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.
> 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!
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.
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.
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.
It contains so many claims, from the obvious to the benign to the ridiculous...
Suburbs are obsolete, cities are magical!
All farms should be in valleys!
People should probably exercise more, twenty minutes of walking per day!
Cars are dangerous, unless they are electric, then they are suddenly safe!
Big doors are fascist!
I'm glad the structural shorthand used in that work inspired lisp and wikis and many other ideas in CS.
And I can wholeheartedly second the recommendation, people should check it out.
With caution though.
I think it'd be extremely dangerous to take the claims at face value just because the organization, the structure and shorthand for those claims is novel.
The book did not meaningfully increase my appreciation for the linked essay unfortunately.
Seems like a ton of people who are smarter than I am found this all stunningly profound though, so what do I know.
> 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.
If the thesis of the article had been simply ”A city is not a tree”, I would have agreed with this criticism. It’s easy to find cases where a model is not a 100% fit.
But the purpose of the article isn’t to demonstrate how a tree is a worthless model, rather, it tries to argue how a semilattice is a better model. More than anything, it’s an argument for the importance of picking the best data structure for your problem, because if you make a poor choice, it’s going to constrain your program further down the line.
From a quick look at the map, I imagine that Welwyn Garden City derives 90% of its desirability, and usefulness as a town, from the 30 minute train trip to King's Cross. It, too, would probably be considered dismal if it had Peterlee's location.
Part 1 https://www.usmodernist.org/AF/AF-1965-04.pdf
Part 2 https://www.usmodernist.org/AF/AF-1965-05.pdf