Michael Mehaffy is an urban planning consultant, author, educator, and research associate with Christopher Alexander’s Centre for Environmental Structure – Europe.  He is Chair of the USA chapter of the International Network for Traditional Building, Architecture and Urbanism, an NGO working to preserve and build on local patterns around the world. He lectures, publishes and teaches internationally.

 

Patterns of city life
It has been just over thirty years now since Christopher Alexander and his team published A Pattern Language, the best-selling architectural book that set off unexpected waves in other fields – notably computer science, where useful by-products include Wikipedia, The Sims and other familiar software.  In so doing, it proved its functionalist merit and surprised some sceptics who objected to its apparently traditional aesthetic surface. But underneath was a transcendent functionalism that aimed at capturing a deeper architecture of objects in process and their recurring spatial relationships.  Its aesthetics was not just expressive material for art but the emergent result of deeper structural processes – including social ones.

The theory of patterns holds that configurations in our environments (or in our software) often repeat under similar circumstances, and that it is possible to map these repeating patterns into a relational system of overlapping groups.  In this way the linear combinations of the elements of design can be developed into more tightly interlinked networks of wholes.  Using such a language, designers can build up rich poetic connections between things, just as natural languages can move beyond mere recitations of facts into the complexities of poetry.  So, too, it now appears, traditional builders used something like this kind of language to make the surprisingly complex structures we all admire in historic cities and towns. 


This turns out to be a handy fact for today’s urbanists.  Critics (and even some prominent architects) increasingly bemoan the failure of today’s fragmented projects to form coherent wholes at the scale of urbanism.  But it is becoming clear that sustainable cities will require just this kind of integrated urbanism – affording us the ability to move efficiently between daily activities, to find interest and pleasure in a walkable streetscape, to participate in shaping an evolving, liveable neighbourhood that is responsive to our needs and our actions. 


While a number of investigators continue to develop the fertile topic of patterns, Alexander and colleagues are now exploring the ways living processes use coded sequences to evolve and differentiate adaptive form.  We want to know how we can use these insights to make a more adaptive, more sustainable kind of technology – one that has the ecological qualities of living systems.  We hope such crossover work may again point the way to surprising new possibilities.