
Christopher Alexander’s Distribution of Towns - chrismealy
http://munsonscity.com/2015/04/23/alexanders-distribution-of-towns/
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guard-of-terra
1) Coasts (and to less extent rivers) are the king, you can't just place a
city at random and call it a day.

2) Why would you want to live in an 100,000 population city that is 120 km
apart from other major cities? Seriously - it's too big for small community
feeling, and not nearly enough for vibrant cultural life (theatres, museums,
live concerts). Also it's too much to just utilize the land around them, and
not enough to be e.g. finance center. Such cities IMO are inherently not
stable, they will gravitate towards either increasing their population to
300-600k (metropolitan area) or lose people until they shrink to 30-40k.

The whole grid thing is stupid. People want to either spread out or
concentrate. They don't want to be stuck at an "average" density.

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stephencanon
"Vibrant cultural life" is a function of more than just city size. Smallish
towns I've lived in (5-10k people) have _far_ more vibrant cultural life than
the large suburbs I've lived in (because in the suburbs, people just go to the
nearby larger city, but that's simply not an option in small towns). Just to
pick one random example I'm familiar with, Burlington, VT (~40k people) has a
great cultural scene largely _because_ it's more than 100km from the next
larger city.

Nitpicking aside, I agree with the general thrust of your argument, especially
point #1.

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Someone
_" That’s what it looks like in an ideal world."_

In a bureaucrat's ideal world, maybe, but not in Christopher Alexander's.
There, small disconnected neighborhoods make locally optimal decisions, and
you end up with structure without large-scale symmetry or repetition.

This article already goes wrong with _" with capital city City1 in its
center"_. That should be _" roughly in the middle"_ (yes, I know that pattern
is for making a good town square, but I think he would certainly like that
better for placing the capital city than _" exactly in the center"_)

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guard-of-terra
Human landscape Christopher Alexander describes looks disturbingly like earth
society in "The Status Civilization" by Sheckley, and that's a dystopia.

