Paolo Soleri was a dreamer. Or a madman. It honestly depends on who you ask in the world of urban planning. In 1969, he released a book that looked more like an oversized manifesto than an architectural blueprint. It was titled Arcology: The City in the Image of Man.
It was massive. It was dense. It changed everything and nothing all at once.
If you’ve ever looked at a sci-fi megastructure in a movie like Blade Runner or played SimCity and wondered why we don't just build upward instead of outward, you’re thinking about arcology. Soleri coined the term by smashing "architecture" and "ecology" together. He hated cars. He hated sprawl. He looked at the 1960s American dream—the suburban house with the white picket fence and a two-car garage—and saw a slow-motion environmental suicide note. He wanted something else. He wanted "miniaturization."
The Core Philosophy: Complexity and Miniaturization
The world is obsessed with expansion. Soleri wasn't. He argued that for a civilization to actually evolve, it has to become more complex, which requires things to be closer together. Think about the human brain. It’s not spread out over three miles of suburbia; it’s a hyper-dense, folded masterpiece of efficiency.
Arcology: The City in the Image of Man proposed that cities should function like biological organisms. This means massive, self-contained vertical structures that house hundreds of thousands of people. In Soleri's vision, you wouldn't need a car because your work, your home, your grocery store, and your school would all be within a five-minute walk. Not a flat walk across a scorching asphalt parking lot, but a three-dimensional move through a living building.
It sounds claustrophobic to some. To Soleri, it was the only way to save the planet. By stacking the city vertically, you leave the surrounding nature untouched. You get rid of the "suburban scar."
Arcosanti: The Real-World Experiment
You can actually go visit the physical ghost of this idea. In 1970, Soleri started building Arcosanti in the high desert of Arizona. It’s about 70 miles north of Phoenix. It was supposed to be a prototype for an arcology that would house 5,000 people.
Today? It houses maybe 50 to 100 people at a time. It's a collection of beautiful, brutalist concrete apses, silt-cast ceilings, and circular windows. It’s magnificent. It’s also unfinished.
Money was always the problem. Soleri wasn't a businessman; he was an artist and a philosopher. He funded the project largely through the sale of bronze and ceramic wind bells. You've probably seen them in high-end gift shops without realizing they were funding a revolution in urban design. But selling bells doesn't build a billion-dollar megastructure.
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The struggle of Arcosanti highlights the massive gap between the theory of Arcology: The City in the Image of Man and the reality of 21st-century economics. We are built for sprawl. Our tax codes, our construction industries, and our very idea of "ownership" are tied to the horizontal. Building a vertical city requires a level of upfront capital and collective willpower that modern society rarely musters for anything other than a stadium or a war.
The Problem With Modern Cities
Look at Phoenix or Las Vegas. They are the antithesis of Soleri’s vision. They are "flat" cities. They rely on millions of gallons of fuel and billions of gallons of water pumped through sprawling networks of pipes and roads.
Soleri called this "implosion."
He believed that by refusing to densify, we are leaking energy. When you look at the sketches in Arcology: The City in the Image of Man, you see these soaring, cathedral-like spaces. They aren't just blocks of apartments. They are designed to use the sun for passive heating. They use the "chimney effect" for natural cooling. They are smart, but not "Silicon Valley smart" with sensors and chips. They are architecturally smart. They use the laws of physics to do the work that we currently use air conditioning units for.
Why Is No One Building This?
Well, someone is. Sort of.
If you look at "The Line" in Saudi Arabia (part of the NEOM project), you see the fingerprints of Arcology: The City in the Image of Man everywhere. It’s a 170-kilometer-long mirrored skyscraper designed to house nine million people. It’s the ultimate expression of Soleri’s "no cars, total density" rule.
But there’s a catch.
Soleri’s vision was deeply humanistic, almost spiritual. He talked about the "theology of the sun." NEOM feels more like a tech-bro fever dream. There is a real fear that modern arcologies won't be the liberating, ecological utopias Soleri imagined, but rather gilded cages for the ultra-wealthy, separated from a collapsing environment outside.
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Then there’s the psychological factor. Humans are weirdly attached to the ground. We like having a "front door" that opens to a street. Living in a massive 3D grid feels "unnatural" to many, even if living in a polluted, traffic-jammed suburb is objectively worse for our health.
Lessons from the Image of Man
Even if we never build a mile-high city for a million people, Soleri’s book offers crucial lessons for the 2020s. We are currently facing a global housing crisis and a climate catastrophe. The "Image of Man" that Soleri wrote about was one of a being that lives in harmony with its environment by being efficient.
We can adopt "Lean Urbanism."
This doesn't mean we all have to move into concrete megastructures in Arizona. It means we stop building "stroad" infested suburbs. It means we prioritize public transit over private vehicles. It means we recognize that density is actually a gift, not a curse.
Basically, we need to stop being afraid of each other.
The "Image of Man" in Soleri's eyes was a social one. You can't have a community if everyone is isolated in their own 2,000-square-foot box with a fence around it. You need shared spaces. You need the "agora." Soleri's drawings are full of people sitting on ledges, walking through plazas, and interacting. He saw the city as a vessel for human evolution.
Moving Toward a Soleri-Inspired Future
If you want to apply the principles of Arcology: The City in the Image of Man to your own life or community, it starts with a shift in perspective. It’s about moving from "more" to "better."
Audit your mobility. How much of your life is spent in a car? Could your neighborhood be redesigned to make that car unnecessary? Small changes in zoning laws—allowing for a corner grocery store in a residential area—are tiny steps toward arcology.
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Advocate for density. Whenever a new apartment building is proposed in a city, people scream about "character" and "traffic." Soleri would argue that the "character" of a city is its people, not its parking lots. Density, if done right, actually reduces traffic by making driving optional.
Support passive design. If you’re building or renovating, look at how the sun hits your house. Soleri was a master of using the environment to control the environment. We have become too reliant on "active" systems (HVAC) and forgotten the "passive" wisdom of our ancestors.
Visit the source. If you’re ever in the American Southwest, go to Arcosanti. It is a flawed, beautiful, dusty, and inspiring place. It feels like a movie set for a future that forgot to happen. But being there, standing in the Bronze Apse, you feel the potential. You see that another way of living is actually possible.
The city in the image of man isn't just a building. It's an admission that we are part of nature, not separate from it. We are currently trying to outrun our ecological footprint by moving further and further away from our problems. Soleri’s message was simple: stop running. Turn around. Build upward. Connect.
It’s a bold vision. It’s probably the only one that works in the long run.
Next Steps for the Urban Explorer
To truly grasp the scale of Soleri’s vision, your next move should be exploring the digital archives of the Cosanti Foundation. They have preserved thousands of Soleri’s original sketches which show the sheer architectural ambition that a 2D book can barely contain. Afterward, look into the "New Urbanism" movement in your local area; many of the zoning changes they fight for—like mixed-use development and walkable blocks—are the practical, "lite" versions of the arcology dream. Seeing how these small-scale changes affect your local economy and mental health will give you a grounded understanding of why Soleri was so obsessed with density in the first place.