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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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. 😔)

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.

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.

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.

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!

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.

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

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

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. :)

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

SimCity is so good real life cities were made as tribute

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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...

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!

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

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.

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).

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...

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.

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

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.

Whittier, Alaska.

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

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.

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.

This video is so well researched!

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.

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

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

"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?"

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

Great video.

shoulda seen my face when you namedropped Isaac Arthur

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

I display my architecture sets like that to!

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

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.

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.

i’d be very interested to read soleri’s book on arcologies

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

Kowloon walled city was a far better example of an archology. Curious why it's never mentioned in these discussions

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

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.

I like this. Thank you

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!

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

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.

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

Near where I live there's a shopping mall with a residential tower, hotel tower, and office tower. It doesn't have a hospital or farms, but it comes close to being an arcology. The problem is that the construction and running costs are so high that only rich people can live there.

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.

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

I watched this on Nebula, but I like Arcologies enough that I am watching it again here.

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.

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.

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.👍

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

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.

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

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.

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

The line has a decent amount of verticality, but its length relative to width without connecting back to itself seems like one of the least efficient layouts for a vertical city.

When I see an arcology project, all I can think about is Brasilia - some architect designs the perfect, most efficient city, but no one moves in because it feels weird, so it's a huge abandoned mess.

i think mountainsides are the best place for arcology's. We could easily build into a cliffside and make the exterior beautifully laid into the mountain and it could house thousands of people that would all have mountainside views. The windows should mostly be the condos people would live in and the inside and at the center of the structure could be public amenities.

The most realistic outcome of an attempted arcology are the Hive Cities from 40k. Truly nightmarish.