Arcology

The picture is of the Jested tower, and is by Michael Liberec. I like the counterpoise of the dated modernism and the timeless cross; a Roman instrument of torture upon which was hung our salvation. It also speaks to my deranged condition, since I have a chest infection, can just about walk, and am on a variety of brilliant medical products. It is cold outside, because it is a proper winter's day in north western Europe.






The Bush Administration has been designating vast areas of the ocean and ocean floor as national parks and conservation areas, for a variety of motives. These made me think of the International Convention on the Law of the Sea, which I've blogged a lot about. I can't, however, think of a connection, and anyway, American conservatives embracing state ecology is interesting in itself. It harks back to Bush's original, ephemeral desire to be a sort of post-modern Theodore Roosevelt, which all, of course, went predictably awry.

One of the curious things about twentieth century ecology was how divorced many of its streams were from actual engagement with nature. We tend to think of ecologists and greens as 'back to nature' types, inheritors of the gemutlich rural fascism of Hitler and Himmler, all wooly jumpers and fear-ridden minds. However, the first 'ecological' state in the world was in fact soviet; between 1918 and 1919, Lenin even took time out from the Russian civil war to plot green policies with the agronomist Podialpolski.

The roots of the view that any human engagement with the world should be from within a self-contained artificial system go back slightly further, and are of a piece with industrial modernism. In this view, Nature is a wilderness and the city is self-contained. H. G. Wells, for instance--such a useful prop for a blog, that man--dreamed of a self-contained hyperstructure that mastered its own environment, as early as 1899, in The Sleeper Awakes.

Such ideas grew throughout the twentieth century. Buckminster Fuller, for instance--planner of geodesic domes, continuous maps, and influential in the imagining of nanotubes--called the whole planet a 'spaceship' in the sixties. James Lovelock has famously fallen out with the environmental movement he helped create by identifying earth as a self-regulating organism and humans as something separate distinguished by their intelligence. Some even dreamed of moving cities that did not have to engage with anyone at all.

It's not that odd a thought. Even the garden of eden must have had a boundary, or how could Adam and Eve have been driven out? A real ecology, surely, would involve people getting their hands dirty, using technology sensibly, managing forests, and applying the idea of opportunity cost to materials and food, and would place an emphasis on self-sufficiency and diversity. Coal mines and cabbages, that sort of thing.

All of which brings me to a living tradition of arcology--the blending of architecture and the ecology of alienation from nature--in the twenty-first century. It's based on Paolo Soleri's expectation of future population density. It was brought to my attention by a student from Pennsylvania, and I'm grateful for the nod.

The best examples are to be found in the strangeness of America's deserts, in China, and in cyberspace romances. Arcology depends upon an odd combination of doomster pessimism and faith in technology. It is taken as a given, for instance, that water will run out and food will fail to meet requirements as population grows--regardless of agriculture, diet, or desalination--and that populations will never fall. However, it is also assumed that urban areas can be a laboratory for hyperstructures. This draws upon a twentieth century tendency for urban areas to be made into experimental spaces completely and overall.

I find it bizarre. Perhaps E.J.Applewhite had it right when he more or less portrayed Fuller's arcology as a combination of New England transcendentalism and Star Trek. Mormonism, Scientology and the Nation of Islam--America's other autochthonous blends of previous faiths and modernist neuroses--just don't provide as much timewasting entertainment.

If you are sitting at a screen, wasting time and waiting for the people stealing your life to dismiss you because of some other group who stole all our money, check out the links. They're an insight into the contortions the human mind can get into.