Search for a Lean Alternative - Design with the Desert: Conservation and Sustainable Development - page 526

being absorbed by the market now is unwise. One tenet is that prototyping is not profit-
oriented. It ceases to be prototyping the moment it enters the straightjacket of profitability,
with its strict rules of “I'll do it if it pays.” The lean alternative would be no longer open to
the nimbleness of novelty; it would have skirted the risk of challenging the market.
The market would have never accepted, endorsed, or financed the Old Town (the existing
structures). The mesa would be there, pristine and untouched if we persevered in trying to
bring in the market. None of the more than 6000 people who built the Arcosanti Old Town
asked for stocks, ownership, guarantees, public debate, or a decision-making voice. They
came, worked, and left, and I think none of the workshop participants came out the worse
for it. Now we have a working fragment of a lean alternative. It should not yet be drowned
in the oceanic marketplace.
The Cosanti and Arcosanti projects have been a modest attempt to become a testing
ground for lean society. We had to generate resources for constructing Arcosanti, while
residents—averaging 70 people at a time—carried on with dignity and some rewarding
experiences. The awareness of being in a domain of excellence vis-à-vis waste, pollution,
environmental disruption, and disavowing the segregation of people and things has been
the constant reward. We would like to submit a proposal for accelerating Arcosanti's
construction to corporate and noncorporate America. Speeding up Arcosanti's construction
would produce more persuasive alternatives to the problems of hyperconsumption and
materialism, which are inseparable twins. Extending the experience of lean culture from
100 or so people to 1000 or so people is the main goal; 1000 or so people would achieve
Arcosanti critical mass.
Arcosanti, by intent and design, has had a 40 year experience of lean-minded persons
living in a lean habitat. We are researching an alternative way of sheltering individuals and
society by seeking optimal shelter. Hyperconsumption's natural home is the exurban waste
camp: an opulent but humanly sterile place. What mainstream society has elected to be
the optimal sheltering—suburbia, now mutating into exurbia—is rapidly destroying our
physical and mental resources. The self-perpetuating labor of technology, inventiveness,
and our innate greed (opportunism) are conjuring the planetary hermitage that we might
discover, too late, to be lethal. Self-isolation, only virtually broken by the microchip, is
what the gregarious, convivial body-brains that we are, will be unable to cope with. The
environmental impact generated by the most extraordinary waste intrinsic to the one-
house, one-family formula will overwhelm people, animals, and the green life on which
all other forms of life depend.
30.5 Lean Linear Arterial City
In recent years I have developed Lean Linear Arterial Arcology as an elongation of the
arcology principle intended to perform well with respect to the main logistical reticulum
now so indispensable to urban life.* The Lean Linear Arterial proposes the study of an
urban environ along main logistical systems existent or anticipated. The main promise
of leanness consists in an unflagging thrust toward a recoordination of cultures within
and along intense broad-ranging experiences available, as history tells us, only in urban
coordinations. As we are definers of spaces and are defined by space, the natural environ
* For more on this proposal, see Soleri et al. 2