Whatever Mr. Stein may wish to do, for now it will have to be accomplished with an operating budget of less than $1 million. That annual sum includes payroll, utilities, food, building materials, insurance: everything. It is, by his estimation, about a 10th of what the community needs to build new housing and attract new residents and businesses. That is, to turn a somewhat derelict complex of a dozen-odd concrete structures into something more like a city.

His first job, perhaps, is to become an ambassador: to remind the world that Arcosanti exists as a going concern. Visitors (and some 25,000 stop here each year) often observe that this city of the future seems more like a city of the past. Part Mos Eisley, part Ozymandias. But that description fails to account for the 56 inspired souls who continue to live and work and dream in the Arcosanti that exists today.

One such latter-day disciple is Maureen Connaughton, 37, who until last year was a project manager in Philadelphia for a specialty fabrication company. On a cold Tuesday night in January, Ms. Connaughton was sitting with Mr. Stein and a few dozen of her fellow Arconauts in the dining hall, known as Crafts III in the local dialect, tucking into a community meal of breaded pork chops and fried tofu. They were bundled in sweaters and hats and Carhartt jackets. Mr. Soleri may have shown a genius for passive solar design, but at Arcosanti he didn’t really do central heat.

If you were an optimist, like Ms. Connaughton, who lives in an apartment beneath the cafe and dining hall, you might note that it’s easy to sleep in the cool Arizona winter. Yes, the building’s aging concrete has a habit of flaking onto your bed. But “what you get in exchange is just so worth it,” she said. “To have this big round window and look out at the canyon.”

At a fall building workshop here in 2010, she discovered how much she liked working with her hands. This is the opposite of the paper shuffling (or, worse, paperless shuffling) that defines the modern office job. Back in Philadelphia, Ms. Connaughton loaded up the car (“I need a lot less stuff than I did before,” she said) and headed west to cast ceramic wind bells.

“I really heard all the good and bad things people say about it being set in the past,” she said of Arcosanti, sipping a $2 glass of wine from the cafe’s tiny liquor cabinet. “And I want to see it set in the present. Because it’s my present.”

DURING Mr. Soleri’s long tenure, Arcosanti evolved into a surprising anachronism: a company town. The product line? Handmade bells and heady theories about imaginary cities, or “arcologies.” Ordinary capitalism — independent businesses and privately held homes — was anathema.