Urban Technology at University of Michigan week 124
Arcosanti vs. e-Bikes
On a recent visit to Phoenix, AZ, I caught up with David King, an urban planner, professor, and all around fascinating thinker about cities. We rode a Waymo driverless taxi to grab mole and cochinita pibil at Barrio Cafe and then settled into a discussion about the search for a better way to live. Read below for a quick interview with David followed by my musings from a visit to Arcosanti, prototype utopia. But first, an announcement about the Prototype Grant that you may remember from last year!
💬 Hello! This is the newsletter of the Urban Technology program at University of Michigan, in which we explore the ways that technology can be harnessed to nurture and improve urban life. If you’re new here, try this short video of current students describing urban technology in their own words.
CALL FOR PROPOSALS - We’re offering three grantees $15k protogrants in support of experimental software and hardware projects that advance decarbonization, climate resilient infrastructure, just energy transitions, and/or circular economies.
We want to know how hardware and software can aid in planning, designing, building, operating, analyzing, and living within cities that are as digital as they are physical. How can carefully-applied technology help grow tendrils of this bright green future in present-day soil?
MORE DETAILS AT PROTOGRANT.IO.
🎙 Three Questions for David King
David is one of the few urban planning gigabrains I’ve met who has also been an active entrepreneur. Maybe this is what gives David a unique ability to analyze things from the combined positions of having feet firmly planted on the ground while at the same time seeing the world from a 30,000 foot macro view?
BOYER: What’s most inspiring to you about Southwestern cities?
KING: American sunbelt cities are the dominant sort of urban form, for better or worse. American cities of the future will look far more like Phoenix and Jacksonville than Manhattan or Chicago. This is because of where people want to live—the sunbelt is popular. Because of this, fixing urbanism in the sunbelt is critical to achieving any of our broader goals on climate, safety, justice or economic opportunities. But, the good news is that Southwestern cities, and the sunbelt overall, can grow their way out of many of the problems they face. Phoenix and Maricopa County are at the top for annual population growth rates in the US. Those new Phoenicians can help fill up new housing built in ways that are sensitive to the local conditions. If places like Phoenix embrace vernacular architecture they will define a new type of urbanism that is adaptable to the new climate conditions.
Urban heat, for instance, is a major health concern. A large contributor to urban heat is the asphalt used in roads and parking lots, which comprise about one-third of the total land area in the Phoenix metro. While there is interest in planting trees to reduce these heat effects, what if we think about streets and parking as sites of innovation? We can reduce the amount of asphalt, improving heat conditions and creating a new type of development that increases shadows to protect from the July sun and creates microclimates that naturally cool the air. The costs of creating such places are worth it as millions and millions of lives are at stake here and around the globe. Southwestern cities offer an opportunity for a new vision of the future and a new type of urbanism that meets the moment.
As for the sustainability of places like Phoenix, the region’s problems are slow moving and well known. Would you rather be Phoenix in 50 years or Miami? Miami can’t do anything about sea levels. Phoenix can take steps to cool down and build in a way to minimize exposure, like places like Minneapolis have done over the years. (Love them or hate them, the Minneapolis skyways are a fantastic way to get around downtown in January.)
And so what that Phoenix has water scarcity? Many cities have it worse. Or Miami again, which is soon to have more salty water everywhere than it can deal with. Phoenix will have to invest in longer pipelines and probably desalination plants (either in California or Mexico), but that’s a political issue that can and will be solved. New York City doesn’t have local water, either, it just built Water Tunnel 3 at the cost of $5 billion to help maintain their water supply from upstate.
New York owns its supply sources far north of the city—it doesn’t just dip a hose into the Hudson. Los Angeles is no better on water than Phoenix other than it is higher up the pecking order of Colorado River water. So thinking that Phoenix is bad because it is built in a desert is shallow thinking. That’s not to say everything is rosy, but Phoenix’s problems are very manageable, and we can make it a better city with more options about how to live.
BOYER: Can urban innovation happen outside of existing cities?
KING: Urban innovation is often tried outside of cities—Arcosanti or Seaside, Florida, as examples—because it’s easier to do things when no neighbors are around to complain. But these places are not going to move the needle on achieving any societal goals, simply because most people will never live there.
I mentioned the growth of Phoenix. Even if that continues and the region grows at roughly 2% per year, that’s a drop in the bucket compared with the nearly five million people who currently live here. We have to innovate for existing places. New places work on paper because they don’t have the messiness of actual people in their homes and communities.
Some ideas can be sandboxed elsewhere, but fixing existing problems being more important than fixing our favored problems on a clean slate. Those new cities will someday be mature cities with all of the problems that come with that messiness.
BOYER: What’s your favorite city and why?
KING: I don’t have one! I think Paris is wonderful not just for being Paris, but because they are doing some of the most exciting policy changes to make it better. Paris is showing us what can be done when we think about street space as more than just a place for cars.
New York has its moments, but after living there for eight years I just don’t think that city is up to the challenge or getting things done. It’s too sclerotic when it should be dynamic.
Phoenix does have an attitude that anything is possible, which I like, which is one reason you and I could take a Waymo to dinner. Minneapolis, where I am from, is doing a lot of things to improve the city in rapid order, and it is a much better city than when I lived there. Minnetonka, a suburb of Minneapolis, is doing shopping mall redevelopment better than anyone by making the mall site permeable to people without cars, and is creating a walkable downtown where people want to live in a place that was (and still is) a regional shopping mall. It can be done.
Toronto is probably my favorite North American city at the moment, but that may be just because since the pandemic I haven’t traveled much, and most recently that’s where I was.
🌵 Desert Utopias
Hop into a car and drive an hour north of Phoenix, AZ and flip the blinker when you see Arcosanti Road. The exit is little more than a pair of dueling gas stations, but if you sneak around behind them the paved road gives way to dirt. Continue down the bumpy path and eventually you will arrive to the namesake of the road, Arcosanti, “the urban laboratory” as they call themselves.
For some 52 years a small community of people have been toiling under the Southwestern sun to build an “arcology”—mashup of architecture and ecology—here in the desert with the intention of demonstrating how to live in harmony with nature. Arcosanti’s relevance to us should be clear: anyone who dreams of a better way to live is engaging questions at the intersection of place, people, and technology.
Among the initiative’s principles are a commitment to human scale and “bounded density.” The idea is to build on a small part of the land you have and leave the rest to nature. Arcosanti occupies a few acres out of thousands owned or leased. Cars are only utilized at Arcosanti as an interface to the outside world. The place itself is a cluster of half a dozen or so structures huddled on the cliffside and there’s no real car use on site. Not even a surface for a tiny golf cart to motor around the winding paths and stairs, really.
Arcosanti feels urban without being a city. Only a few dozen people reside here, yet every structure is multiple levels and serves multiple functions (mixed use), and it seems that everyone here is at work doing their thing—be it farming and cooking, studying and learning, or making the ceramic and metal crafts that provide an income stream. The place has a subtle urban buzz despite being about as populous as a family reunion.
The clarity of this project, while very much a group effort with many contributing ideas and labor over the decades, has been clouded due to abuse allegations against its charismatic founder. I came with cautious eyes in regards to the interpersonal dynamics of a place like this, but after reading about Arcosanti as a student many years ago, I was excited to see it and form my own conclusions.
The first and very simplistic realization is that the compound is still connected to the grid, which would seem antithetical to the ecological intentions of the community. This seems like an obvious opportunity for improvement. I didn’t have a chance to ask our tour guide but imagine that the lack of contemporary renewable energy infrastructure is due to difficulties raising funds to invest in such a thing. Arcosanti has hosted VR artists, but have they hosted a microgrid experimenter? In theory, the Henry Ford of microgrids should emerge from a place like this with all the right ecological bonafides and a wild, tinkering spirit.
The second realization was harder to process and, I guess… accept. As others have written, the 1960s Boomer counter-cultural revolution that very much included projects such as Arcosanti has given way to problematic levels of individualism. Here’s Boomer columnist Polly Toynbee capturing the sentiment in the Guardian:
Out of all this revolution against “the system” came a “me” individualism that grew into neoliberalism. Early hippy ideals of silicon valley soon morphed into each-for-yourself, pay no taxes, screw all governments. Anti-establishment “freedom” has many dark sides and the Beatles had it right: “We all want to change the world / But when you talk about destruction / Don’t you know that you can count me out”.
In the same way that Steve Jobs transmogrified the energy of the Homebrew Computer Club into the self-perpetuating cash behemoth of Apple Computer, real estate developers are currently adopting selective aspects of Arcosanti, knowingly or not.
One example is the Cul-de-Sac development which, coincidentally or not, happens to be in Arizona as well. It’s wild to see the dreams of the 1960s realized by real estate developers of the 2020s, even the most progressive ones! Though I’ve never seen them refer to Arcosanti, Cul-de-Sac has adopted the principles of focusing on non-motorized mobility and the joys of dense urban life.
Here’s a recent tour by drone:
The developers are in the process of creating 636 units that, by extension, should house some 800-1500 people. At the low end that would make Cul-de-Sac’s 17 acres as dense as NYC—impressive! Though recent advances in fusion have shown that density at a tiny scale is meaningful when it comes to nuclear experimentation, the same remains to be seen in the context of utopian urbanism.
Arcosanti struggles to attract enough people to have a school, a health clinic, a shop. As David King asked rhetorically while forking at his cochinita pibil, is Cul-de-Sac’s community large enough to sustain Vik’s corner store and Mike’s coffee shop after honeymoon rent abatements evaporate under the Arizona sun? To be clear, I’m rooting for them because I think experimental settlements such as this play an important role in shifting the Overton window of possible urbanisms, but I fear this project will succumb to the same exceptionalism that Arcosanti struggles to escape.
Arcosanti has demonstrated a high level of commitment to experimentation well beyond the edge of existing cities but it’s a little too far out there—both literally and conceptually—for many to participate. In this regard it exhibits one of the critical failures of the smart cities era: where you build is what you build. If you build a new way of life in the middle of nowhere, its chances of eventually reshaping life elsewhere are diminished, as David noted above. Arcosanti is inspiring but isolated. By comparison, Cul-de-sac, exists within landscape of Tempe which is part of the Phoenix metro area. “Dense” is not the first word that comes to mind when describing the geography that Cul-de-sac sits within, but it’s conceptually much closer to status quo American life than its 1960s utopian progenitor.
My third realization while visiting Arcosanti was basic and personal: this is the kind of place I could live later in life. Maybe. The ability to live without a vehicle is attractive, but that’s available in many communities, even if most of them happen to be on other continents. The possibility of living in a community that is deeply committed to experimental, ecological ways of life is attractive to me but—in the most American way possible—I’d like to have more ability to sample utopias before subscribing to one. Standing under Arcosanti’s giant shade arches it becomes visceral how much of a commitment is required of individuals hoping to partake in this utopian project. It takes a lot of luck for some 40 people to align their values to the extent that they are willing to live together like this. Accomplishing the same with 400 or 40,000 people are orders of magnitude more complicated.
Cities are an extremely blunt unit of innovation. A new place requires thousands of people (or their representatives) to agree on certain things before executing a bunch of work (construction) and then eventually people can move in and judge for themselves whether a new reality was achieved or not. The paradox of Arcosanti is that for an “us” to accomplishing significant changes in how humans occupy land, relate to nature, utilize space, or share resources, it needs to be easy for individuals to say “I’m in.” The reality in Arizona would imply that it’s not easy for most to commit.
Prior to visiting Arcosanti, I had conceptualized utopia as a public good but what I realized while being there is that utopia is actually a “club good,” in a funny kind of way. If so, then the question is what’s the theory of change for a zone of exception like Arcosanti? It would seem Arcosanti is more theory than change, precisely because of the barriers to opting in. In that regard, the easier you can make it for individuals to decide to partake on their own terms, the more easily the club will expand. Grow a club large enough and it becomes the new civic normal, as was the case with American fire departments in the 19th century—notably not through some magical concept of growth, but through careful planning by cities.
Compared to the years long process to build even a small district like Cul-de-Sac or an experiment like Arcosanti from scratch, a new technology like the e-Bike can hit the market and within a year change how people are hitting the road. This is possible because selling devices to individuals gives people a way to opt into a new normal without first having to get 40-some friends to agree with them. The metaphor is imperfect, because anything that relies on individual purchases leaves huge questions about equity and inclusiveness, let alone the fact that some positive outcomes are only obtainable at scale (like regional transit), but I left Arizona thinking that Arcosanti’s competition is not Cul-de-sac, NEOM, or even CityDAO, but the e-Bike.
🎁 And with that, we’re offline till January. See you in 2023! 🎁
These weeks: Studio prep, MOUs, gearing up for Cities Intensive 2.0 (already). Awaiting the arrival of Batch Two, which will triple our student headcount . 🏃