Atlas City Project

From what I am understanding an Arcology is a fully self-sufficient building with hundreds of thousands of people living and working in the building. to me it seems alot easier for automation and self-efficiency as well as energy distribution.
If we build a City it seems to me that would consist more of a larger area with many more natural resources,minerals, metals, rivers and such. Seems like a city would be building much more building which would each need to be very energy efficient, and must all work together for the ease of total automation

There are a few things to be considered when building a mega-structure like arcology.
In my opinion, arcology is built that it covers an area about 2/3 the size of a city of equivalent population.
We have to consider the effect of stormwater (from rain,melting snow etc) that does not drain into the ground under the middle of the arcology and the concentration of surface runoff that will be concentrated around the arcology.

If the ground water under the megastructure is drained and is not replenished from stormwater, it will cause the depression in water table, which will cause the ground to settle. The settlement per se, is not an issue, but what usually will happen is there will exist differential settlement that will greatly affect mega structures.
Another issue is of course, by impoverishing the water table, it affects local natural ecology.

The ground skirting the arcology on the other hand will receive a concentrated amount of surface runoff. This will cause erosion and will also weaken the ground.

Perhaps one advantage of arcology is the reduction in transportation, but with proper urban planning, we can get the same benefit with any type of city.

I have some idea on a workaround to minimize or even eliminate the stormwater/surface runoff issue. But i want to see if anyone can give better idea first.

For transitional RBE cities however, i think building arcology is way beyond our financial capacity.

We can research this later, but i think the most realistic design for transitional RBE is conventional city building (in contrast with a city consist of single megastructure).

I might imagine a city is cheaper to start with, and that an Arcology would come later on once we have developed the infarstructure and resources to be able to build one.