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 [Wiki Names] 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 Small World flavor here.

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 Region]-s (City Region-s then World Government, with nothing in between)

• 8 [Mosaic Of] Sub Culture-s

• 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 Auto Mobile to get around within a given area

• 12 [Community Of7000]: decentralized city government with lots of Neighbor Hood-level autonomy

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

• 17 [Ring Road]-s

• 18 Network Of Learning

• 20 [MiniBus]-es: 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.

• 21 [Four Story Limit] esp for housing

• 26 Life Cycle

• 37 [House Cluster]

• 38 [Row House]-s

• 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

• 46 MarKet of Many Shops (Bazaar, not Super Market)

• 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 [Childrens Home]

• 87 [Individually Owned Shop]-s (Small Retail)

• 88 Street Cafe

• 89 [Corner Grocery]

• 90 Beer Hall

• 93 [Food Stand]-s

• 94 [Sleeping In Public]

• 137 [Childrens Realm]

• 146 [Flexible Office Space]

• 148 [Small Work Groups]

• 154 [Teenagers Cottage]

• 155 [Old Age Cottage]

• 156 [Settled Work]

• 157 [Home Workshop]

This Pattern Language has a medium-density 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.

User Options Recent Changes Help Page