Part of the power of cities is that they balance density and modularity. You don't need an enormous capital outlay to build a city all at once. It can grow and shrinks organically at an individual building, street, and transit line level based on the needs of the population and industry, and can update itself piecemeal as new materials and construction techniques come into play. Building an integrated "community dwelling machine" seems to disregard all of that, and the practical reality if it would even have been possible to fund the thing in the 1980's would have been an incredible, outdated, derelict hulk in East St. Louis by 2019.
The endless miles of windowless and half-populated internal corridors seem like they'd be both be awful to live with and serve as a substantial enablement of crime.
My immediate thought was that Apple Park (the spaceship) looks like a miniaturized commercial space only decedent of this idea. Even the scale is roughly constant- Apple Park houses 12000 employees in roughly 1/10th the size of the Old Man River City, which was to hold 125,000.
Arcologies always seemed like a neat idea to me, but I've never seen an in-depth look at their proposed infrastructure.<p>What would power and communication distribution look like? HVAC? I assumed chill water with several distributed plants. This place is going to need lots of loading docks or it's own trainyard for food and other consumables. Domestic and waste water would probably both need to be handled on site.<p>I've never seen those aspects of an Arcology design explored.
"Thus landscape-partitioned from one another, the individual homes beneath the umbrella dome do not need their own separate weather roofs."<p>Is this saying that the houses themselves wouldn't have roofs? That would seem like a pretty significant privacy and security issue.