The City In A Box is the most energy and environmentally efficient way for people to live that has yet been devised. Only a prototype has so far been built, and we need production versions. This is how we’ll build one.
An arcology is efficient for a number of reasons. The original concept, created by Paolo Soleri in Arizona in the 1960s, was to minimize transportation expenses by putting commercial, industrial, residential, civic, and recreational assets all in the same place, so your commute becomes “walk down the hall.” The more recent “city in a box” concept takes that further.
The Arcology is intended to be not merely energy-neutral, but energy-*generating*. By using active solar windows, the entire building becomes a solar collector, and putting vertical-axis wind turbines at the corners of the building take advantage of the effects of the towers on wind-patterns to generate electricity from them.
In addition to the carbon-savings from minimizing transportation, the structure is also engineered from modular structural carbon-fiber, which can be made from carbon removed directly from the atmosphere. Since this structure is replacing concrete, the most environmentally hostile building material known, the environmental savings are substantial.
Our initial project is to create and design a plan for building an arcology here in Portland, to both act as a further proof of concept and to help Portland deal with the rising tide of climate refugees that the existing city planners seem bent on ignoring.