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

“Japan-Like a National Park,” Yearbook of Agriculture 1963, U, S. Department of Agriculture, pp. 525–28.)

What this means, is that IDENTIFIABLE NEIGHBORHOOD, SUBCULTURE BOUNDARY, WORK COMMUNITY, and QUIET BACKS are incomplete, unless they contain an ACCESSIBLE GREEN; and that an ACCESSIBLE GREEN is itself incomplete, unless it contains POSITIVE OUTDOOR SPACE, TREE PLACES, and a GARDEN WALL.

Zoning. Zoning policy to protect small towns and the countryside around them. Greenbelt zoning was defined by Ebenezer Howard at the turn of the century and has yet to be taken seriously by American governments.

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

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

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.

The implementation of this pattern requires new policies of three different kinds. With respect to the farmland, there must be policies encouraging the reconstruction of small farms, farms that fit the one-mile bands of country land. Second, there must he policies which contain the cities’ tendency to scatter in every direction. And third, the coun

arranging country roads around large open squares of countryside or farmland, with houses closely packed along the road, but only one house deep. Lionel March lends support to this pattern in his paper, “Homes beyond the Fringe” (Land Use and Built Form Studies, Cambridge, England, 1968). March shows that such a pattern, fully developed, could work

This is a fundamental view of the world. It says that when you build a thing you cannot merely build that thing in isolation, but must also repair the world around it, and within it, so that the larger world at that one place becomes more coherent, and more whole; and the thing which you make takes its place in the web of nature, as you make