It must be the grassroots environmentalists and community activists who provide the yeast for such an adventure. With a mass base, arcology will achieve its rightful academic status and its place on the estate will become real. All other architecture is merely like rearranging the deck-chairs on the Titanic. Big city realities are overwhelmingly violent and depressing. It is unreal to plan on more townhouses, cars, shopping malls, waste dumps and highways, etc.
Industry needs to be neighborhood-friendly.
Independence is evolving into inter-dependence. The aging population needs accessibility, as demonstrated by the disability rights movement. A convergence is at hand, with growing population and technology, shrinking wildlife refuges and wetlands, the dwindling and contaminating of resources and the widespread realization of these problems. The beauty of the challenge is that we are not far from the solutions. Indeed, they are at hand if only people would reach for them.