6 ms·

A City Is Not a Tree (1965)

80 points by dedalus 7y ago

dang 7y ago
A bit from 2015: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9970090 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9970090
haunter 7y ago
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
- _TwoFinger 7y ago
  More importantly, your links have the full content. The article linked in the title is missing some diagrams, and others are way too small. Thanks!
- aasasd 7y ago
  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.
9nGQluzmnq3M 7y ago
> 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 7y ago
  >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 7y ago
    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 7y ago
      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.
skilesare 7y ago
Alexander inspired most of what I put together in this proposal for a new financial systems: https://amzn.to/37DAVSG https://amzn.to/37DAVSG

80 points by dedalus 7y ago

dang 7y ago

A bit from 2015: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9970090 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9970090

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

_TwoFinger 7y ago
More importantly, your links have the full content. The article linked in the title is missing some diagrams, and others are way too small. Thanks!
aasasd 7y ago
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.

9nGQluzmnq3M 7y ago

> 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 7y ago
>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 7y ago
  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 7y ago
    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.

skilesare 7y ago

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