A "WE THE PEOPLE" interview with Paolo Soleri and Jerry Brown

JB: We're back with "We the People," and again I want to give you an opportunity those of you who are interested in joining "We the People," the number is 800-XXX-XXXX. Paolo, you just said that the human organism, the human being is a transcending...

PS: Yes.

JB: ...and that's at the heart of what it is to be human, putting it in my words. So now let's focus that for the remaining 13 or 14 minutes on the city of the future. Having talked about all this, we now...I get a sense of the criteria for the new city. It certainly doesn't look like Oakland or Manhattan or Los Angeles.

PS: Yeah, but number one is almost a simplistic attempt to re-introduce the notion of what I call the urban condition. So you should not take it as a very powerful and very massive proposition. It's a very modest process. We have no more than a hundred people involved. The facility...

JB: You're talking now about Arcosanti, but I was also thinking about, you certainly can refer to that, but I was thinking of really the vision, since from what we just said for the last three quarters of an hour, we're running out of time here, and what certainly the positive plan, the blue print, the vision of what...we ought to be in the city and what should that city look like. It's going to be totally different from than what it is today.

PS: Yes, but, but not too different from some of, what you may call the old example of successful cities. I'm...let's say Europe, because I come from there and I have some experience there, but there has been a period in European history which has been very cruel and very bawdy, evidently, when cities, in terms of communes and so on, communities, not communes in terms of American experience, were successful and they gave us, what we call, for instance, the Renaissance and then the development from the Renaissance up to the present day. So the fact that we are gregarious, we are corporal, we need each other, indicates that the city is the thing eventually is going to be as it has been in the past.

JB: Okay, now in your city you put so many people together...

PS: Yes.

JB: ...you take away the car...

PS: Yes.

JB: ...you, I don't want to say pack as many people in, but that's pretty much what your doing. You want a lot of people close together. Could you just describe that. I'm sure some people have no acquaintance with what you have written in the past.

PS: Well, for instance, I had the experience of Phoenix, which is becoming now a small signs of it, but Phoenix is a structure...

JB: Phoenix, Arizona.

PS: ...Phoenix, Arizona is a structure of about 600 square miles. So it's a gigantic structure, and as East Los Angeles, it doesn't work very well. It's sluggish by necessity, because it's gigantic. It depends on logistical system which are colossal, feudal would be a good example. So just in physical terms, in terms of gravity and thermodynamics, Phoenix negates what Phoenix would like to be, which means lively, intense, joyful and so on, and on. What we need is to take Phoenix, and in a way, fold it over make it big dimensional so that we miniaturize the landscape of Phoenix, and by doing that we eliminate all the problems of the gigantic. And this is pure physics, this has nothing to do with metaphysics. This is the fact that time and space are very precious and we should use them, it really, in the best way we can.

JB: Okay, now if we...going a little further there. As you fold Phoenix into a three- dimensional city...

PS: Yes.

JB: ...you start with 600 square miles. So what's it going to look like?

PS: Well, I would say that we would subdivide Phoenix in, let's say, ten units or whatever, and then would begin to build in those real estate that develops units which are no longer one or two floors, but there are many, many floors. Maybe up to fifty, maybe up to a hundred, because there it is very efficient, there is where frugality comes in, there's were less pollution and less waste.

JB: Okay, so people are in a building that could be fifty to a hundred stories. How long would...how many blocks would it be?

PS: Oh, it might...depending upon the population it might be, let's say a quarter of a mile square, or whatever, that depends on the number of people and the technology you want to put in and how far you want to go into these...

JB: Okay, within that building...

PS: Yes.

JB: ...I want to see some more of that.

PS: Yeah.

JB: What would be...give me an example of how many people. Would everything they do be within that building?

PS: I would tend to say, yes, if you want to achieve a great efficiency, but naturally we don't have that experience of that kind of architecture. That's why we need laboratories which are going to investigate what that implies and slowly generate the morphology that is going to be the answer to this problem of the gigantic and the wasteful.

JB: The morphology meaning the shape?

PS: The shape, the structural shape, how the logistics are developed, how the transportation, the () , and how the different functions are located, and how we can become again pedestrians.

JB: So you might have moving sidewalks. You will have to have elevators.

PS: Absolutely.

JB: And you are going to do that in a way that is going to husband resources and create far less waste.

PS:Yes, and the citizen is going to be a citizen and a country person, because he or she can walk out of the city and stay humanist and be in the presence of nature, which is now impossible in the () we have developed.

JB: So at the doorstep of this building...

PS: At the doorstep is there will be cultural, the wilderness, whatever is the condition, the local condition.

JB: Now...

PS: To keep in mind, we need to save good land for agriculture.

JB: Okay, you have study, you have sleeping, you have intimacy, you have working production...

PS: ...learning and play.

JB: ...celebration, ritual.

PS: Absolutely.

JB: Now, people are going to be...it sounds like people are going to be a lot closer together than they are right now used to.

PS: Again, this goes back to the European experience where, for instance, my personal experience was in Italy that I was living in what you might call an apartment and wasn't the best apartment because we were not wealthy. But the living room was the city, because I could walk down four or five stories and be then in the middle of the city, which was offering to me () that the sources of the city provides, including the theater, the library, the university, the hospital, the playground, and so on. But that was available for me pedestrian, not me for the person who has to enter this magic machine, which is the automobile, and then drive myself to those places further and further away from where I am.

JB: Now, what about this question about, Is this a hive, or? I know just, because I know you, that this is a complexity that is elegant not monotonous.

PS: Well...

JB: Could you speak to that.

PS: That brings in the skills and the ability, what you might call the intuition, the vision of the planner, or the planners, because that is not one person. That is why we need laboratories. In chemistry, in physics, in technology, we have laboratories. The laboratory is where you develop an experiment, and then you take the experiment to the stager point so through this failure you learn about the experiment. Well, we should do the same thing in urban problems which are the most complex, the most demand- ing, and the most invading problems of them all.

JB: We certainly...we have some negative experiments that are being run right now.

PS: No, but the condition for the experiment is there to be successful. If the experiment is not success, then we say that this was a failure, this was worthless, there's no learning from that so we're not going to do another failure. Next time is going to be a success. Well, that's the premise for failure, because we don't want to learn from our mistakes. We do not want to investigate what might happen that might make for a failure, so that's why the laboratory notion is very important.

JB: So, in...this is jumping a bit, but I just have to ask it. Is it your feeling that if we are in the condition of ten billion human beings...

PS: Yes.

JB: ...and in the need of forty planets, that through appropriate design...

PS: That's right.

JB: ...we could still be evolved human beings in a space and in relationship that would allow us to keep transcending in the way you described earlier?

PS: I believe so, because frugality is ultimately interiorization. To be frugal means to find, if you might call happiness, not from the holding up on ideas and holding on things of the aesthetic, so it's not that you renounce when you become frugal, you're opening yourself to more of the interior values that are fundamental for the human animal. So it's not a necessity only, it's a necessity which almost automatic becomes a vision.

JB: We certainly have models of frugality in the monastic tradition.

PS: That's right, and there is quite a bit of learning to do there.

JB: I don't think we are going to finish this topic by any means, and Paolo, how would you like to continue this discussion on Monday at the same time. Could you do that?

PS: Yeah, I could, but I don't want to impose...

JB: Your not imposing, we have just scratched the surface here.

PS: Okay.

JB: And I find it fascinating, and I know the people listening who are very quiet, but they are out there in New York City, and New Jersey, and California, and all the rest of it, I think it would be a wonderful thing if we could continue this discussion on Monday.

PS: Okay, I would like to just say very quickly that I might sound arrogant, but I am () very much by limitations, so what I'm presenting are hypothetical systems, I'm not presenting truths, so that takes the edge off the arrogance you might feel.

JB: Your throwing it out as a model to be examined.

PS: Yeah.

JB: Okay, Paolo, let me thank you now. I'll be calling you again over the weekend, and we will plan another show for this Monday. At the same time? Thank you, thank you very much.

PS: Thank you, thank you, Jerry.

JB: And all of you for listening, thank you very much. And thanks Shelton, Kristin, and Christine, and Elain, Michael and Tom all for putting this show together, and certainly, Paolo Soleri, for a very fascinating presentation. So don't go away, we'll be back on Monday to continue this exploration of the cities of the future.

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