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Christopher Alexander has died

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Re: Christopher Alexander has died

#21

Post by nabla9 »

cryptonector wrote: post #13

> In 1965, Alexander wrote a much-cited essay, A City Is Not a Tree, one of the earliest and most trenchant critiques of the dendritic, sprawl pattern of city planning and development. On the other hand, all dense old-world cities (London, Paris, Rome, even Tokyo, say) are... "dendritic". There's nothing wrong with that, and it has everything to do with the history of the ownership of all the bits of property on the…

The sentence you quote does not give you enough information to make any kind of critique. It's OK to use the sentence as a writing prompt to write what toughs it brings into your mind, but that has little to do with the subject. Alexander's critique is against rigid tree structure when a city should have connections between branches.

Re: Christopher Alexander has died

#22

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

cryptonector wrote: post #13

> In 1965, Alexander wrote a much-cited essay, A City Is Not a Tree, one of the earliest and most trenchant critiques of the dendritic, sprawl pattern of city planning and development. On the other hand, all dense old-world cities (London, Paris, Rome, even Tokyo, say) are... "dendritic". There's nothing wrong with that, and it has everything to do with the history of the ownership of all the bits of property on the…

> We've got about 500 years of old world folk moving to the new world, but the old world has thousands of years of history. Besides new world cities starting from much lower population density overall than the old world already had four to five centuries ago

Humans have lived in "the new world" for at least 24,000 years. At the period when the first Spanish arrived in "the new world", it seems likely that there were cities here at least as large as anything in "the old world". By some calculations, "the new world" may have been home for between 10% and 33% of total human population worldwide.

What changed the development path in "the new world" was the arrival of "old worse" disease, which wiped out at least 80% of the human population here (perhaps 10% of humanity), and then a frankly genocidal process by European settlers built around ideas such as manifest destiny that intentionally completely ignored the millenia-old histories of human civilization here.

It is convenient to reset the clock in 1492 (or even 1776), but it is not honest.

Re: Christopher Alexander has died

#23

Post by mercutio2 »

mezod wrote: post #20

Wow :( Precisely yesterday I was reading some reviews on some of his books on architecture... does anyone care to recommend one?

A Pattern Language is incredibly good.

His core ideas have been riffed on so much since then that it won’t read as an original idea anymore, but it’s still a great read if you’re interested in thinking about how communities and building and people work.

Re: Christopher Alexander has died

#24

Post by sloan »

lukasb wrote: post #5

Saw him speak at Berkeley around the time his book on the Eshin project was released. Talked in very strong terms about the importance of working in a holistic, caring way. A SWE in the audience spoke up, saying basically "look, we want to follow that approach, but it's hard, we have a lot of stakeholders to satisfy in order for a project to happen." Alexander was unyielding. "Once you've worked with love, you won't…

Thanks for the anecdote, I love it. What’s SWE in this context?

Re: Christopher Alexander has died

#25

Post by Turing_Machine »

cryptonector wrote: post #13

> In 1965, Alexander wrote a much-cited essay, A City Is Not a Tree, one of the earliest and most trenchant critiques of the dendritic, sprawl pattern of city planning and development. On the other hand, all dense old-world cities (London, Paris, Rome, even Tokyo, say) are... "dendritic". There's nothing wrong with that, and it has everything to do with the history of the ownership of all the bits of property on the…

> On the other hand, all dense old-world cities (London, Paris, Rome, even Tokyo, say) are... "dendritic".

Not in the sense of the Alexander essay. It explicitly contrasts the interwoven connections of traditional cities with the artificial tree-like structure of modern planned cities.

"Tree", in the sense that Alexander uses it in that essay, is a math tree (e.g., a binary tree in CS), not an organic tree.

I highly recommend reading the essay for those who haven't seen it.

Re: Christopher Alexander has died

#27

Post by Nadya »

sloan wrote: post #24
lukasb wrote: post #5

Saw him speak at Berkeley around the time his book on the Eshin project was released. Talked in very strong terms about the importance of working in a holistic, caring way. A SWE in the audience spoke up, saying basically "look, we want to follow that approach, but it's hard, we have a lot of stakeholders to satisfy in order for a project to happen." Alexander was unyielding. "Once you've worked with love, you won't…

Thanks for the anecdote, I love it. What’s SWE in this context?

Software Engineer.

Re: Christopher Alexander has died

#28

Post by karaterobot »

I just buy a new copy of A Pattern Language whenever I see it in a bookstore, because I know I'm going to end up giving it to someone. It's one of those books you can confidently recommend to any curious, intelligent person, and it may change their thinking, or at least blow their mind, whether they find it useful or not. He was such an original thinker.

Re: Christopher Alexander has died

#29

Post by fifticon »

sloan wrote: post #24
lukasb wrote: post #5

Saw him speak at Berkeley around the time his book on the Eshin project was released. Talked in very strong terms about the importance of working in a holistic, caring way. A SWE in the audience spoke up, saying basically "look, we want to follow that approach, but it's hard, we have a lot of stakeholders to satisfy in order for a project to happen." Alexander was unyielding. "Once you've worked with love, you won't…

Thanks for the anecdote, I love it. What’s SWE in this context?

Software Engineer I think

Re: Christopher Alexander has died

#30

Post by stellar678 »

cryptonector wrote: post #13

> In 1965, Alexander wrote a much-cited essay, A City Is Not a Tree, one of the earliest and most trenchant critiques of the dendritic, sprawl pattern of city planning and development. On the other hand, all dense old-world cities (London, Paris, Rome, even Tokyo, say) are... "dendritic". There's nothing wrong with that, and it has everything to do with the history of the ownership of all the bits of property on the…

Sprawl patterns are not caused by natural market forces.

They are caused and enabled by land-use zoning that uses state force to limit the use of private property, along with massive market distortions like government-funded freeways and the building of low-density infrastructure without a sustainable mechanism to pay for maintenance and operation of that infrastructure.

But I'm also not a free-market absolutist and I'm not sure I believe there has ever been an unencumbered free market. Markets are just a mechanism to organize and manage a complex system. There are always forces in place which nudge the overall behavior in one way or another while still leaving the market interactions to hash out the details. That's fine - we just need to nudge things is the "right" direction.

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