Long before Silicon Valley billionaires purchased tracts of Solano County land to build a tech utopia, a group of Bay Area environmentalists proposed one of their own: an “ecovillage” to serve as a model for sustainable communities worldwide.
In the early 2000s, Bay Area environmentalists and futurists designed “Califia,” a 10,000-person community named after a mythological Amazonian queen that would challenge the conventions of suburbia and usher in new ideas for urban planning.
The mastermind of the project was Michael Gosney, a Bay Area futurist chasing the potential of technology, psychedelics, media and ecology. In 2022, Gosney co-founded the nonprofit firm Green Century Institute to champion sustainable communities with Marc Kasky, a consumer rights activist who sued Nike in 1998 for false advertising about the labor conditions of its factories. Green Century acted as a vector for discussions about Califia and green urbanism, learning from similar eco-cities and tapping into financial and tech resources in the Bay Area.
“We were very close,” Kasky said of Gosney. “We used Green Century as an umbrella for our respective projects. I certainly supported Michael in doing everything he could, and I attended some meetings with him with developers.”
Gosney’s lofty goals with Califia used cutting-edge environmental designs, upcycled materials, solar power, self-heating and self-cooling capabilities and advanced information systems all contained in one walkable community. These designs have influenced the U.S. Green Building Council’s certification for Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design, the gold standard of sustainable architecture today. Gosney hoped the eco-city would be a model for eco-friendly communities for the growing population of the global south while combating the growing threat of climate change.
But the project failed to make development in-roads and was never realized in the lifetime of its mastermind. Gosney died of cancer in 2022.
So what happened to the dream of Califia?
Building the arcology team
A cohort of environmental-minded architects in the 1970s developed a framework to incorporate sustainability into architecture and urban design. The foremost leader in the movement, Italian architect Paolo Soleri, coined the term “arcology” – a portmanteau of architecture and ecology – to fight what he considered the scourge of single-family homes, car-centric communities and suburban sprawl. He believed such trends would lead to a “global hermitage” of isolated people, separated from each other and the land upon which they lived.
Soleri founded his Mecca in Arizona where he built a prototype community near Mayer, a small town about 70 miles north of Phoenix that he dubbed Arcosanti, a 10-acre urban laboratory on a 4,000-acre preserve. Today, Arcosanti is inhabited by about 100 people and multiple generations. Although the city is incomplete, Soleri’s original design for a 3,000-person community remains an aspiration for its residents.
Between 1997 and 2001, Arcosanti hosted the Paradox Conference series, a set of conventions and trainings focused on sustainable design that attracted environmentalists and architects from across the United States — especially the Bay Area. Gosney attended this meeting of minds to absorb Soleri’s rousing ideas and share some of his own about humanity’s place in a green future.
Soleri “anticipated biomimicry, complexity theory, conscious evolution, and, even in the ’90s when we were working together on the Paradox conferences, the potential of cyberspace,” Gosney said at a Sierra Club-sponsored speaking event in 2019.
One of the environmentalists who made the pilgrimage to Arcosanti was Jeff Buderer. As an undergraduate at Missouri State University in 1998, he attended a workshop in Arcosanti to learn about its futuristic cast-in-place concrete and green spaces that adorn its campus. Buderer returned as a graduate in Sept. 2001, for Paradox III to listen to Gosney’s vision for the future.
“I got into this environmental movement, and I remember reading about really radical people looking at the idea of a fundamental shift,” Buderer said. “Over the years, Michael (Gosney) and I have had different discussions. … That was about the time when we started trying to do Califia.”
Buderer moved to Oakland and began attending planning meetings for Califia.
Designing Califia
The Bay Area was a strong candidate for Califia because of its proximity to environmental activism, tech entrepreneurship and capital funding, Gosney said in his presentation at the Sierra Club. Califia would establish a pedestrian community within a living building, one that would mimic structures found in the natural world — known as “biomimicry.”
Co-founder of the Biomimicry Institute Janine Benyus described this architectural concept in her 1997 book “Biomimicry: Innovation Inspired by Nature.” Arcosanti was one of the first biomimetic architecture projects where “tech meets hippie,” she said in an interview with Bay Area News Group. Arcosanti built on these ideas with innovative designs that absorbed cooling winds and sheltered against the arid, desert sun. Califia was to do the same.
“It’s about the materials you use. It’s about how you use those materials, how you build in adaptability, and how you build in self-sufficiency,” Benyus said in an interview with Bay Area news Group. “That’s where this world that started in the 1970s has gone, the world of ecological design and arcologies. This idea that you’re off the grid, that you’re doing your own wastewater, you’re doing your own food, you’re even trying to create out of local raw materials.”
The proposed Califia development would have three phases, according to the designers’ plans. The first phase would establish residential, commercial and transit components, supported by greenhouses and gardens. This initial stage would act as a test site for additional ecological research and technologies. From there, Califia would scale in size to support a hotel, entertainment venues and eventually 10,000 people.
Gosney said Soleri’s opposition to commercialism had stymied the growth of Arcosanti, a community already separate from major metropolitan areas. Learning from this, he proposed corporate and educational partnerships with surrounding institutions and a location within a 30-minute commute to Oakland or San Francisco. Buderer said planning meetings discussed Richmond or Treasure Island as potential venues for the project.
Yet Kasky, as the co-founder of Green Century Institute, said he refused to be a part of this project with Gosney. He felt that building such a large, centrally planned community in the Bay Area denied the harsh realities of Bay Area development.
“Frankly, it was not going to happen,” Kasky said. “There were forces that, objectively looking at them, said, ‘This is such a long shot that I’m not willing to put my time into it because I just don’t think it’s going to be productive.’ And that’s because of the cost of land, politics, the difficulty in doing something affordable for people and organizations. … That was just an impossibility, frankly, here in the Bay Area.”
The end of Califia
The combination of financial barriers and development challenges that still plague large developments across California doomed any hopes for Califia, according to Kasky and Buderer. The fundamental shift that Gosney hoped to spur with Califia could not overcome the reality of construction in the Golden State. And members of the Califia planning group, like Buderer, who had followed his environmental passions to Arcosanti and then to the Bay Area felt burned by its failure to concretize.
“I started to realize these conferences, these different get-togethers, the progress people were concerned about — nothing much got done out of any of it,” Buderer said.
Though Califia is an unrealized dream, sustainable architecture projects have proliferated in the years since its proposal. Benyus described the “eco-machines” used at the Adam Joseph Lewis Center for Environmental Studies at Oberlin College and Conservatory. Approximately 70% of the building’s wastewater is recycled thanks to a biomimetic system that imitates wetlands — though it’s not for drinking water. Sites like the Lewis Center have earned the designation of a “Living Building,” a framework for architecture to have a symbiotic relationship between people and nature.
“If you really want a building that is considered regenerative, you try for the Living Building designation,” Benyus said. “There are now 200 or 300 buildings around the world that have gotten this very hard to get designation of a living building.”
In recent years, Kasky has turned his focus to Weed, California, a 2,800-person town with a declining population north of Mt. Shasta near the California-Oregon border. The financially depressed town with a “captivating” name could be revived as a model eco-city if enough capital funding can be raised to buy enough of the town’s buildings, he said.
“I’m an advisor to a team that wants to basically buy the town and convert it to a cultural, economic, and environmental destination,” Kasky said. “That’s the last project I would work on that I would love to work on. And I would like one more project.”
Though Kasky did not join the Califia project, he continued to support Gosney with his endeavors throughout his life, describing him as a “wonderful man” and a “beautiful spirit.” But he felt Gosney’s efforts to shape the future with Califia were not as sustainable as the eco-city purported to be.
“One of the interesting things about the environmental movement is it often talks about sustainability,” Kasky said. “And I thought about it in terms of cultural sustainability, financial sustainability. I don’t want to do something that’s going to be a shooting star, I want something that’s going to be an actual star, something that lasts indefinitely.”
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