A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction (Center for Environmental Structure Series)

The process of city administration is invisible to the citizen who sees little evidence of its human components but feels the sharp pain of taxation. With increasingly poor public service, his desires and needs are more insistently expressed. Yet his expressions of need seem to issue into thin air, for government does not appear attentive to his de

Even in cities like London and Paris, with the finest urban public transportation in the world, the trains and buses have fewer riders every year because people are switching to cars. They are willing to put up with all the delays, congestion, and parking costs, because apparently the convenience and privacy of the car are more valuable.

It is quite possible that the collective cohesion people need to form a viable society just cannot develop when the vehicles which people use force them to he 10 times farther apart, on the average, than they have to he. This states the possible social cost of cars in its strongest form. I t may be that cars cause the breakdown of society, simply b

One final point must be discussed. The magic of a great city comes from the enormous specialization of human effort there. Only a city such as New York can support a restaurant where you can eat chocolate-covered ants, or buy three-hundred-year-old books of poems, or find a Caribbean steel band playing with American folk singers. By comparison, a c

Otis D. Duncan in “The Optimum Size of Cities” (Cities and Society, P. K. Hatt and A. J. Reiss, eds., New York: The Free Press, 1967, pp. 759–72), shows that cities with more than 50,000 people have a big enough market to sustain 61 different

Jura Federation of watchmakers, formed in the mountain villages of Switzerland in the early 1870’s. These workers produced watches in their home workshops, each preserving his independence while coordinating his efforts with other craftsmen from the surrounding villages. (For an account of this federation, see, for example, George Woodcock, Anarchi

People can meet for lunch, children can drop in, workers can run home. And under the prompting of such connections the workplaces themselves will inevitably become nicer places, more like homes, where life is carried on, not banished for eight hours.

Do everything possible to enrich the cultures and subcultures of the city, by breaking the city, as far as possible, into a vast mosaic of small and different subcultures, each with its own spatial territory, and each with the power to create its own distinct life style. Make sure that the subcultures are small enough, so that each person has acces

metropolis. The solution is this. The metropolis must contain a large number of different subcultures, each one strongly articulated, with its own values sharply delineated, and sharply distinguished from the others. But though these subcultures must be sharp and distinct and separate, they must not be closed; they must be readily accessible to one