their populaces more easily. In the cyberpunk genre they are generally each owned by single corporations, with the extremes a tech-enabled company town would have. Imagine the factories in china where workers live in dorms but bigger and with all the support systems, like kitchen, medical, etc also in there.

[@d0lph1n63]

@@RecklessFables I talked about all that in my comment above. It’s why the idea of having an all digital currency is being met with a great deal of hesitation and resistance: how do you keep individuals from exploiting the system to their advantage or prevent said individuals from utilizing it to discriminate against other by ensuring that they can’t even use it themselves? Physical currency has never been discriminatory in nature and there will always be people who will accept it regardless of the religion, race, sex, martial status, or even species the hand that holds it. In an all digital currency society the have-nots are at the complete mercy of the haves plus if the have-nots have a valid reason to rise in rebellion all that they’ll need to do is sever the energy grid and everything will grind to a literal halt.

[@thefrub]

My biggest fear of arcologies is that they would basically turn into a Company Town. One company controlling your job, housing, and shopping, is a recipe for hypercapitalist abuse

[@useodyseeorbitchute9450]

Don't worry, you may get it with commie block flavor...

[@gaiuszeno1331]

Id bet an arcology would devolve into neither a hyper capitalist company town nor a brutalist commie block and instead look more like a hive city in Warhammer 40k. Feudalist in nature.

[@domp2729]

@@ernstschmidt4725they would likely devolve into cyberpunk like dystopia. Structures like this require cooperation, doesn’t matter if it’s forceful or not, otherwise they devolve into crime riddled hellholes. Britains social housing after WW2 is a good example. People who don’t care about anyone else will take what they want even if it make their life worse in the long term. Arcologies are just bigger.

[@backintimealwyn5736]

These are jails. The line is dystopic nightmare. You can't run from it, you're locked up in a prison in a desert.

[@cupriferouscatalyst3708]

That's why we need communism. And not Stalinist capitalism, i.e. the only type of "communism" most Americans and Europeans think of when they hear the word, but actual, global class erasure through an automation-created surplus of resources; the Marxist-Leninist kind where the end goal is essentially anarchy, by definition.

[@secondengineer9814]

"The Saudi's bought golf". That sentence seems like it shouldn't parse, but with context it does 💀

[@My-nl6sg]

I'm shocked that you do not even mention the Podium and Tower architectural typology so popular in Asian cities. As its name suggests you have a high density tower housing offices or high-rise apartments, built on top of a podium, which is a multilevel mixed-use structure that house a variety of functions, from entire malls, wet markets, restaurants, daycares, groceries, clinics, to public transit station like subway, bus terminals, and parking. There can be internal streets inside of podiums, even linked with other buildings or podiums through pedestrian underpasses or bridges. The top of large podiums could be a public or gated community park for the towers. You can have access to almost all service in a podium or through public transit if its well planned.

[@senritsujumpsuit6021]

Now if only I could get medical help without going bankrupt or being sued by the person who ran me over for denting they're Car

[@workingstudentera]

The Philippines have lots of them.

[@theviniso]

Oooh, so that's why major Asian cities seem so fond of highrises, it's actually all mixed use. That's really cool.

[@senritsujumpsuit6021]

@@theviniso we have youtube channels that just walk through China the shit they have is crazy a whole mountain range is just one giant tourist pathway

[@My-nl6sg]

@@theviniso there are also different types of Asian cities: small parcels or large city blocks. China, Singapore and parts of Korea has large city blocks that can contain multiple buildings split between different uses in a single block; meanwhile the small parcel parts of cities often have this Podium and Tower setup. (these two types can kind of mix, just look at satellite maps of Asian cities and find out)

[@nickbenton4881]

Building a city in a straight line is such a ridiculously stupid idea even if it wasn’t in the desert. You need to have redundancies in vital services and building those radiating out in multiple ways from a center is more efficient than building them repeatedly in a line. Which is why cities have been you know…approximately circular or square for 10000 years.

[@bearcubdaycare]

Cities likely grow in that shape because it yields the most city close to the center. Redundancy is good, but if my train from the center wasn't running, I never found that I took some other train headed out in a different direction.

[@poetryflynn3712]

Having it in a straight line allows hyper-fast transport options to a faux center if that makes sense.

[@Bradinator]

My question is about airports, in big cities you’ll have no more than 3 airports and that is because they cities aren’t spread or enough to have more than that but in this line city how often will they have to have airports, because let’s say they just put 1 in, someone in the line would not want to take transit for 5 hours just to catch a flight that lasts for more time

[@fmac6441]

​@@poetryflynn3712But with the amount of stops he would need to have to make sense would it be worth it? Subways hardly have stations far enough apart to justify such a system, just like elevators, trains need to speed up and down at speeds that don't cause nausea.

[@nickbenton4881]

@@Luke5100 it’s just that the same goals can be accomplished better, cheaper and more safely in more traditional complete neighborhoods. Not that we build those in the US but all I’m saying is we have thousands of years of conventions and none of them involve a straight line city.

[@Robin_Goodfellow]

I think that an arcology could work as long as it was easy to leave and go outside. People feel trapped when they can't or don't often leave a building.

[@Lildizzle420]

cable cars

[@theviniso]

Elevators?

[@Robin_Goodfellow]

@@theviniso Possibly, but you also have to consider the horizontal direction. Is the building so large horizontally that a person couldn't walk out of it easily from the center?

[@riley_oneill]

I visited Arcosanti in 2005 and I recommend it for everyone, its a very fascinating place with some very clever architecture. Arcosanti however is less than 1% finished. In their visitor area they had models that Soleri designed for what he actually wanted to build for Arcosanti, what was actually built was absolutely tiny compared to his original goal. The Book "Arcology: City in the Image of Man" goes into a lot of detail about this future and assumes a lot more automation and material science developments.

[@fernbedek6302]

I think the closest we’ve got is downtowns like Toronto or Montreal where large amounts of it are connected together by tunnels or bridges to let you walk everywhere without going outside. (Sadly, those condos are waaay out of my price range. 😔)

[@justynawisniewska1213]

Sounds really cool considering the kind of weather they get there for most of the year.

[@AMPProf]

Minneapolis Skyway

[@antonburdin9756]

PATH - Toronto’s Downtown Pedestrian Walkway.

[@stickynorth]

Calgary +15, Edmonton Pedway too... All based on the same concept which to people outside of Canada or the Upper Midwest (aka Canada 2.0 to us Canucks) find weird. But once you live here or visit for a while you'll understand... Up to +40c in the summer, -40c in the winter... Pedways just make sense...

[@MrArchilus]

​@@Luke5100I could definitely imagine living in arcology. I barely ever leave the area 3km around my place in a city. Wouldn't be a huge change for me

[@chebikitty5566]

space stations in sci-fi stories would be pretty close to Arcologies. They have to be self sustaining to even function properly. I would love to see these types of structures explored more in books that aren't YA dystopias.

[@speedyf40]

Guys, I have an idea. Let’s make a big city in a single building, in the desert… in a shape of the City Beautiful logo.

[@fullcrum2089]

or maybe in a shape of a line.

[@public.public]

We could call it Supermax.

[@stickynorth]

Riyadh is also building that huge gold block building that is basically an Archology on top of The line... MBS is obsessed with mega-projects it seems... At leased ones he creates... Meanwhile, poor old Jeddah Tower is rotting away in the sands...

[@bluemountain4181]

@@stickynorth They don't seem to have properly completed King Abdullah Economic City either. On Wikipedia it says that KAEC has a population of only 7000 out of a planned 2 million

[@gun10ck]

I visited Arcosanti in 2011 as an architecture student and was one of the last groups to get to talk shop with Mr Soleri before he passed away. Truly remarkable visionary. Very little of his master plan has been completed though, and with his death I wonder how much more ever will. His legacy lives on though and this was a great video that I didn’t expect to touch on his work. I played the game too, but I guess not enough to put 2 and 2 together.

[@pcawley1964]

The novel "Oath of Fealty" is about an arcology in Los Angeles, with the chief engineer being one of the main characters and a lot of the issues and solutions that are possible.

[@bishop8958]

My first exposure to the term "Arcology" was from stellaris. There's a special perk you can pick called "The Arcology Project" but instead of creating a single megastructure self-sustaining city for environmental reasons, in stellaris you turn the entire planet into one big mega-arcology called an Ecunopolis, replacing any and all nature with towering metal structures and concrete, to fit as many people and jobs into the planet as possible.

[@StephenRichmond89]

See, I think the problem with arcologies is actually a systems thing. Cities need to be like lego, you can take a building out and put a new one in without redesigning the whole city. Arcologies have massive risk of system failure: need to replace the equivalent of one building? The whole system falls apart. It simply is not humanly possible to plan and operate on that scale successfully. If you can make them modular then they'd be considerably easier to imagine as viable!

[@timogul]

The Tested channel recently did a sponsored video on how cruise ships get made, and apparently all the cabins are built next door and then slotted into place on the ship. You _could_ apply a similar concept to buildings, at least as high as you could get a decent crane.

[@StephenRichmond89]

@@timogul that would definitely help. I still don't see how you deal with things like pedestrian infrastructure at height on building a new "subway" line that's actually 300 meters in the air going through and between existing structures.

[@timogul]

@@StephenRichmond89 Yeah, some things can be tricky. The Disney Contemporary has a monorail running through it, but it's harder than it might seem, and even then it's only like 50ft off the ground. I think it's a better idea to build relatively small archology towers, equivalent to a small town, but then you could have multiples of them within blocks of each other if you wanted. On the other hand, if you had a single massive city, then you could also invest in massive "industrial supports," like having entire 50-story towers within it that are just massive freight elevators, capable of lifting entire houses up to a higher level if you wanted, and then broad boulevards along the way that link areas of the building.

[@StephenRichmond89]

@timogul that sounds cool but it does not sound cost effective.

[@timogul]

@@StephenRichmond89Generally, yeah, but "cost effective" is relative. So long as you have plenty of room to spread out as much as you like, it is not cost effective to build to this level of density. On the other hand, if you had a country with very little footprint to work with, and you need to get more and more out of every square foot, then building up is the only way to do that (aside from building down, which has its own issues). And you can't just build super tall, thin towers, because you run into issues where the elevators become super inefficient to use, and people end up "trapped" on the upper floors because it takes an hour to reach the ground, so if you're going to build tall, you also have to build wide in some way, and spread out goods and services so that people don't *need* to travel all the way to the ground most of the time,

[@greghall4836]

Çatalhöyük was a city of of a single building founded back into the 7th millenium BC. Since there were no streets or other open spaces between homes, you had to walk over the roofs to get anywhere. So fitting everything in one building is not exactly new. :)

[@authenticmikejones]

Seeing these, reminds me of the Hive cities in Warhammer 40k.

[@RecklessFables]

Yeah, so many examples in fiction, even the ones this guy uses, are examples of dystopian extremes.

[@Roggor]

If the Line actually gets built, this is what it will become.

[@dymaxion3988]

Two of my favourite fictional megastructures (which could be considered arcologies) are from the Blame! manga and Portal 2. The City, as they call it in Blame, is a self-building megastructure that humans have lost control over. It’s long since taken over the Earth’s surface, and is building upwards infinitely. Although the structures are autonomously built according to a human-centric design template, the left-behind inhabitants no longer factor into how and where things are placed. The City is a surreal 3D maze of blindly built M.C. Escher architecture and liminal spaces, devoid of life and meaning, stretching out forever in all directions (including up and down). Aperture Science as depicted in Portal 2 is a research lab, but it offers an interesting perspective on arcologies too. Unlike the City, Aperture is constrained to a former salt mine, and isn’t growing. In the lowest and oldest levels, the structures were designed in an inflexible configuration. Those science spheres couldn’t easily be removed or repurposed. But the newest, highest level is completely different. Absolutely everything is modular: rooms and structures slide around on enormous tracks, and walls, floors, and ceilings are all made of robotic panels that can be repositioned on the fly. As a space, it’s potentially useful for a huge variety of applications, you just have to shuffle things around a bit. That level of flexibility also makes it easy to integrate new ideas, technologies, etc. into the existing system. My takeaway from these two examples is that governance is of paramount importance to arcologies. As tightly-knit enclosed systems, everything has to work together, the inhabitants themselves included. The Aperture hyper-modular system, with instant delivery of the consequences of decisions, puts it the clearest: if there’s a misalignment, you can end up with everyone’s lungs full of neurotoxin.

[@krux02]

The arcologies in sc2000 can actually launch into space. You just need a lot of them and they then all start at the same time.

[@unitrader403]

and also very late into the game. like the year 10.000 late.

[@emanym]

I liked doing that using cheat codes 🎉

[@wet-read]

Only the Launch Arcos.

[@dom8338]

me living in a small little village where i can get anything i need in a 10 minuet walk that was built three hundred years ago watching city folk trying to figure out how to make somewhere to live that isn't soul crushing

[@martylawson1638]

Afik I think ownership is the big problem with an Arcologies. I.e. the haphazard planning by thousands of people over hundreds of years is what creates our best cities. I don't see how you do that with a single central organization owning all the "land". I.e. while Arcologies are potentially very efficient I would expect them to be brittle and slow to adapt.

[@Gruncival]

I'm confused by this-do you mean "best cities" in terms of variety and interest? Because otherwise, I think both claims are backwards. When a city is unplanned, there are inefficiencies and undesired redundancies that spring up due to lack of coordination, and when there is a conflict of control/ownership between the tenant and the owning organization, then structures don't rapidly adapt to changing norms.

[@bearcubdaycare]

Various Canadian cities have a large connected system of buildings downtown, such as Calgary's +15 system, due to the winters.

[@stickynorth]

And Edmonton... To a much lesser extent but with more underground connections... They are a godsend in our climate...

[@colormedubious4747]

Houston has a fairly extensive one, too.

[@shaba41490]

Love the content on novel ideas for cities. Would really be interested to see a video on the concept of floating cities like Oceanix Busan.

[@arrvidcarlson8107]

I also loved the archologies of SimCity, but I think two things would be a perpetual crisis in motion for real one: heat management and fire suppression. Even making everything electric, fire would still be significant challenge as it could render parts or perhaps the entire structure unusable in a shockingly short period of time. Good engineering can only carry the concept so far.

[@dennisjing4961]

this channel is really accessible and approachable, keep it up. im a big fan.

[@barryrobbins7694]

The Line sounds like a city designed by someone with no imagination. They drew one line and got stuck.

[@someinteresting]

The epitome of contemporary art.

[@bluemountain4181]

Maybe they drew inspiration from colonial powers drawing borders in the Middle East lol

[@barryrobbins7694]

@@bluemountain4181 …or in Africa.

[@Solon7766]

One of the huge stumbling blocks of Arcologies as envisioned is as a self-sustaining colony in a building, not a city. Cities require support from agriculture, water, etc. and vertical farming is, at the moment, far too energy intensive to be practical. What's more practical are Arcology-like structures that already exist, but could be expanded to increase overall density without increasing land usage. We already have modern residential developments, apartment buildings and condos that include grocery stores, miniature malls/shopping, pools and recreation, walking paths for animals, etc. Other examples are basically expanding existing structures through tunnel and bridgework systems, like the Winnipeg Walkway or Minneapolis Skyway. Other cities are structured, like parts of Hong Kong where you could work, shop and spend leisure time all without every going to street level. This is approaching being arcologies, but more in an "organic", city planning way rather than top down, ground up redesign of entire cities.

[@Veve101]

Perhaps in a future where humanity decides to seriously colonize space, people would gain practical experience designing, creating, and maintaining self-contained cities, and that knowledge would be imported back on Earth to create arcologies.

[@faridjafari6356]

Thank you for this video, this was your best one and I was really looking for something like this.

[@ThreeRunHomer]

Buckminster Fuller also proposed an arcology-style one-structure city covered by a geodesic dome.

[@highlorddarkstar]

It wasn’t really an arcology, it was a traditional city with a dome for climate control. The idea being you wouldn’t have the costs of snow removal, deep cold or heat waves.

[@ThreeRunHomer]

@@highlorddarkstar his Old Man River City project for East St Louis was a full-fledged arcology concept. Not a cover over a traditional city. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Man_River%27s_City_project

[@EvilWeiRamirez]

I think kowloon should be mentioned in this conversation. While it wasn't meant to be a single building, it is a good example of a dystopian version that actually existed. It raises an important question. If we have cities that can't grow, what happens? The density could increase internally, and necessity could create makeshift shelters and separations within structures. What happens if the population grows? Do we just set a max occupancy and kick people out? These questions need to be considered.

[@stickynorth]

At one point even the Canadian government was planning domed cities for the arctic. The first one designed was to have 12 circular towers connected to a large town-centre dome to be built near modern day Iqaluit (Frobisher Bay) in Nunavut... Never got off the drawing board but in climate like the Canadian High Arctic it makes perfect sense...

[@stickynorth]

The link to the actual plan! polarpilots.ca/images/stories/docs/Frobisher%20Bay%20plan1958.pdf

[@robertgronewold3326]

I actually stole this idea for a fantasy novel I wrote several years ago.

[@pongop]

Sim City was great! Yes, Paolo Soleri and Arcosanti! Awesome video. Interesting concept. I love the aesthetic of green/eco/sustainable arcologies with plants everywhere. Do underground cities count as arcology? Is a Stanford Torus a type of arcology or is it technically different? Great video! I would love to see your take on floating cities next!

[@mdhazeldine]

I wanna play Sim City 2000 now. haha. The 4 big disadvantages to arcologies in my mind are 1) Lack of daylight, 2) fire risk, 3) they require massive investment from a big developer 4) they're not very flexible. They'd have all the disadvantages of living in a skyscraper plus more. I think the idea of building a bunch of tall towers close together and connecting them with sky bridges or elevated transit makes way more sense than a single huge building as it mitigates the first 2 disadvantages, but I don't know how necessary it really is. Dense mid-rise cities seem to be good enough.

[@csweezey18]

Seeing Isaac Arthur get mentioned gave me a f*cking jumpscare!!! It sometimes feels like nobody knows about his channel, even though he's got three-quarters of a million subs...

[@HeisenbergFam]

SimCity is so good real life cities were made as tribute

[@pluviaaeternum]

as someone who has nebula, always nice to see a nice video and find out there's more on there.

[@KyrilPG]

One example of existing "somewhat" arcology is Les Arcs 1800, one of the "villages" of Les Arcs ski resort, part of Paradiski mega ski resort. Itself one of the humongous Tarentaise Olympic Valley mega ski resorts in France. Les Arcs 1800 (and 1600 and 2000) were designed by Charlotte Perriand, one of Le Corbusier "disciples". The main part of the 1800 village called Charvet looks like several buildings but they are all linked together, with a kind of street or open air gallery at a certain level and buildings protruding both up AND down. So you access the "up" buildings by their bottom on the gallery and the "down" buildings by their top, also located along that tentacular gallery. The gallery is mostly open air but half protected by a trench-like design and on several floors, some parts are partly covered. It features restaurants, shops, bars, a club, a few offices, a doctor practice / small emergency center, hotels, a pharmacy, a bank, a cinema, etc. And of course lots and lots of apartments that were designed in prefabricated modules typical or le Corbusier / Perriand. Most of the building system sits on a large underground parking garage and the "ski side" of the resort is entirely pedestrian. Some bars or restaurants are located on the top of the "down" buildings, at the same level as the main gallery, so they have breathtaking views of the valley below. Arc 2000 is similar, even though it's more lunar base like due to its higher altitude and relative isolation. Les Arcs resort in general, comprised or Arc 1600, Arc 1800, the more recent and Disneylandesque Arc 1950 and Arc 2000, is a perfect example of the French "integrated stations" (the word "station" is used in France for resort with a twist of "colony", as in space). Arc 1800 and Arc 2000 can feel a bit like a colony in a harsh environment. They both are "plugged" high on a mountain side above the clouds. It's one of my favorite resorts. Other "integrated" examples are : Plagne Aime 2000, also called Le Paquebot (the cruiseship), a huge and long building with stepped architecture like pyramids, being a small city in itself, even featuring a cable car station inside the building to link with La Plagne Centre. And of course restaurants, bars, shops, a doctor, etc. Plagne Bellecôte, which is like a wall or a dam across one of the valleys and it forms entirely by itself one of the villages of la Plagne. La Plagne is the other massive multi resort located on another massif right next to Les Arcs and part of the same Paradiski mega resort. Of course, like all the French mega ski resorts, any part of the domain is reachable by ski / cable lifts, without needing any car for your stay. You can go from one end of the mega resort domain to the other end, which is over 20km, only by ski and cable lifts. All these "integrated station" buildings sit on underground parking garages to allow you to forget about the cars for your holidays. I can only advise you to have a look at these building systems ! It the closest thing I've seen to an existing form of arcology, even though these are ski holiday resorts and not really everyday life cities-in-a-building. But hey, Les Arcs was mostly designed by Perriand, a direct pupil and spiritual daughter of Le Corbusier, the "pope of integrated buildings", so it's a must see.

[@bensaret]

While there may be practical reasons to live in arcologies in some situations, all I envision when I think of them are colossal monsters like Peach Tress from "Dredd." Barely seeing the skies from the lower levels, claustrophobic and cramped and dirty unless you somehow find ways/materials/resources to constantly maintain the upkeep of all portions simultaneously (otherwise you start getting "good neighborhoods" and "bad neighborhoods" within a single structure, which then negatively impact each other and just create the divide you would otherwise have outside, minus any interaction with nature).

[@lucasnuns]

In think in the same way. For more than i love the concept of Arcology, if we tried building something like that in real world, saddly i just can see them became a Kowloon Waled City 2.0., sooner or later. Could be something because of pop culture and Cyberpunk, but every time i see plan for mega structures i imagine them became a dystopia monolith cyberpunk style...

[@cuseyeti_one8three]

The Line seems short sighted. If you are stationed at one end and need to be at the other, your route is limited by the nature of the line; it’s highly inefficient to logistics and prone to traffic jams at popular destinations. Placing a city in a desert requires imported goods into the city in order to sustain life. Water, food, building materials, labor, etc. must all be shipped in and distributed evenly throughout the city. A linear format just spreads out and constricts movement within the city.

[@bearcb]

About arcology in sci fi: there was a Canadian TV series called Star Lost, where action took place in a giant spaceship that tried to take what was left of humankind to a new solar system after a cataclysm. The spaceship consisted of huge domes connected to a central hull. Each dome was ecologically independent, and each with a population of a different preserved culture. As generations passed, people at some domes forgot they were in a spaceship, and thought their domes were the universe. A great story setup, someone should remake it. As a side note, the protagonist was played by Keir Dullea, of 2001 A Space Odyssey fame.

[@DomyTheMad420]

shoulda seen my face when you namedropped Isaac Arthur

[@TheRunningJoker]

That video on arcologies is what led me to this channel

[@s.n.9485]

Damn this takes me back. I used to post SimCity2000 for hours on end!

[@xanderod5629]

Love ur vids been watching for a year now keep it up 👍

[@blumrich1970]

Whenever I see one of those charts, such as at 8:35, I always have to say: "What if they are wrong?"

[@adamkiraly7866]

Ther is an example of an archology in BUdapest as well, called the village house. Its a soviet era building, which was designed to provide housing for several thousand people.

[@dylantoymaker759]

What I’ve heard about Fermont, Quebec sounds like a big part of it could be a small remote arcology. Something about the super harsh winters there lends itself to sharing I think.

[@HowtoBuildtheWorld]

The closest i have come to an arcologie was my vacation across the gulf of Mexico on a cruise ship, those things are insane 😎

[@elizabethdavis1696]

Please do a video on creating a transit system and city in an O’Neil cylinder please?

[@devenscience8894]

The term Arcology might have been coined in the 70s, but I've read several pulp SF novels from the 40s and 50s that took place in a megastructure that had everything one needs. I remember being tantalized by the ideas they forwarded. One story had the building very regimented. Something like stores and shopping the first handful of stories, then several floors of businesses and government offices, followed by dozens of floors of housing, and finally health, fitness, and leisure activities on the top levels. Made me want to live in one.

[@MrArchilus]

I remember them from Foundation.

[@seanconnors9912]

Unique episode! Would love a Sim City 2000 episode. Been watching since 2019

[@alexgravenor]

This video is so well researched!

[@user-ie4tt1xp7j]

This is sarcasm, right?

[@coupequattro]

I've long thought underutilized suburban malls could be reimagined into Arcologies. They could rebuild an empty anchor tennant spot as a multiunit condo or apartment. Add a grocery store in the mall and a general goods store like Target and the mall would have an instant captive audience for everything else in it.

[@antonburdin9756]

Whittier, Alaska.

[@8LegoVogel8]

Also the concept of Kowloon Walled City, and the Chinese 'Fujian tulou' are examples that come very close to Arcology.

[@Xidnaf]

the example of the kowloon walled city makes me wonder if changes in zoning law could enable arcogies to spring up naturally. like, what if we just changed it so that your property doesn't extend upwards forever by default? what if we had building requirements that said you had to build sturdy enough that someone else can build on top of you if they want? i bet we would wind up with something kinda like a decentralized, modular arcology.

[@kjj26k]

Yeah, no one wants strangers building ONTOP of their building, what if they do a bad job and drop a building on your house? To put it extremely, but there a million other concerns. That said, this is probably how a lot of ancient settlements built on or in hills and cliffs where made. That is quite different though, being of village size with a tribal culture and a serious lack of build space.

[@Xidnaf]

@@kjj26k 1. most people don't want strangers living directly above them at all, but here we are all anyway living in apartment buildings. 2. same thing would stop that that stops someone from smashing my roof right now. like, we're not talking about abolishing construction codes here. 3. if their culture was so primitive and tribal, why could their society do something ours can't? maybe we have something to learn from those ancient cultures. 4. what "lack of build space"?? global populations were way lower back then. if they had anything back then that we don't have anymore it was space.

[@irispaiva]

Thats just a fancier version of the favelas we have in br

[@chrislanejones]

I love Plymouth Arcology and it's scrambled tv. Also can you please describe unincorporated towns. You should do City Beautiful - country beautiful edition

[@laurie7689]

They had arcologies in the 1st Sid Meir's Civilization: Call to Power game that came out in 1999. They also had monorails. Although the game wasn't for planning cities, but civilizations and then conquering other civilizations. I still have my old game. It was my favorite. I also still have my Ultimate Sim Series: Sim City 2000 Special Edition (although it is probably too scratched up to play anymore), Streets of Sim City, and Sim Copter. I also have the Sim Isle game. I've been playing sim and god type games since the game Santa Paravia came out. No, I could not live there. I prefer to live under the trees, among the hills, like I currently do. I like dirt. I like the smell of rotting leaves. I like hearing the bugs and the birds in the trees. I like seeing the darting lizards in the corners of my eyes. I need that all right outside my door. Most of all, I need to be alone with no other humans in sight with all of that. I'm not a social animal. Human habitation alone isn't even close to what I need to live. When I'm not working, I like to keep myself closeted away pursuing my multiple hobbies and when I want to relax from them, I step into Nature. People, except for dead people, aren't interesting to me. I enjoy reading about Archaeology and Anthropology. Genealogy is a hobby of mine. I'll pick a random family and start making a tree. I LOVE research.

[@craigcook9715]

The imagery in Fritz Lang's _Metropolis_ certainly has that megastructure feeling. But of course, that's a dystopic form of it. On the other hand, it was released in 1927, 42 years before Soleri's work.

[@HarvestStore]

Great video.

[@MrDouglascalhoun]

8:55 line can expand gradually as demand grows. circle will have to be created completely to be useful, then cannot grow further.

[@rexmann1984]

Never watched your channel before. Big 👍 for mentioning Isaac.

[@purplelord8531]

I so so wish you talked about the walled city - I've only read the wikipedia article and that was already a wild ride

[@spiralmewtrix]

I stayed in Whittier a couple summers as a kid in that building when my mom worked at the fishery there. It was very common to share the apartments with people you don't know since we were only there temporarily. I remember being incredibly bored (I was 12 and it was 2000), and all the snacks were overpriced at the store in the building.

[@matthiuskoenig3378]

"humans naturally lived in small isolated groups that roamed large areas, which developed into small isolated groups that famred large areas, so obviously they would be super happy to be shoved into extremely dense hives that make existing city density look like suburbs right?"

[@quitlife9279]

Adapt or die. It's the way of the world.

[@useodyseeorbitchute9450]

​@@quitlife9279Have you thought it? I mean right now they key evolutionary edge is resistance to left wing ideologies, as they crash fertility rate. Being religious fundamentalist is highly adaptive...

[@aangb0b]

I went to calpoly, graduated in 2019. I wish you were teaching there and I was aware of you at the time!

[@grimlockorc]

The Arcologies in Sim City are one of the big reasons I got into Urban Planning. Still my top hidden agenda no matter what I'm working on.

[@ProrokLebioda]

I wonder how 'The Line" would alter wind currents and impact nearby desert. Would it allow moisture to gather and create some small water reservoirs? Probably not, but that would be interesting.

[@bluemountain4181]

I think that area is quite mountainous anyway so it probably wouldn't make much difference. Though I wonder if sand blown by the wind would start to build up on one side of the building

[@simonforget280]

"Le mur" (The Wall) in Fermont, QC is another lesser known example of that concept.

[@ErnestJay88]

The closest thing today to Arcology is "SUPERBLOCK" where mall, apartment, hospital, shops, supermarket, workplace, and school in single block so resident doesn't need to travel outside for daily needs.

[@xyreniaofcthrayn1195]

yes, for the first 120 generations during terraforming ops on barren worlds. Though the worst arcology technically was kowloon walled city though as kowloon demonstrated people need at least 2 meters of space flanking a person on walkways so depression and such don't set in. Though I would assume a fleet of arcology ready colony ships making up a regular city would be a very smart move when going interstellar.

[@th3thrilld3m0n]

Great vid, but I do wish you could have mentioned things like Star Wars and the megaproject concepts like the Tokyo pyramid, Sky City 1000, X-Seed 4000, etc.

[@53kenner]

Ain't nothing never simple. If you want to use solar and wind to power your city, then a line city makes some sense. The problem is the square-cube law ... as the size increases, the volume rises as the cube while surface area rises as a square. The volume is proportional to population while the surface area is proportional to solar and wind energy production. Which might explain the line city ... it is less efficient when it comes to packing people in a tight space, but it could generate a lot of power, and make desalination more feasible.

[@jtjr26]

Depending on how the next 50-100 years go climate-wise we may see something akin to arcologies being built. If sea levels do rise like they are projected to over the next century then there are going to be hundreds of millions of people looking for a new place to live as coastal areas flood. I could see some wealthy regions building them as a way to maximize their available living space. For people saying it's impossible then consider while it is impossible right now, the various projects developing verticle and indoor farming and Saudia Arabia in building The Line are essentially alpha-testing a lot of the technology needed for arcologies to be possible.

[@jukio02]

Kowloon Walled City was a city in a city. I like the idea of a city within a city, it sounds cool.

[@LEGOZoey]

I display my architecture sets like that to!

[@jonathanravenhilllloyd2070]

I really hope you mentioned the City Blocks from 2000AD's MegaCities

[@josephfisher426]

Part of the reason for the "line" scheme is that it simplifies some of the engineering problems that arise as buildings get more sprawly. Ventilation. Waste collection. The massive weight bearing on the ground.

[@talbotlynx]

When I heard "A city should be considered as a whole." I thought... "Most cities already kind of are holes." I'm aware of the guy who said it but, can't help thinking such.😂 I've had fun talks with scientists and professors of several stripes on topics like archologies on earth and in space. My favorite plan is to build one around a space elevator.👍

[@madarchmage1151]

I like this. Thank you

[@RobertVincelli]

I still play SimCity 2000! Been playing since it came out in 1993. What a great game.

[@Zartren]

This reminds me a lot of the original concept of Habitat, for which a much too scaled-down version was built in Montreal: Habitat 67. Habitat was a lot more open in its design however. There is a visual representation of the original concept available from Unreal Engine (yes, the game engine) made in collaboration with the original architect. It's called the Hillside project.

[@MrDisasterboy]

In the 1980s there was an archology like proposal for South Australia. It had a silly name "Multifunction Polis", the concept was abandoned in 1998. However, a city being able to largely feeding itself is great design goal!

[@shewmonohoto]

You can book rooms at Arcosanti, I would highly recommend staying a couple days, if you get a chance.

[@teambellavsteamalice]

An supposed disadvantage of an arcology is that the design has to be perfect to work, but that's also kinda an advantage. If you allow any flexibility in the design you get people moving into and out of the arcology, creating traffic problems. This means you need a lifecycle approach to all residents, adapting to single people, couples and families of various ages. All residents must have a job there (or work remotely), follow an education or be pensioners. The line is superior to a grid only because it forces planners to stick to the idea. Each 15 minute walkable area is its own self-contained village/district. You could specialize these blocks into a pattern, so one always commutes within their block but have all types of blocks within 5 or so stops with transit. Unlike a grid you could impose rules/incentives which force/push people to move when their job or household composition changes. With a grid it would always be semi-ok to have people in suboptimal place and the concept would degenerate. Instead of a stand-alone arcology concept I'd mix several specialized arcologies with regular cities. The arcologies can then be optimized for their specific use but rely on the city for flexibility, like changes in demographics. With high speed connections you have a car-less population, most of whom don't need the cities often. You can design the arcologies for certain demographics and plan the number of each type to best synergize with the cities. Note the arcologies don't have to be optimized massive high density areas. One could even be an idyllic urban area with canals like Venice or a cute Dutch city center or have huge parks or other tourist areas. The connections to other arcologies will make the whole of the area work efficient and fun. All the concept has to do is have each area walkable and eliminate unnecessary daily commutes.

[@53kenner]

Oath of Fealty (1981) is a novel by Pournelle and Niven that centers around an arcology.

[@sarcasmo57]

You have made me change the way I think about the Line. It's like a super tall horizontal sky scraper. Still don't think it will succeed though.

[@MofoMan2000]

My SimCity game was SimCity 3000 Unlimited. It was a good game, I mostly just really liked the music in it.

[@coolius9198]

you should look into the 'ihme zentrum' in hannover germany, it has the largest concrete foundation of all of europe and it included shops, appartments and was basically supposed to work like a city inside of a city

[@lepidoptera9337]

Yawn. Singapore has way more and way better of that kind.

[@kokofan50]

Arcologies are just cities that are self sufficient. Simcity popularized it as a city within a single structure. With developments in technology, I think most cities self sufficient in most things by the end of the century. In the single building sense I can see it on the moon and Mars

[@karatos]

We are still a long way off to being able to recycle and generate well enough to make self-sufficient cities. Currently production and transportation costs are so low it is easier and more efficient to import than make most things local. Imagine how expensive food would need to be for someone to buy a NY skyscraper and make a vertical hydroponics farm and make money. Then we need to consider that to become self-sufficient NYC would need to turn thousands of buildings into massive vertical farms. If they can make the equivalent of 400-500 times as much food per acre (no small feat) then they would still need thousands of buildings devoted to this. They might be able to get away with having maybe 5 floors of farm below most buildings, but a lot of that is used for other utilities. During the winter they can use some of that waste heat to climatize the building above but at all other times the massive amount of electricity being used to power glow lamps and air conditioners and pumps would be heating everything making summers unbearable. Being underground that helps a lot but only so much. If instead they make every top floor or two of nearly every building into a grow factory then you will need more workers and lose benefits of density, and plus the cost of heating them, it adds up. Imagine how expensive and harmful just having it delivered would have to be to make all the effort of making it local worth it. An estimate from a few years ago said the cost difference on these farms for crops like wheat is such that a loaf of bread grown in this way would cost more than 20 times what bread from conventionally grown wheat would cost. That is just food, it is a whole different nightmare to make textiles and ceramics and plastics, not to mention the electricity to do all of these things locally. It is far more efficient to import some things. Zippers are a great example. Half of the zippers in the world are made in one factory in Japan, then shipped all over the world. If, instead, we built 4000+ zipper factories to supply every major city on the planet with local zippers, how long might we need to continue this practice before the cost of those 4000+ extra factories is less than the shipping costs from the one? Lifetimes? Millennia? Or is it entirely less efficient and so impossible to be worth it? I think the later.

[@kokofan50]

@@karatos you’re making several mistakes. 1) You’re talking about now. I’m talking about the future. 2) You’re acting like all of NYC is downtown Manhattan. The outer burrows aren’t nearly as expensive, and there’s a surprising amount warehouse space available. Also, wheat and other grains are the absolute worst crops to grow in a vertical farm. Leafy greens other crops like tomatoes are much better suited to vertical farming and in some cities they’re already cost competitive. 3) I’m under no delusion that we’re going to have semiconductor fabs in every city. However, with the break down in international trade that’s already happening and improvements in manufacturing technology and energy are going to drive greater localization

[@Jakeurb8ty82]

I spent hours designing one in high school that was under an island in the pacific as a mega NORAD Cheyanne mountain that sustains itself. Complete with underground agriculture. Pretty sure the city in logans run was an archology. my understanding is that a modern towers resource consumption footprint is much much bigger than the tower itself its just less obvious than suburbia. Archaeologies are just big towers. 5over 1's or mid level buildings that don't require elevators is the real sweet spot.

[@MarcSiegert]

Has anyone ever calculated the minimum size of a mini society? How many people do you need to fill all core positions, from farmers to teachers, nurses, bakers, security, administration to artists and still be a functional society? That should also be the minimum size for an arcology or a mars colony.

[@hypnokitten6450]

very interesting video about arcologies. though the bit at the end of 'don't try living in a desert' kinda ignores how some countries don't have a lot of choice in that (mostly desert) or how many countries may need to solve for that soon (global warming / cutting down forests -> desertification)

[@Skipping2HellPHX]

5th generation Arizonan here. While it is tempting to call all of Arizona a desert, most of the state is not. Arcostani is actually on the semi-arid grass plain outside Prescott & along I-17. Cosanti, his first project, is in the desert in the segregated town of Paradise Valley. They also make some fine bronze bells there.

[@GoranXII]

The _concept_ of an arcology is much older than that. The tulous of ancient china are a good example, being an entire village in one (sometimes more) building, not to be environmentally friendly, but to defend against pirates. Some of the Puebloan structures in the south-western USA and northern Mexico might also count, although that's probably more down to the harsh environment.

[@charlesatanasio]

"Scattered life is parasitic" Um, what? This man has never even seen a farm, has he?

[@mathiaslist6705]

Actually a vision of mine is converting an updraft plant into an acrology. The huge gigantic tower could be used for passive air condition, cooling, providing water etc. So far I have seen no such plans and too bad that I am not an architect.

[@Nata-ch2bk]

As long as it doesn’t become dystopian to the point where they will force everyone to live in those megastructures. Humans are sociable and enjoy being around other people, but not everyone enjoys living in super dense areas. Some people just like to be closer to nature and with less human density.

[@laurie7689]

Also some people, like myself, are not as sociable as other people. I prefer my alone time than being with other people.

[@bluemountain4181]

Yeah while I recognise the sustainability issues that suburbs bring I personally quite like being about to go outside and not have very many people around

[@Game_Hero]

Introverts and neurodivergent people : "yeah, no thanks on the being around other people part"