Alexander Patterns

This will be the focal page for some linked excerpts of A Pattern Language by Christopher Alexander. The scope ranges from room details to Society Design. You can free the full-text by buying the book or going to his site. (Some excerpts are re-worded a bit to directly use WikiNames instead of making those pattern names as redundant labels in the text. So the wording here may be a bit less elegant at times...) There's a strong SmallWorld flavor here.

• note his book title is "A Pattern Language", not "The Pattern Language**". He was encouraging people to create different languages.
• also note he ultimately found this approach unsuccessful - see The Nature of Order

Framing, from intro: The Timeless Way of Building says that every society which is alive and whole, will have its own unique distinct pattern language; and further, that every individual in such a society will have a unique language, shared in part...in a healthy society there will be as many pattern languages as there are people... we have written this book as a first step in the society-wide process by which people will gradually become conscious of their own pattern languages, and work to improve them... We have spent years trying to formulate this language, in the hope that when a person uses it, he will be so impressed by its power, and so joyful in its use, that he will understand again, what it means to have a living language of this kind. And yet we do believe, of course, that this language which is printed here is something more than a manual, or a teacher, or aversion of a possible pattern language. Many of the patterns here are archetypal... it seems likely that they will be part of a human nature...We doubt very much whether anyone could construct a valid pattern language, in his own mind, which did not include the pattern Arcades (119) for example, or the pattern Alcoves (179)... This sequence of patterns is also the "base map", from which you can make a language for your own project, by choosing the patterns which are most useful to you. Well that's incoherent...

https://www.patternlanguage.com/patterns/patterns.html

An unofficial full set/text

Connections among them.

I'm focusing here (initially) on patterns that related to education and work organizations. There are 253 patterns in all. Here's someone with very brief summaries of all the patterns.

• 1 Independent Regions (City Regions then World Government, with nothing in between)

• 8 Mosaic Of Subcultures

• 9 Scattered Work

• 10 Magic Of The City: restrict the growth of downtown areas so strongly that no one downtown can grow to serve more than 300,000 people. With this population base, the Down Town's will be between two and nine miles apart

• 11 Local Tranport Area-s: 1-2mi apart, major roads making it easy to get from hub to hub, but hard for AutoMobile to get around within a given area

• 12 Community Of 7000: decentralized city government with lots of Neighborhood-level autonomy

• 16 Web of Public Transportation: Treat interchanges as primary and transportation lines as secondary.

• 17 Ring Roads

• 18 Network Of Learning

• 20 MiniBuses: small taxi-like buses, carrying up to six people each, radio-controlled, on call by telephone, able to provide point-to-point service according to the passengers' needs, and supplemented by a computer system which guarantees minimum detours and minimum wait times. Make bus stops for the mini-buses every 600 feet in each direction and equip these bus stops with a phone for dialling a bus. See Smart ParaTransit.

• 21 Four Story Limit esp for housing

• 26 Life Cycle

• 30 Activity Nodes

• 37 House Cluster

• 38 Row Houses

• 39 Housing Hill: get to that Four Story Limit in a stepped-terrace design

• 40 Old People Everywhere

• 41 Work Community

• 43 University As A Marketplace

• 44 Local Town Hall (serving the Community Of 7000)

• 45 Necklace Of Community Projects

• 46 MarketOfManyShops (Bazaar Market, not Super Market)

• 47 Health Center

• 57 Children In The City

• 60 Accessible Green: Vestpocket Park: uniformly scattered at 1500-foot intervals, throughout the city. Make the greens at least 150 feet across, and at least 60,000 square feet in area.

• 68 Connected Play

• 75 The Family

• 78 House For One Person

• 79 Your Own Home (Home Ownership)

• 80 Self Governing Workshops And Offices

• 81 Small Services Without Red Tape

• 82 Office Connections

• 83 Master And Apprentices

• 84 Teenage Society

• 85 Shopfront Schools

• 86 Children's Home

• 87 Individually Owned Shops (Small Retail)

• 88 Street Cafe

• 89 Corner Grocery

• 90 Beer Hall

• 93 Food Stands (Food Truck?)

• 94 Sleeping In Public

• 137 Childrens Realm

• 146 Flexible Office Space

• 147 Communal Eating

• 148 Small WorkGroups

• 154 Teenagers Cottage

• 155 Old Age Cottage

• 156 Settled Work

• 157 Home Workshop

This Pattern Language has a medium-PopulationDensity smell to me (not so much the list above, but the other items in his language): maybe applicable to an Edge City or smallish city, but not necessarily a NYC (or other really-big city). Maybe we need an Urban Pattern Language.

• in The Nature of Order he writes about his design for a housing development in Shiratori, Japan. It fit 80 people/acre ( = 50k/sqmi), using 2-1/2 story apartments. Of course, that was just a housing development, it didn't include retail/commercial space, so the local density is overstating what you'd net out at full scale. Some excerpts (PDF).