Paolo Soleri and America’s Third Utopia: the sustainable City-Region

The ingredients of successful urbanism have been proposed by various scholars. However, their deployment has not always led to successful cities. Utopian visions are intended to help fill this gap. This article analyses Paolo Soleri’s main US arcology-based vision: Arcosanti. To what extent does Arcosanti constitute a realizable utopia, when it is only partially built and its chief architect is no longer able to shape the vision’s future implementation? It is argued that visionary urbanistic ideas put forward by intellectuals have influenced standard professional practice, pedagogy, and design and planning scholarship on the relationships between natural and built environments and more desirable human behaviours. The paper provides a distillation of thoughts to the operationalization of ideal communities in the 21st century.