GENIUS FORUMS

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One of the hobbies I have had since childhood has been designing Arcologies. I did this with legos and in drawings long before I ever knew about Paolo Santeri,
Or had heard the word "Arcology". My first premise was always simply creating a realistic futuristic city as might be seen as a mars colony, or, as might be used
to solve Earth political problems such as the Palestinian Issue. I must thus concede the word which exists in the language and thank others for their contributions,
but my own exploration has been considerably different and in my view, far more pragmatic than others.

Building an Arcology is no small undertaking. New York is filled with badly planned and too densely packed apartment buildings. The World is full of mediocre and bad architecture. Its easy to build an Arcology and much harder to build a good one. Its Easy to build a dystopian Arcology and Much harder to build a Utopian one.

Thus, I think that it is long over due for somebody to speak out about the primary design considerations which should be thought of when building an Arcology.

1. Arcologies should use as much as possible materials which are collected from on site.
2. Arcologies should be built around open pit rock quarry mines, or strip mines.
3. Arcologies should be composed primarily of foam crete, or, concrete with lots of air bubbles blown into it.
4. Arcologies should be composed secondarily of a metal infrastructure.
5. Floors on Arcologies should be constructed using the same techniques as modern suspension bridges, and with the least amount of materials possible.
6. Arcology walls should be two or three meters thick at the base.
7. Arcologies Should be built no less than 100 stories tall and no more than 200 stories tall.
8. Arcologies should, like ice bergs, have considerable volume beneath the surface in the form of mines, basments, and deep foundations.
9. Arcologies Should invariably take advantage of geothermal power.
10. In essence, A good Arcology is firstly a large scale strip mine, secondly a large scale geothermal power plant, thirdly a large scale manufacturing center,
fourthly a large scale permaculture garden, and only lastly a large scale city inside of a single building.
11. Because Circles have more structural strength and durability, Arcologies should be based on circular geometry and radial symetry.
12. Inhabitants of an Arcology should have porch gardens of sufficient size to grow all of the food that they need.
13. Inhabitants of Arcologies should have thus windows to the outside. No arcology should be built where inhabitants do not have access to outdoor sunlight or air, unless that arcology is built on mars, venus, or some other such planet other than earth.
(Unless Earth becomes toxic.)
14. These criteria combined mutually together infer a large central tower with radial habitation wings. Radial symetry and size considerations thus would seem
to combine with space requirements to create a situation where the real size of a real and pragmatic Arcology can be in essence refered to by the number of stories tall that it is, and the number of habitat wings which fit around the central tower.
15. Each of these habitat wings by neccessity should be as thick at least as the current large house. Between 5 and ten meters at minimum.
16. Each wing in most ideal Arcologies will actually have an interior hallway adding 5 more meters to the thickness via the hall and 10 more meters due to doubling the housing. Thus the width of one wing is presumed to be between 25 and 35 Meters. Adding 4 meters on each side for the garden porch renders
a total of 31-41 Meters.
17. The next criteria for size is the length of a habitat wing. While this could be virtually any multiple of the apartment size, smaller numbers will not take advantage of the other design criteria well enough, and larger numbers will sprawl the arcology out too far. Assuming that the whole point is to be able to walk
only as much as a single mile from one end of the arcology to the other, (approximately, and perhaps as much as 2 miles.) The length of a habitat wing can be inferred to be optimal around 300 or 400 meters, depending on the size of the central tower.
18. Elevator arrays should be located next to emergency stairs at both ends of each habitat wing.
19. An arcology should by definition be also a water park, with its own closed circuit water system, with its own sewage treatment, and its own full air and water biocycle. No water should ever leave the arcology via tunnels or tubes for any reason. Sewage should be directly recycled on site and used as fertilizer.
20. A good Arcology as a water theme park should offer many different swimming pools, water slides, hottubs, and other water intensive environments at or below the ground floor. The Ground floor (or, deepest sub basement) of a good Arcology is a geothermally heated water park.
21. The central tower of a good Arcology should house in the basements the geothermal power plant, the water works systems, the sewage treatments systems, and any other major energy equipment.
22. The Central tower should house a large coliseum.
23. The central tower should house above the coliseum several layers of community gardens, of sufficient size and complexity via stacking to support the entire population with food. (Redundant to the porch gardens which are ancillatory to personal apartments. A stable civilization has at least two layers of redundancy for food supply in case there is some sort of problem. The isolation of individual gardens will protect the system from larger scale systemic failures, whereas the community gardens will supply more food at less human labor cost, but be more susceptible to large scale system failures.)
24. Although different applications may differ, it is probably advisable to put towers at the ends of the habitat wings, for the purpose of housing assorted human activities such as schools, offices, industry, manufacturing, smaller scale social gathering spaces, community kitchens (non corporate "Restauraunts.)
Baby sitting centers, activity centers, recreational facilities, and so forth.
25. The outer towers can be infered to be slightly larger than the width of the habitat wings themselves, perhaps 50 or 70 meters in diameter.





____________
“The opposite of bravery is not cowardice but conformity.”

"Out beyond ideas of right-doing and wrong-doing there is a field. I’ll meet you there. "
-Rumi-

“The best way to escape from your problem is to solve it.”

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CIVIL ENGINEERING General
Civil Engineering is about how to build society or civilization from the nuts and bolts pragmatic perspective. A civil engineer is unconcerned with personally understanding
The social impact of their work unless they are specifically asked to think about that.
Rather, what a Civil engineer thinks about is how to build a structure, have it last, have
It mesh with its environment, have water flow around it, have wind not push it over. A Civil Engineer builds what society asks for generally, adding the details that make a description into an operational reality.
Many social and civil problems have civil engineering components. Energy usage
And creation, for instance, has both a social and a civil level as problems to be solved. Zoning laws and other social considerations limit what a civil engineer can do. And, rightly, civil engineering realities create limits for sociologists. Civil engineers are concerned with how efficiently resources are used, how much load a structure can bear, how well a structure accommodates traffic, and other details such as environmental impact.
Civil Engineering has aesthetic components, resource management components, construction components, and other issues which must be juggled for a good overall design and implementation.
Serious solutions for assorted problems are implied by depth understanding of civil engineering issues. Poverty for instance can in theory be out civil engineered by building the structures that are needed to house people, employment, education, and social welfare systems. The solution for instance to the Palestinian problem once diplomacy has finished is civil engineering; building the new State of Palestine and simultaneously building a strong Israel. Eco Villages, Tribal Arcologies, Permaculture,
Cable cars, Solar power, Geothermal power, Wind power, Tidal power, and other such
Civil engineering solutions can solve myriads of problems that would be untenable from the sociologist’s desk alone. Simultaneously, Good civil engineering requires us to be honest about things that don’t work, such as fossil fuels, bio-fuels, nuclear power, hydroelectric power from rivers and dams, and individualized mass transportation.
Ideally, most people should live in communities rather than in nuclear families
Cut off from community support, and communities should maintain community gardens
And local employment to increase the efficiency of civilization as a whole.

Civil Engineering;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_engineering
http://www.icivilengineer.com/
https://engineering.purdue.edu/CE/
http://www.unm.edu/~civil/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Civil_engineering
http://whatiscivilengineering.csce.ca/



Economic Social Justice;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_justice
http://indymedia.us/en/topic/economicju ... hive.shtml
http://www.commondreams.org/community.htm
http://www.cesj.org/thirdway/economicju ... efined.htm
http://www.cesj.org/


Eco-Village;
http://www.gaia.org/gaia/
http://gen.ecovillage.org/
http://www.ecosustainablevillage.com/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eco-village

Arcologies;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arcologies
http://www.arcosanti.org/theory/arcology/main.html
http://www.arcology.com/
http://www.halfbakery.com/idea/Self-suf ... Arcologies

Permaculture;
http://www.attra.org/attra-pub/perma.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permaculture
http://www.permaculture.net/about/definitions.html
http://www.permaculture.net/about/brief ... ction.html
http://www.permaculture.org/nm/index.php/site/index/


Cable Cars;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cable_car
http://www.rickly.com/sgi/cable_cars.htm
http://www.cable-car-guy.com/html/ccmain.html
http://www.photovault.com/Link/Vehi...RCVolume01.html

Solar Power;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power
http://www.solarelectricpower.org/
http://www.montanagreenpower.com/solar/index.html

Geothermal Power
http://geothermal.marin.org/pwrheat.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geothermal_power
http://www1.eere.energy.gov/geothermal/powerplants.html
http://geothermal.marin.org/
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/15749933/

Wind Power;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_power
http://www.otherpower.com/otherpower_wind.html

Tidal Power;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tidal_power
http://inventors.about.com/od/tstartinv ... _power.htm
http://waterpower.hypermart.net/tidal.html
http://www.esru.strath.ac.uk/EandE/...dal%20Power.htm

Prom,

Just a suggestion. To get the kind of discussion you're after, with intelligent responses, try limiting the opening post to a short paragraph.

The intelligent person you're hoping to interact with, loves good writing. Good writing distills everything down to one, at the most two, simple ideas. It might provide one good example, such as one internet link. If you get a bite, and spark interest in others, then they will do their own research or ask for more links.

The idea is to stimulate thought, isn't it? Therefore, be terse, somewhat cryptic, to force the reader to think. More words count for less.


Kelly