History Main / Arcology

* The town of Whittier, UsefulNotes/{{Alaska}} can be considered a mini-arcology of sorts. Virtually everybody in this town of about 200 people lives in Begich Towers, a fourteen-story former Army barracks that was turned into an apartment building, one that also houses the police station, the post office, the general store, the laundromat, the hospital, the church, and the municipal offices. The school, located across the street, is connected to Begich Towers by a pedestrian tunnel. Former residents have [[http://gizmodo.com/the-alaskan-town-living-under-one-roof-1678831641 described the lifestyle]] as quite unique. An episode of ''Radio/ThisAmericanLife'' had the story of a Samoan teenager whose father abruptly [[https://www.thisamericanlife.org/555/the-incredible-rarity-of-changing-your-mind/act-three-0 moved the family to Whittier,]] and she had to cope with the extreme change and try to find things she liked about the new environment.

* The town of Whittier, UsefulNotes/{{Alaska}} can be considered a mini-arcology of sorts. Virtually everybody in this town of about 200 people lives in Begich Towers, a fourteen-story former Army barracks that was turned into an apartment building, one that also houses the police station, the post office, the general store, the laundromat, the hospital, the church, and the municipal offices. The school, located across the street, is connected to Begich Towers by a pedestrian tunnel. Former residents have [[http://gizmodo.com/the-alaskan-town-living-under-one-roof-1678831641 described the lifestyle]] as quite unique. An episode of Radio/ThisAmericanLife had the story of a Samoan teenager whose father abruptly [[https://www.thisamericanlife.org/555/the-incredible-rarity-of-changing-your-mind/act-three-0 moved the family to Whittier,]] and she had to cope with the extreme change and try to find things she liked about the new environment.

* ''WebOriginal/OrionsArm'' has arcologies on several planets and high-population orbitals. Originally on Old Earth they were exclusive communities for the wealthy and powerful, then nanotech meant they were cut off from a lot of the countryside's resources, then the Nanodisaster happened and the arcos were well defended and many survived into the exodus. On many worlds they're the only inhabitable places.

* ''Anime/FarewellToNostradamus'': Earth Building, the HQ of the Douglas Foundation. Standing at 3,000 ft tall with 200 stories, the lower half of the building has all the features of a major city, including roads, a monorail, a 30-story all-purpose sports stadium big enough to host the Olympics, and an indoor snowy hill (in the event of a Winter Olympics).

* [[https://www.dezeen.com/2022/07/26/neon-170-kilometre-long-skyscraper-city-saudi-arabia/ The Line]] is a proposed building, 170 kilometers in horizontal length, to be built in Saudi Arabia as a self-contained city of 9 million. It would contain residency for its entire population, shopping, offices, schools, hospitals, parks, recreation centers, government facilities, and even an underground quick transport system. However, its shape, and the fact that its outside walls are entirely mirrored, have brought concern from environmentalists about potential disruption to migratory animals and corralling off local species' territories.

* ''LightNovel/Overlord2012'':

* ''LightNovel/ShangriLa'': Atlas is a superstructure built to shelter the lucky from the fallout of the runaway greenhouse effect, but some can move into it if they win the lottery. [[spoiler: But it takes more than just technology to keep the structure from crumbling.]]

* ''Franchise/LupinIII'': Earth Building, the HQ of the Douglas Foundation in ''Anime/FarewellToNostradamus''. Standing at 3,000 ft tall with 200 stories, the lower half of the building has all the features of a major city, including roads, a monorail, a 30-story all-purpose sports stadium big enough to host the Olympics, and an indoor snowy hill (in the event of a Winter Olympics).

[[folder:Film]]
* ''Film/{{Dredd}}'': Most of the action takes place in a residential arcology within an arcoplex. Even the car chase opening through the streets of Mega City One shows multiple levels of automotive arteries all over the city, which is a hallmark of the arcoplex concept. The buildings are almost completely self-sufficient. They have self-defense systems that allow them to withstand a nuclear blast, only the people inside can choose whether any communications can go inside or out, and the main villain of the movie has been operating in secrecy to the outside world for so long that she has ''every last citizen'' who lives in the complex under her thumb. As Judge Dredd progresses his way up to the top, he ends up traveling through shops, factories, people's homes, and classrooms. Even the distance from the top floor to ground level becomes a minor plot point.
* ''Film/{{Skyscraper}}'': The titular building, the Pearl, is a gigantic top-of-the-line super-scraper with its own integrated wind turbines to provide power independently, as well as its own residential section complete with park and mall. Will and his family, as part of Sawyer's work as a security consultant for the building, are staying there as the (unofficial) first family living inside, since the building's residential floors aren't officially open yet.

* ''VideoGame/{{Fallout}}'': The Vaults were nominally designed to be underground arcologies capable of sustaining a population through the lingering effects of the nuke fight that was WorldWarIII. In reality, they were a source of [[TestedOnHumans human lab rats]] to test space colonization.

[[quoteright:350:[[https://i.imgur.com/K3ww0.jpeg https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/center_of_the_universe.png]]]]
[[caption-width-right:350: [[{{Utopia}} The ultimate city]]. Theoretically.]]
[-[[caption-width-right:350:[[http://forums.cgsociety.org/showthread.php?t=606662 Image]] by [[https://www.staszekmarek.com/ Staszek Marek]]]]-]

** ''Literature/TheCaliforniaVoodooGame'', co-written with Steven Barnes: The title Dream Park game takes place inside the MIMIC (Meacham Incorporated Mojave Industrial Community), which was built during the 1990s. It was so badly damaged by The Quake that it had to be abandoned. It was later acquired by Dream Park and used as the basis for the Barsoom Project -- the {{terraform}}ing of Mars.

* On the WretchedHive side there used to be Kowloon Walled City in Hong Kong, a huge apartment complex that got turned into a semisealed, somewhat self-sufficient environment for around fifty thousand people. For a long time it was effectively unpoliced and so an unsafe, unsanitary haven for all sorts of criminal activities; in the eighties the government decided to police it more seriously and its situation improved considerably, though the reputation never waned. It needed interaction with the outside world for acquiring food, along with drawing electricity from Hong Kong's power grid, but other than that it had everything - shops, maintenance, services and even basic medicine and dentistry. The ''quality'' of what it provided was highly questionable, but for many people it was preferable to a life in the slums, However, while life was by no means easy, there was a sense of community in there due to the shared hardship, and several groups formed committees and communal organizations to help improve the quality of life. Today, Kowloon Walled City no longer exists, the government, citing the poor sanitary conditions and hotbed of criminal activity (despite the fact that most residents were completely uninvolved in crime, other than simply tolerating it as a fact-of-life), had the entire complex demolished, but it probably remains the closest the world has ever had to a typical cyberpunk-type arcology.

* ''VideoGame/{{Stellaris}}'': The Arcology Project ascension perk allows one to convert planets covered with city districts into {{City Planet}}s with Arcology districts that house a lot of [=POPs=].