A provocative urban planning experiment of a compact city designed not around roads and cars but around people. It was intended to be a Western caravansary, a traditional inn with central courtyard for travelers in the desert regions of Asian or North Africa that often served as a stopover for ideas.
It was designed and established by Paolo Soleri, around same time as the counter-cultural movements of “back to the land”.
Soleri strongly believed in the concept of arcology: the mixture of architecture and local ecologies. He strongly believed that dispersal was antagonistic to life and that density is the only morphology that can give us a lively existence.
