Notas del episodio
In Whittier, Alaska, nearly the whole town lives, works, and goes to school inside the Begich Towers, an accidental small version of the arcology. The word was coined in 1969 by architect Paolo Soleri, blending architecture and ecology, for a dense megastructure aiming at autarky: internal power, climate control, vertical food production, and water and sewage treatment in a closed loop. Soleri pitched it against Frank Lloyd Wright's Broadacre City, which gave every family a one acre plot, and went further than Buckminster Fuller's domed Old Man River's City for about 125,000 people in East St. Louis. The idea answered the environmental alarm of the late 1960s and 1970s by shrinking the human footprint and leaving wilderness untouched.
Real attempts struggled. The Dongtan eco city near Shanghai missed the 2010 World Expo, the Ihme-Zentrum in Hanover slid into insolvency and decay, and Soleri's own Arcosanti in Arizona has been under construction since 1970. Saudi Arabia's The Line was cut in 2024 from 170 kilometers to 2.4. Fiction turned the dream into a warning, from Robert Silverberg's The World Inside to Neuromancer, SimCity 2000, The Ascent, Cyberpunk 2077, and Dredd.
- The elevator problem, where taller and denser buildings lose more of their core to empty shafts
- The Line's original pitch: 200 meters wide, nine million residents, zero cars, and a $500 billion budget
- McMurdo Station's yearly need for about 30 million liters of fuel and 11 million pounds of supplies through Operation Deep Freeze
- Silverberg's 1971 world of 75 billion people in thousand story urban monads where wanting to go outside is heresy
- Niven and Pournelle's Todos Santos, and the Peach Trees mega block of 75,000 residents in Dredd