
A City Is Not a Tree (1965) - dedalus
https://www.patternlanguage.com/archive/cityisnotatree.html
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haunter
The originial scan of the journal is incredibly beautiful

Part 1
[https://www.usmodernist.org/AF/AF-1965-04.pdf](https://www.usmodernist.org/AF/AF-1965-04.pdf)

Part 2
[https://www.usmodernist.org/AF/AF-1965-05.pdf](https://www.usmodernist.org/AF/AF-1965-05.pdf)

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aasasd
In my childhood I was mesmerized by magazines like that one. It's a whole
world of its own, bold and unruffled in the confidence of its righteousness.
Another reason is that we didn't have stuff so clean and enticing, in that
place and time.

I rifled through catalogues of office stationery, admiring each photo of a
binder or a stapler, straightforward and audacious. I still have in my
possession a centerfold with a collage of newspapers where Czechoslovakia is a
country, and on the rear is an ad for some IBM mainframe.

From those PDFs I can almost sense the paper, heavy in its poise but its
promise being light as air. I now realize that it's almost the same feel that
kept me at my monitor for many nights, much later on.

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9nGQluzmnq3M
> _Siena, Liverpool, Kyoto, Manhattan are examples of natural cities._

Nit: Kyoto is actually one of few major cities in Japan (another being
Sapporo) that is _not_ "natural", being built on a strict grid pattern as a
copy of Chinese former capital Chang'an. However, this planning happened in
794 (not a typo), so it has had a bit of time to evolve since!

~~~
tonyedgecombe
>Levittown, Chandigarh and the British New Towns are examples of artificial
cities.

The British new towns range from dismal[1] to desirable[2]. Their success
seems to have far more to do with the local economy than planning.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peterlee](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peterlee)
[2]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Welwyn_Garden_City](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Welwyn_Garden_City)

~~~
brownbat
Among the several puzzling assumptions in the article seems to be the idea
that initial planning is the only story worth telling.

It insists all those cities are "razor blades that cut up life," but the
streets don't seem to be running with blood.

One way to signal that you have carefully thought through your arguments is a
commitment to clarity. If you have nothing up your sleeves, you lay out your
points as simply as possible.

Here, poetic hyperboles hide weak leaps throughout the piece. Such tactics are
key when the underlying ideas aren't very strong. At worst, they come off as
an argument for an irrational phobia of all new communities.

Did no one in Brasilia ever read a newspaper? Really? Is that really the core
problem there? Or are we using that silly example to avoid carefully engaging
with what actually worked and failed there? Even the categorizations seem
arbitrary and collapse on a closer look. Is NYC planned or unplanned?
Completely depends on which aspects you're looking at.

I feel like the central argumentative strategy here is a slight of hand. If we
take an abstraction, then discuss the examples we abstracted out, it will
appear like the abstraction misses some core aspects of reality and is
therefore harmful.

That's the entire purpose of an abstraction though!

Of course a city isn't a tree. A city isn't a series of roads either. And yet
maps still somehow manage to be useful.

The piece is full of such sloppy argumentation and hyperbolic language it
should be used as an example for students of how not to write.

~~~
Kaibeezy
A city isn’t a machine.

Ambiguity isn’t sloppy in this context, it’s needed to allow room for
contradictions to resolve. People make art out of trash, but the dump isn’t a
museum, a museum is.

Christopher Alexander has arguably done more than any other human to help us
understand why our built environments (physical and software) take the forms
they take. 10 minutes flipping through _A Pattern Language_ will clarify the
underlying basis for the linked essay.

~~~
archithrow
I think the point here is that there is a really bad "rhetoric smell" to A
City is Not a Tree. It's a geeky rant which jumps to conclusions and makes
tendentious statements.

Christopher Alexander's trajectory as an architect (almost all other
architects ignore his work) is witness to this. Whether it's down to the
abstract formalism, messianism, narcissism, I don't quite know. But there is
something off-putting about him.

When Alexander tries to sell us the line that a city "is" a semilattice, and
that this precise mathematical formalism is somehow humane while an equally
abstract tree is not—these abstract structures are being asked to do a lot of
work. A more skilled theorist wouldn't structure the argument around platonic
ideas. All he is trying to say is that exclusive zoning is bad, that human
settlements are a naturally a mess of overlapping activities and concerns and
should be designed that way. Trying to suggest that this is some kind of
mathematical property just feels theological and immature. His writing is
reminiscent of a CS undergrad coming up with a concept for a new operating
system based on some particular abstraction (pipes, say) and writing a long
screed about it without implementing the thing. It's giddy and the central
idea is an overvalued abstraction.

All I can say is, Alexander is a crank, as far as architecture goes.

~~~
thanatropism
Why did Alexander metaphors flourish in computer science?

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dang
A bit from 2015:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9970090](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9970090)

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skilesare
Alexander inspired most of what I put together in this proposal for a new
financial systems: [https://amzn.to/37DAVSG](https://amzn.to/37DAVSG)

