Arcology: The City in the Image of Man

Soleri, Paolo. Arcology: The City in the Image of Man. Cambridge, MA: MIT P, 1970.

Presents PS's ideas for a real-world civilization based in "a structure called an arcology, or ecological architecture." Allowing humankind to function in the physical universe ("an immense megamachine"), an arcology is a city viewed as a huge organism, preferably one including a computer brain as well as the interacting organic brains of its human inhabitants. (PS's idea of an arcology is modified and given fictional life in Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle's novel, Oath of Fealty [1981], in which an arcology is an antibureaucratic environment.) Note also in SF, total and totally human-made environments on a vast scale, in dystopian works such as E. M. Foster's "The Machine Stops"[1] to neutral or positive presentations as in the Galactic capital of Trantor in I. Asimov's Foundation stories.[2]