Arcosanti is optimism in concrete.
We define Arcosanti as a kind of an urban laboratory.
The experiment in the laboratory is really a spatial experiment.
How much space do we really need to take up
in order to have rich and rewarding lives?
Here are some stairs.
Let's go all the way up.
We intend to demonstrate how to create a walkable city.
Not one that is dependent on fossil fuels,
but one that is wonderful social space.
People are here for a time, a few weeks or maybe several years of their lives.
Nearly 7,000 people since 1970
have come through this place,
paying tuition to be part of building
all of the buildings that we see at Arcosanti.
Okay, stand back for just a moment.
About a third of our income comes from the
making and selling of ceramic and bronze wind bells.
The work here is to figure out how to have
a rich life without really being rich.
I've lived at Arcosanti for almost 9 years now.
It's not what I envisioned for my life,
but it's the best thing for me.
People are instantly very open and very direct in their feelings.
Before here I was the senior project manager of an ad agency.
The American Dream of living in a mansion
that's air-conditioned, where you have everything
you need in a refrigerator is the best place for you to check Facebook.
That's the opposite of what Arcosanti is about.
This is the Slack system here.
You can see that we have all sorts of different private and public channels.
It's not trying to drop out of mainstream society.
It's trying to say, "we understand mainstream society intimately, and we're going to go
one or two steps ahead to see where this is going."
We imagine that if cities were devised in the proper form,
then something wonderful could happen.
We're here in the Central Arizona desert,
not in spite of the place but because of this place.
Right now, we're kind of a basecamp for arcology.
Architecture and ecology as two parts of the same entity.
We only use about 1/5 the amount of energy
that most American developments use.
Our architecture just works harder than your architecture.
You'll see that the lights aren't turned on.
We don't need to turn them on.
We have the sun.
The sun shines down on this concrete all day,
and in the evening, the concrete retains
its warmth while the air gets cool.
If we can devise some ways to populate the
desert economically, ecologically, and socially,
it's going to have value for a third of humanity, right away.
Paolo Soleri first started Arcosanti in 1970.
Paolo Soleri turned out to be among the
most famous architects in the world.
He was still working very hard up until the
very last days of his life to continue to
push this idea of the three dimensional, compact, complex urban city.
Since Paolo Soleri's death in 2013, we have had a vision for this place.
So we have 17 sketchbooks, and about 5600 pages altogether.
Here then is one of the first designs of Arcosanti,
and you see right here, is little Arcosanti
that we have right now.
This is original Soleri work.
He used crayon and drew all this.
Our work as the next generation of Arcosantians
is to revisit Soleri's early designs,
see how they can become buildable and transferrable
to other places and peoples.
After a while, one of two things happen:
either you go to sleep from the outside world,
and you just say, "Life's great, I'm going to
watch a sunset, have my mind blown, write poetry.
But hopefully what it will say is that
we have a responsibility to help many more groups of people."
Right now, a little more than 50% of all human beings alive on the planet live in cities.
In the next thirty years,
that's likely to go up to 80%.
We can put our minds together and try to solve the issue of our generation:
how to live in cities.