Arcologies

Of all the ways that the way we live has changed since the Risings, the most noticeable is far and away the mighty Arcology. What didn't exist anywhere a century ago is now the universal visual for Sprawls everywhere. The term was coined in 1969 by architect Paolo Soleri, who believed that a completed arcology would provide space for a variety of residential, commercial, and agricultural facilities while minimizing individual human environmental impact.

An arcology is distinguished from a merely large building in that it is designed to lessen the impact of human habitation on any given ecosystem. It can be self-sustainable, employing all or most of its own available resources for a comfortable life: power; climate control; food production; air and water conservation and purification; sewage treatment; etc. An arcology is designed to make it possible to supply those items for a large population. An arcology supplies and maintains its own municipal or urban infrastructures in order to operate and connect with other urban environments apart from its own.

Arcology was proposed to reduce human impact on natural resources. Arcology designs might apply conventional building and civil engineering techniques in very large, but practical projects in order to achieve pedestrian economies of scale that have proven to be difficult to achieve in other ways.

Of course when the time came to realize these architectural dreams, it wasn't to protect nature from man, but to protect man from an angry nature. With the rising sea level, the rapidly degrading environment and the exploding population, humanity is frankly running out of places to put itself. As the populations of the Great Cities of the world moved inland, Arcologies were one of the solutions the new metropolises turned to to help house all the refugees.

Corporations have discovered that Arcologies are also great ways to create captive markets for their products and control workforces. Almost all first tier corporate headquarters are arcologies or arcology equivalents and they serve as convenient strongholds in hostile territory (all of the Big 8 maintain arcologies in the North American Megalopolis, as an example)

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