For years, smart and creative thinkers have imagined what the perfect place to live would look like. Usually, this quest includes searching for the right balance of open space, living quarters, play areas, and work environs.

Planners have been thinking about these issues for the past 200 years and they are still very much thinking about them today. The first planned community was Radburn, a community that is part of what is now Fairlawn, New Jersey and was constructed before World War I. The development still exists today.

This eternal search is as much an environmental issue as it is a quality of life issue. Proper planning can reduce automobile use and can enhance reliance on solar energy. Recycling and safe solid waste disposal, as well as efficient sanitary waste treatment, can alo be planned for in a new community.

An Arizona model community, called the Arcosanti project, represents an ongoing highly cerbral effort to address these issues. It is a prototype. If successful, it can be replicated may times over.

In 1970, the Cosanti Foundation began building Arcosanti. This experimental community is located in the desert of Arizona, 70 miles north of Phoenix. It started 30 years ago and is far from completed. When it is fully developed, Arcosanti will be home to 7,000 social pioneers.

The community is a work that is very much in progress. Success will eventually be measured by the ability to curtail suburban sprawl through the construction of this pedestrian oriented city.

The Foundation hopes that Arcosanti will demonstrate methods for enhancing urban conditions while reducing the destructive impact that we human beings tend to have on the Earth. Its compact structures which are being built for working and living, as well as its large-scale green houses, will only occupy 25 acres of the 4065 acre community. In this manner, living and working conditions will be efficiently designed, while the natural country side will be kept undisturbed and in close proximity.

Arcosanti is a product of arcology. Arcology, in turn, is the marriage between architecture and ecology. This is green living at its extreme. It is obviously the idea of the Foundation to take this concept as far as it can go.

While apartments and businesses are closely situated, privacy is of paramount concern. Green houses are used to provide gardening space for public and private use, and are used as solar collectors for winter heating.

This evolving design is a classroom for the world to see. Volunteers and students come from all over the world to participate in workshop programs offered by the Foundation. Many are design students, there to receive credit for their participation.

Those who live in this community, and there are some who do, help make it run. They are all workshop alumni involved in the planning, construction and teaching activities that occur within this experimental haven. Fifty thousand tourists visit this desert community every year.

Arcosanti is located in central Arizona at the Cordes Junction exit of I-17. Contact its tourist office for information concerning hours and prices for admission.

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Published: February 24, 2000

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Stuart Lieberman, Esq. writes about environmental issues. He was a New Jersey Deputy Attorney General assigned to the State Department of Environmental Protection from 1986 to 1990. Currently he is a shareholder in the environmental law firm of Lieberman & Blecher, P.C., located in Princeton, New Jersey. Stuart can be reached at slieberman@liebermanblecher.com.