"Start where you are," Buddhist teacher Pema Chodron advises, but I'll start where things seem to be, which is in the middle; and the middle I'll begin with starts with a brief history of Arcosanti BeeWorks. This is relatively recent in the material culture history of Arcosanti but it is relevant and significant in the ongoing saga about the development of community agriculture. 

In 2003, Paolo Soleri, Tomiaki Tamura, Mary Hoadly, Daniela Soleri, Will Bruder, Jeff Stein, Michel Sarda, Fran Kitayama,  Roger Tomalty were, among others, Trustees of the Cosanti Foundation. It was and is the responsibility of the Board of a non-profit's to set policy. Therefore, since Paolo's response to the information that the apiary then located at Arcosanti was being poorly managed was his agreement that the apiary was of value, that it should be developed, what else could that have been other than affirmative policy regarding development of an apiary? 

At that same time, some alumni expressed their wish to support development  of Arcosanti BeeWorks. The upshot was that as a matter of policy, it was understood that support for an Arcosanti apiary was/is, should/could/would be of practical value. 

In a nutshell: Yes, to Arcosanti BeeWorks.

The first step was to put, as immediately as possible, the apiary at Arcosanti into the most capable hands Arcosanti could find. After the hives that had been in Camp were taken away by unknown persons, the hive equipment and remains of an extractor moved out and disposed of by Arcosanti Organics, Gerard Kaur, bee-keeper in Dewey and long-time friend of Arcosanti who'd been supplying Arcosanti with honey, was invited by Arcosanti Organics to bring his own hives to Arcosanti. 

All the apiary equipment in Camp was cleaned up and moved out by Arcosanti Organics. Gerard Kaur responded affirmatively when asked to take on the project of helping develop and manage the apiary at Arcosanti. That is how Arcosanti BeeWorks - with its own unique label for its honey - began. 

Arcosanti BeeWorks was launched with 5 hives at the south end of the water-retention dam. The goal was to expand the apiary to 20 hives, to be located in the 3rd pasture, as Mary Hoadley had suggested. Arcosanti Organics used a space in Camp to store two bee suits, which it purchased so residents interested in bees could, if they wished, learn beekeeping with Gerard. Before his untimely death, Ben, having learned beekeeping from his grandfather, talked with Gerard about working in the apiary. Ben's death was a horrible blow, exacerbated by the disappearance of the two bee suits, gloves and veils, along with a library of beekeeping books that had been donated, as well as the smokers that were also part of the original equipage.

Such losses led to thinking it was necessary for Arcosanti to have BeeWorks come to an agreement with Arcosanti Organics about allocating some lockable space for the storage of apiary resources, possibly in or near Camp. The Board was presented with a letter asking for such an agreement but no immediate action was taken. Some time after this, Paolo Soleri stepped down as President of the Board of Trustees.

Gerard's hives produced honey sold under the Arcosanti BeeWorks label. Bee products (soap, salves, honey-related foods, et al) were discussed but without an actual agreement, without a safe keeping-place for apiary tools and supplies, without policy decisions made by the Board regarding agricultural development, without consensus from the greater community of Arcosanti, how is agriculture  - and especially, the apiary at Arcosanti, to be developed? An apiary's production will create profit when it is well-run but there are costs involved, such as: 

• apiary certification
  
• teaching costs (one student per year is optimal)
• equipment
• transportation

As of this writing, just over a decade later, with the Community of Arcosanti having been asked to develop an agricultural plan that will include management of the greenhouses still under construction, there is no official (as in: contractual) recognition of BeeWorks' role in the agricultural plan. Nor is there, yet, an agricultural plan that includes the orchard - or whatever may remain of the orchard that was. 

Since the orchard of peach trees was ripped out some years ago, I believe it is incumbent upon the Arcosanti community to put orchard development high on the community agriculture agenda. I hope Arcosanti's orchard will include a variety of fruit trees, including quince so Arcosanti can supply fruit for jam-making, an enterprise located at Cordes Junction undertaken (and run, for some two decades) by Randall Schultz, long-time Acosanti resident and one of its managers (Maintenance). I also hope to see Arcosanti invite BASEG, the coalition of German landscape architects, to assist with evaluation and implementation of its agricultural plan, but until it's clear just how the new agricultural plan will be developed and what it might include, I suppose I'll probably have to keep my interest in including BASEG on hold.

Suggestions, as Jeff Kuntzleman has said repeatedly, are not enough. For ideas to become reality, they need leadership and direction. Leadership takes time and energy. Leadership also, ultimately, implies the existence of a team.  

Organizing the Community of Arcosanti is - a task, eh?

I myself hope to see established an Arcosanti Community Development and Management Co-operative, since IMO Arcosanti badly needs a rational business model that will allow its people - its "tribe," as Jeff Stein put it - to build a financial base that is growth-oriented, egalitarian, principled, and viable. I've been advocating for a co-op because a co-op is, in my experience, an elegant (in the mathematical sense) plan. For me, the question isn't "Why establish a co-op?" The question is rather "Why not establish a coop?" I can't see any reason not to, nor can I see any impediment to starting one. The start-up costs are minimal, the potential is almost unlimited, the benefits are huge.

The question I have, however, is: What are "the people of Arcosanti" willing to do to achieve the (I-daresay-not-so-very radical) goal of building more Arcosanti?

The late urban economist Jane Jacobs, who wrote eloquently about cities, noticed that urbanites live in neighbourhoods. In fact, generally speaking, most people identify with their own particular area/place of residence and/or work. In Principles of Urban Structure, Nikos A. Solingaros suggests that humans' existence "depends upon the ability to interpret the information present in their surroundings." Neighborhood awareness must surely play a part in how we come to have a sense of self, a neighborhood-related identity. Solingaros posits this relationship as a mechanistic performance, an idea which I feel needs more scrutiny, but there is plenty of evidence to support the influence of neighborhood culture upon children's development.

In NYC's Manhattan, for example, one might live and/or work in Soho, in Harlem, Chelsea, on the Upper West Side, the Upper East Side, in Washington Heights, etc. In Montreal, Westmount, le Plateau, Old Montreal, St. Henri are all quite distinct, from a cultural perspective. But my question here is, what neighbourhoods might we see at Arcosanti? 

In other words, can we ask questions like: What do you want your Arcosanti neighbourhood to be like? What amenities do you want to have available to you in your Arcosanti neighbourhood? Who decides, who will decide where at Arcosanti you will live? How will it be determined what sorts of businesses, social, cultural, and/or recreational opportunities you will find and/or be able to establish/create in your neighbourhood? 

How will Arcosanti as it is today build itself? Can we build a community of Arcosanti on the site of Arcosanti, neighbourhood by neighbourhood? What if a group of people want to build some of Arcosanti using techniques other than those utilized to date? For example: rammed earth reinforced with barbed wire sprayed with concrete? 

Can there be/will there be experimentation with design (even with Soleri's many designs) that will allow for some engineering impunity? Will there be, can there be development of co-housing, time-shares, or the like? If not, why not?

Communities all over North America, all over the world, are developing community agriculture programs. What's prevented the "tribe of Arcosanti" from developing one - or even more than one - at Arcosanti? 





 

 

 

 

 

For more than a while, I've wanted to see two particular books written about Arcosanti. One of them is The Architectural Vocabulary of Paolo Soleri, which would fit fine on anyone's coffee table, full of nifty pictures to reference Soleri's designs, contextualize them historically and culturally. The other is a different kind of story/picture-book, about the people of Arcosanti: full of good pictures and personal histories from Arcosanti's builders. 

I know I'm not alone in thinking the latter book is a good idea since I had an abettor, once upon a time, in the person of Dr. Mel Roman, then a Cosanti Foundation Trustee. Mel was as keen as I about doing a people-history, back in the mid-1980s. We got as far as drafting a proposal for his literary agent in NYC but Mel died before we got any further than drafting a preliminary page or three. 

It was in part because of my conviction about the importance of such a study that I advocated for inclusion of The Smithsonian as one of the prestigious institutions we asked, in 2003, to serve on an Advisory Committee to the Soleri Archives (located then and now at Arcosanti). It seemed simple and straightforward to me, that Arcosanti is as much a cultural institution as a building project: Material Culture is about - culture...

I went back to grad school after Mel and I talked about working together and while I was at McGill, I ran our idea past Vikram Bhatt, a professor in McGill's School of Architecture. When Mel died, I supposed that like the Little Red Hen,  I'd just have to do it by myself. Why not as an interdisciplinary PhD? My thesis topic would be: The Social History of Arcosanti.  (Or something like that, eh?) Although I had to put all plans on hold when dealing with the sequelae of a car accident took priority, I was sure that  just because nothing happened immediately didn't mean nothing could nor would, can nor will, ever happen... 

That said, it does happen that not all academic roads are paved with gold. Some, like the road from the interchange at Cordes Junction to Arcosanti, are scarcely paved at all. And although I remained convinced it's a good thing to believe there's a power of pedestrianism (Salingaros is strong reinforcement, I must say) although I was still, right through the 1990s, convinced it's a study that needed to be done, as I wondered and pondered over what was hindering Arcosanti's growth and development, the more I wanted to take direct action, get into trying directly to do something about it. 

But that desire has its own history, and once I did start acting upon it, the more complex all direct action-taking seemed to get. 

In the mid-1990s, a dozen or so people met with Paolo at a convocation of "alumni" and advocated - successfully. Got him to agree it might actually be of benefit to let us find our minions, already numbering in the thousands. And that was only just the people who'd completed some type of official, Arcosanti-managed "construction workshop" as registered participants, never mind the multitudes of friendly visitors, pre-workshop-era apprentices or externally organized craft and dance workshoppers. 

The plan was, simply, to find us and organize us. Somehow. 

Paolo's reluctant agreement to allow this was classic Paolo but agree he did; and thus began, modestly, the gathering together of what we (meaning, here: those who happened to be present at that particular 1997 meeting) hoped would ASAP become an international support network for our - for Paolo's - mega-project. 

While I had few illusions this gathering-in-of-the-minions would be easy to do, I'm not sure I anticipated just how complicated it might get to be. Fools rush in (another version of "Mann plannt und Gott lacht"?) and here we are, almost twenty years later, for the most part still teetering, although I'm happy to say it's true we've found a lot of us, minion-wise. Which is something, and an awful lot of people deserve a lot of credit for that. 

Of course we have a few ideas but - truth be known, we've never lacked for ideas. We're a league, a legion, of idea-generators. What we don't quite have, yet, is consensus about plan-implementation. Not yet. At least not more than the bare bones thereof. Yet. 

But like steam engine trains, it takes a while to heat up the boilers, yes? But once they're hot - well, Little Engine, I think we can, I think we can, I think we can...