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> In 1965, Alexander wrote a much-cited essay, A City Is Not a Tree, one of the earliest and most trenchant critiques of the dendritic, sprawl pattern of city p

> In 1965, Alexander wrote a much-cited essay, A City Is Not a Tree, one of the earliest and most trenchant critiques of the dendritic, sprawl pattern of city planning and development. On the other hand, all dense old-world cities (London, Paris, Rome, even Tokyo, say) are... "dendritic". There's nothing wrong with that, and it has everything to do with the history of the ownership of all the bits of property on the city. Sprawl is a problem, but sprawl is a new world problem that has to do with its very short history. We've got about 500 years of old world folk moving to the new world, but the old world has thousands of years of history. Besides new world cities starting from much lower population density overall than the old world already had four to five centuries ago, there's also the fact that the last 100+ years of that history has had personal motor vehicles in it -- that's 1/4th to 1/5th of all the Americas' post-Columbus era, while it's more like less than 1/20th of the old world's history. You can critique things like this all you like, but trying to do away with the "dendritism" that arises naturally is... unnatural, and requires a great deal of market distortion or use of force. Is that really something we want? EDIT: Yeah, I probably read too much into that sentence!

bullfightonmars 5y ago
Don't forget that the market was heavily distorted in favor of sprawl. Massive federal investments (subsidies) in: * interstates and highways that made sprawl development possible. * oil infrastructure and automobiles. * suburban housing development designed to specifically exclude people of color, driving disinvestment from and leading to the collapse of cities. None of these are natural new-world problems nor are they market driven, these are policy choices made. Pre vs Post WWII cities are structured and shaped completely differently as a result of these policies.
deleted 5y ago
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nabla9 5y ago
The sentence you quote does not give you enough information to make any kind of critique. It's OK to use the sentence as a writing prompt to write what toughs it brings into your mind, but that has little to do with the subject. Alexander's critique is against rigid tree structure when a city should have connections between branches.
- cryptonector 5y ago
  That's fair.
PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
> We've got about 500 years of old world folk moving to the new world, but the old world has thousands of years of history. Besides new world cities starting from much lower population density overall than the old world already had four to five centuries ago Humans have lived in "the new world" for at least 24,000 years. At the period when the first Spanish arrived in "the new world", it seems likely that there were cities here at least as large as anything in "the old world". By some calculations, "the new world" may have been home for between 10% and 33% of total human population worldwide. What changed the development path in "the new world" was the arrival of "old worse" disease, which wiped out at least 80% of the human population here (perhaps 10% of humanity), and then a frankly genocidal process by European settlers built around ideas such as manifest destiny that intentionally completely ignored the millenia-old histories of human civilization here. It is convenient to reset the clock in 1492 (or even 1776), but it is not honest.
Turing_Machine 5y ago
> On the other hand, all dense old-world cities (London, Paris, Rome, even Tokyo, say) are... "dendritic". Not in the sense of the Alexander essay. It explicitly contrasts the interwoven connections of traditional cities with the artificial tree-like structure of modern planned cities. "Tree", in the sense that Alexander uses it in that essay, is a math tree (e.g., a binary tree in CS), not an organic tree. I highly recommend reading the essay for those who haven't seen it.
stellar678 5y ago
Sprawl patterns are not caused by natural market forces. They are caused and enabled by land-use zoning that uses state force to limit the use of private property, along with massive market distortions like government-funded freeways and the building of low-density infrastructure without a sustainable mechanism to pay for maintenance and operation of that infrastructure. But I'm also not a free-market absolutist and I'm not sure I believe there has ever been an unencumbered free market. Markets are just a mechanism to organize and manage a complex system. There are always forces in place which nudge the overall behavior in one way or another while still leaving the market interactions to hash out the details. That's fine - we just need to nudge things is the "right" direction.
riffic 5y ago
dense old-world cities were constrained by city walls and mobility.

bullfightonmars 5y ago

Don't forget that the market was heavily distorted in favor of sprawl. Massive federal investments (subsidies) in: * interstates and highways that made sprawl development possible. * oil infrastructure and automobiles. * suburban housing development designed to specifically exclude people of color, driving disinvestment from and leading to the collapse of cities. None of these are natural new-world problems nor are they market driven, these are policy choices made. Pre vs Post WWII cities are structured and shaped completely differently as a result of these policies.

deleted 5y ago

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nabla9 5y ago

The sentence you quote does not give you enough information to make any kind of critique. It's OK to use the sentence as a writing prompt to write what toughs it brings into your mind, but that has little to do with the subject. Alexander's critique is against rigid tree structure when a city should have connections between branches.

cryptonector 5y ago
That's fair.

PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago

> We've got about 500 years of old world folk moving to the new world, but the old world has thousands of years of history. Besides new world cities starting from much lower population density overall than the old world already had four to five centuries ago Humans have lived in "the new world" for at least 24,000 years. At the period when the first Spanish arrived in "the new world", it seems likely that there were cities here at least as large as anything in "the old world". By some calculations, "the new world" may have been home for between 10% and 33% of total human population worldwide. What changed the development path in "the new world" was the arrival of "old worse" disease, which wiped out at least 80% of the human population here (perhaps 10% of humanity), and then a frankly genocidal process by European settlers built around ideas such as manifest destiny that intentionally completely ignored the millenia-old histories of human civilization here. It is convenient to reset the clock in 1492 (or even 1776), but it is not honest.

Turing_Machine 5y ago

> On the other hand, all dense old-world cities (London, Paris, Rome, even Tokyo, say) are... "dendritic". Not in the sense of the Alexander essay. It explicitly contrasts the interwoven connections of traditional cities with the artificial tree-like structure of modern planned cities. "Tree", in the sense that Alexander uses it in that essay, is a math tree (e.g., a binary tree in CS), not an organic tree. I highly recommend reading the essay for those who haven't seen it.

stellar678 5y ago

Sprawl patterns are not caused by natural market forces. They are caused and enabled by land-use zoning that uses state force to limit the use of private property, along with massive market distortions like government-funded freeways and the building of low-density infrastructure without a sustainable mechanism to pay for maintenance and operation of that infrastructure. But I'm also not a free-market absolutist and I'm not sure I believe there has ever been an unencumbered free market. Markets are just a mechanism to organize and manage a complex system. There are always forces in place which nudge the overall behavior in one way or another while still leaving the market interactions to hash out the details. That's fine - we just need to nudge things is the "right" direction.

riffic 5y ago

dense old-world cities were constrained by city walls and mobility.