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The fundamental premise that this is starting out with is flawed which is that cities can be successfully designed upfront. This is what we painfully learned wi

The fundamental premise that this is starting out with is flawed which is that cities can be successfully designed upfront. This is what we painfully learned with our grand experiment with the modernist architecture movement. The argument is roughly the same as the one against waterfall development in software engineering which is that it's impossible to know until actual implementation & use what is successful or not. Instead, successful cities are evolved and mixed use, with a mix of new and old buildings, strong social fabric and buildings built to be adaptable to changing needs. See: How Buildings Learn, The Death and Life of Great American Cities and A Pattern Language for more context on this.

nikhilalmeida 15y ago
Thanks for the resources. Good analogy with software engineering. I would say that deciding the layout and large infrastructure would be analogous to selecting the technology stack. Allowing the buildings and neighborhoods to evolve would be the learn/evolve as you go, agile approach.
harrylove 15y ago
And I would add, regarding Alexander, at least, start with his most recent series on The Nature of Order. Then, if you want more, go back and read The Timeless Way of Building, followed by A Pattern Language. But really, his most recent stuff is the most compelling, and the most profound.
- praptak 15y ago
  I recommend the totally reversed order. First, A Pattern Language - the concrete examples presented there are IMHO the most compelling. Then The Timeless Way of Building since it actually builds upon "A Pattern Language". There are quite a lot of references to particular patterns there, so you minimize forward references this way. The Nature of Order series generalize even more, so I'd read them after that. They rather independent from the TWoB and APL but I believe the way from the concrete examples (APL) to the generalizations is a better one. Here it's rather a matter of preference than one of forward-dependency.
astrodust 15y ago
I would rather see a programmatic simulation of a city growing than someone's deeply flawed "programmed city". An airport in the middle is a massive mistake, for instance. That's the kind of thing an ISO committee would do on the grounds that it creates equal amounts of noise, pollution, and the risk of unfortunate immolation due to a crash for everyone.
tgrass 15y ago
The programmer's cognitive dissonance is the demand for emergence on the web while demanding top down control in the real world.
ajuc 15y ago
Didn't suburbia evolved organicaly from regular cities? Should we just accept it, because it's organical growth, so it's optimal? There's place for organical growth, and there's place for upfront design, both in programming and in urban development. The best cities layout I've seen was consequences of organical deveopment within some rules - see most old european cities. Building rules specified how broad should streets be, how high the building can be in each region, which functions can't be performed in which part of the city, which way should new streets be built. There were reasons for these rules. In my country after 50 years of communism (and hideus commie blocks, etc) we went throught 10 years of "free for all" development of cities. Believe me - I hate totalitarism, but in these first 10 years of freedom cities got much worse - wallmarts in the city center, ugly cheap postmodern buildings near 500 year beutiful houses, commercials hiding half of the city besides them. Now, since +- 10 years there is some regulations coming back, and I'm happy with that.
- bane 15y ago
  It's interesting that you bring up European cities. I was about to type a post offering the counter example, New York (specifically Manhattan) and to some extent Chicago. Both are products of a strong "framework" of transit and utilities, but the growth within this framework has been more or less organic...all buildings don't have to be the same height a la Paris. I've felt that organically grown cities, of which most major European cities are good examples, are very sub-optimal for because of the haphazard and random way the cities are laid out. It many such cities, the old, medieval core became so bogged down that cars aren't even allowed and it's basically a pedestrian heaven. Navigation is hard in these cities, traffic is usually a mess without modern development to route around the "organicness" of the city centers, as a result certain types of goods and services...namely anything to do with lots of manufacturing or bulk goods, ends up moving away from the city core. And while it means that the cores tends to become very pedestrian friendly, they really just sort of end up as extended outdoor shopping malls with some housing for the shop workers above. It's interesting in some of the older Asian cities which have very old histories, say Seoul, the the haphazard, medieval-style organic planning has given way to a large effort to put the major thoroughfares on a grid and as old areas are redeveloped, to do so with a heavily planned development policy in mind. The city was simply not able to handle the growth and population demands the organic system created. There's a reason Paris' business center is not in Paris' geographic center, and central London has restricted driving zones, and most of Barcelona's population enjoys the 19th century planned developed residential areas, while the older parts are being turned into tourist hotels, malls, restaurants and more shopping areas.

nikhilalmeida 15y ago

Thanks for the resources. Good analogy with software engineering. I would say that deciding the layout and large infrastructure would be analogous to selecting the technology stack. Allowing the buildings and neighborhoods to evolve would be the learn/evolve as you go, agile approach.

harrylove 15y ago

And I would add, regarding Alexander, at least, start with his most recent series on The Nature of Order. Then, if you want more, go back and read The Timeless Way of Building, followed by A Pattern Language. But really, his most recent stuff is the most compelling, and the most profound.

praptak 15y ago
I recommend the totally reversed order. First, A Pattern Language - the concrete examples presented there are IMHO the most compelling. Then The Timeless Way of Building since it actually builds upon "A Pattern Language". There are quite a lot of references to particular patterns there, so you minimize forward references this way. The Nature of Order series generalize even more, so I'd read them after that. They rather independent from the TWoB and APL but I believe the way from the concrete examples (APL) to the generalizations is a better one. Here it's rather a matter of preference than one of forward-dependency.

astrodust 15y ago

I would rather see a programmatic simulation of a city growing than someone's deeply flawed "programmed city". An airport in the middle is a massive mistake, for instance. That's the kind of thing an ISO committee would do on the grounds that it creates equal amounts of noise, pollution, and the risk of unfortunate immolation due to a crash for everyone.

tgrass 15y ago

The programmer's cognitive dissonance is the demand for emergence on the web while demanding top down control in the real world.

ajuc 15y ago

Didn't suburbia evolved organicaly from regular cities? Should we just accept it, because it's organical growth, so it's optimal? There's place for organical growth, and there's place for upfront design, both in programming and in urban development. The best cities layout I've seen was consequences of organical deveopment within some rules - see most old european cities. Building rules specified how broad should streets be, how high the building can be in each region, which functions can't be performed in which part of the city, which way should new streets be built. There were reasons for these rules. In my country after 50 years of communism (and hideus commie blocks, etc) we went throught 10 years of "free for all" development of cities. Believe me - I hate totalitarism, but in these first 10 years of freedom cities got much worse - wallmarts in the city center, ugly cheap postmodern buildings near 500 year beutiful houses, commercials hiding half of the city besides them. Now, since +- 10 years there is some regulations coming back, and I'm happy with that.

bane 15y ago
It's interesting that you bring up European cities. I was about to type a post offering the counter example, New York (specifically Manhattan) and to some extent Chicago. Both are products of a strong "framework" of transit and utilities, but the growth within this framework has been more or less organic...all buildings don't have to be the same height a la Paris. I've felt that organically grown cities, of which most major European cities are good examples, are very sub-optimal for because of the haphazard and random way the cities are laid out. It many such cities, the old, medieval core became so bogged down that cars aren't even allowed and it's basically a pedestrian heaven. Navigation is hard in these cities, traffic is usually a mess without modern development to route around the "organicness" of the city centers, as a result certain types of goods and services...namely anything to do with lots of manufacturing or bulk goods, ends up moving away from the city core. And while it means that the cores tends to become very pedestrian friendly, they really just sort of end up as extended outdoor shopping malls with some housing for the shop workers above. It's interesting in some of the older Asian cities which have very old histories, say Seoul, the the haphazard, medieval-style organic planning has given way to a large effort to put the major thoroughfares on a grid and as old areas are redeveloped, to do so with a heavily planned development policy in mind. The city was simply not able to handle the growth and population demands the organic system created. There's a reason Paris' business center is not in Paris' geographic center, and central London has restricted driving zones, and most of Barcelona's population enjoys the 19th century planned developed residential areas, while the older parts are being turned into tourist hotels, malls, restaurants and more shopping areas.