The glorious failure of the experimental city: Cautionary tales from Arcosanti and Masdar City

This chapter examines the underlying motivations and philosophy of these self-styled experimental cities to reveal continuities in the ways in which experimentation is articulated. The lived experience in each place suggests that neither has managed to embed its experiments into an urban culture or political system. The current proliferation of urban experiments around the world reflects the same urgency to find alternatives to business as usual in the face of pressing global challenges and a similar ideological dependence on technology as the basis for a designed urban society. Arcosanti was built in an extreme environment to show that sustainable living was possible anywhere and that the arcological model could be replicated. Arcosanti and Masdar City serve as cautionary tales for such approaches, highlighting the need to situate new technologies within a lived political and social context rather than designing cities around technologies.