One might think, given the premise of a walkable community, it should be simple to create one. 

Arcosanti, at least in principle, is a model walkable community, is it not? What's not to like about a "walkable community"?

As in: getting where you have to go, where you want to go, using only the power you yourself come equipped with? Sounds good, right? 

Sounds more than good. Sounds fantasy-perfect. No more hassling with multi-ton machinery for which you have to be responsible. No more oil changing, no more tire-checking, no more motor-tuning-up, et al. Even people who are most perfectly content with mechanical messing-about can and do get on the "let's have more walkable communities" bandwagon. 

You drive up to Arcosanti, you get out of your car, and there you are. But: Is there anything wrong with that picture, with what you see in it, or with its frame?

What I see is complex. How I'm thinking aloud about it now, thanks in great measure to ongoing dialogue I'm having with other Arconauts, seems to be evolving into some kind of an odd play in many acts with many characters. I'm going to take a stab at going on about it, in the hopes of clarifying my 'take' on the dilemma facing the many folks who want to see the Arcosanti we have begun to construct, become more constructed. Much more constructed. 

What I think is that for the most part Paolo had no way to ask himself (nor did he particularly encourage people to ask in a way that could even remotely be construed as scientific) certain crucial critical questions. For example:

• What experiments of a social nature can be undertaken that can be practically performed at Arcosanti?
• What social experiments are going on there right now?  

It seems quite clear that he did not consider this an important step to take for the development of the ideally-conceived "prototype of arcology" which he dreamed and imagined Arcosanti could become. Paolo was convinced arcology would be good for people. Way better for people than typical sprawl development, at the very least. But he had no social model in mind, which means that (insofar as I know) no-one has kept a precise record of why all the people who've come to Arcosanti have come.

Which means we have no hard data revealing for what reason or purpose they came. Nor do we know what they hoped to learn (if they even knew ahead of time). And so on...

Schools of architecture - by which I mean those architectural trend-setting schools like the Bauhaus, the Ecole de Beaux-Arts, and so on, are valued by the architectural/fine arts establishment due to a lot of factors, not the least of which is the number of people who fell into them and carried them forward. For example: Tel Aviv wins a UN-award for its Bauhaus-style buildings. It's ironic that they were built there because so many Bauhaus architects who were Jewish escaped to Palestine qua Israel from Germany when the Nazis came to power. But the more important point is that there were (are) many Bauhaus students...fine artists, craftspeople, architects: we know them by name: they identify themselves as Bauhaus designers/artists/craftspeople/artists.

How does this bear on arcology? 

It bears on arcology because it is clear that there have been and are students of arcology. Whether you call them, tongue in cheek, "Arconauts" or "arcologists," the fact is that they exist. Here is an instance: Will Bruder wins a design award for a library building in Phoenix; he says his design is a tribute to Paolo Soleri. Doug Lee acknowledges Soleri's influence upon his designs. Does this mean "Arcology" (like Bauhaus) has culturally permeated the world of architecture? 

Yes and no. Methinks that while there is some appreciation of how desirable the "walkable community" has become, acceptance of that goal as an ideal in no way equals universal acknowledgement or a special identity, at least not yet. Moshe Safdie wrote a book about the "post-automobile" city in which Soleri gets not even a footnote.... 

Even when people come to Arcosanti and espouse the "idea of arcology" (whatever they think it is), do they therefore manage to renounce driving? 

It doesn't  look like it, and somehow I don't think so. Me, I can go on and on about arcology being inconceivable without commitment to sustainable transportation, which I do, but responses indicate that not only does that thought rarely occur, it is practically inconceivable to a great many people. Neither "back then" (i.e.,1978, the year of the "carbecue" at Arcosanti, when Warren Johnson's Muddling Toward Frugality was published); nor "not long ago" (i.e., 2001 when after 9/11 Dubya gave US $12 billion to the airlines rather than invest in R&D for high-speed rail) - have we clamored for or demanded political action that would make it possible for the USA as a whole to let go of automobile dependency, no matter how much that would be desirable if ecology "really" mattered to us.

Which leads me to reiterate my strong feeling that Arcosanti itself is best understood as a dwelling site for life-long learners. I take this now as axiomatic, repeat and reiterate: it is as a dwelling-site for life-long learning that Arcosanti can be most easily understood.

It is as a dwelling place for life-long learners committed to life-long learning that Arcosanti can best grow and thrive. 

Taking those great architectural schools (Bauhaus et al) as models, I feel strongly that we will be able to come to consensus about how to simply encourage, as an idea and as an ideal, the educational development of Arcosanti.

I don't see this as a "wicked" problem. To the contrary, in fact: I see it as a very good problem.

    When the set designer Edward Gordon Craig referred to architecture as "frozen music," I thought it a marvelous image. It echoed repeatedly as I followed the progress of the movement to save the Paolo-designed-and-built Amphitheater in Santa Fe; it popped vividly into my mind again during some of the arconautical discussion that took place over the internet prior to the recent Soleri memorial gathering. 
    Save the Soleri Amphitheatre is a movement kicked off by Santa Fe Indian School alumni, particularly Frances Abeyta, Vanessa Quintana and Willie Pacheco. Conrad Skinner, a non-Native architect in Santa Fe, NM,  took up their initiative, which is hugely important to me personally because not only am I privileged to have lived/worked on the Rez, I actually knew Lloyd Kiva New and Charles Loloma, met them at Cosanti in the 60's when they came to visit with Colly and Paolo to talk about the amphitheater they had built so as to honor and support the creative energies and wisdom of all Native peoples. 
    Those fine artists/teachers deserve consideration, which is why I want to know what has happened to the understanding of the sense of the amphitheater's purpose, the purpose for which it was commissioned? 
     That purpose was to provide a home for an inclusive, comprehensive Native performance and expressive arts program so I'm puzzled about why and how it is that one of the most important educational programs ever conceived isn't being nurtured. I wonder: What has to happen in order for the essential to be operational? 
     If it is true (and my own training in the theater leads me to believe that it is) that "The theatre is the most authentic reflection of a nation," (as the innovative director Rouben Mamoulian told the LA Times in 1970, quoted by Joseph Horowitz in "On My Way" - the untold story of Rouben Mamoulian, George Gershwin, and Porgy and Bess), then why is there still no performance and expressive arts training program active in its own phenomenal, landmark amphitheater? Why isn't the program they were intent on having not well-established and busily engaged in benefiting all the sovereign nations of all Native Americans? 
     Surely not for lack of money. A mere 1% of the net take from casinos on reservations/reserves in the USA and Canada will be enough to provide more than enough start-up capital to perform any safety-required repairs needed on the amphitheater. Heaven knows there are a goodly number of talented Native performers (stand-up comics, actors and playwrights, dancers, musicians, poets, performance artists), all of whom can reach out to others- including non-Natives - to raise consciousness and capital. Expressive arts (the bridges between professional performance arts and therapeutic expression: music therapy, dance therapy, creative drama, and so on), close cousins of the performance arts, also assure validation of Native sensibility.        Craig's quote is relevant to the impasse, I feel, for whatever reasons the impasse still exists; but it also bears upon how I see theatre as an element in several arcological puzzles. I'll explain:
    Pallasmaa, in The Eyes of the Skin, explains how we experience architecture with all our senses. We feel it with our skin as much as we see it with our eyes. My feeling is that the order of architectural construction is something we may hear, as well. I mean, by this, more than acoustics - important as acoustics must be... . 
    What I mean is: how it (architecture) is frozen music.
    Now, to begin with, music as simile is straightforward - many things are likened to music. Not surprising since music is not only universal, it's inherently mathematical. But when Craig's quote starting coming into my mind again, I got to puzzling on it. 
   The quote is actually from Goethe - master poet, Jung's inspiration; but it wasn't Goethe, it was Craig, author of On the Art of the Theatre (London: William Heinemann, 1911 - a classic work, right up there with Stanislavsky's An Actor Prepares), who was on my mind when I first met Paolo in 1962. It was Craig whose insights about theatre as an art form were behind my trying to convince Paolo that theatre was/should be as important to him as an architect as it was to me as a human being. 
   My passion for the theatre was a foreign language to Paolo at the time, one that didn't find an open resonate space with him - at least not one compelling enough to provoke him into learning to speak it immediately, then and there. But he was more than tolerant of my energetic devotion to that mystery, never tried to discourage my enthusiasm or even dampen it. IMO, he was as much amused as bewildered by my antics. When he called me, once upon a time, his "troublemaker," I took it as a back-handed compliment, decided he might have thought he needed a gadfly since he smiled impishly when he said it. (Led me to suspect he rather liked trouble or at least that he could be amused by unpredictability. Up to a point, of course. At least, that is what I thought at the time but since It's still my pleasure to think so, I'm gonna keep thinking so. I hope it's not improper to fancy that my needling him did some good, added to the mix that nourished his interest in performance arts enough to create all the fabulous performance spaces that exist absolutely everywhere at Arcosanti. But no matter: I digress...) 
   Where I started was the purpose of the visit of Lloyd Kiva New and Charles Loloma to Cosanti. More precisely, the intention of their purpose. 
  Why they were so intent on Paolo's design of the amphitheater was, as I said, because as teachers, as professors at the IAIA (Institute of American Indian Arts, a college-level program), they were intent on having a perfect-fit performance space to make it possible to enlarge the programs at the IAIA that were already in place for Native peoples. Their vision was clear and long-range, I think in part because they felt - and who could not or would not concur? - that there has never been a time, particularly post-colonization, that the world would not benefit from the amplification of Native voices. Has there ever been such a time? 
   No. Never, I think. Native voices have always been needed, are needed now more than ever. The world needs to hear them. 
  This seems transparent, to me. Leads me to wonder how to coax (and who can/will coax) those programs into place. For the sake of the children, for the sake of all peoples who will ever live upon this earth.
  Lloyd Kiva New and Charles Loloma both died before the Native performance/expressive arts program they envisioned for the IAIA could be launched. The venue itself, the Paolo Soleri amphitheater, has fallen to the All-Pueblo Council, which is and has been responsible for the administration of The Indian School. But while the initiative to Save the Soleri was due to the fine effort of graduates of The Indian School, where and who are the Native leaders who can and will follow through?