A Pattern Language - A Preview

“If children are not able to explore the whole of the adult world round about them, they cannot become adults. But modern cities are so dangerous that children cannot be allowed to explore them freely.”

A Pattern Language is a book which seems to be following me around, which every time I meet it offers new insights. According to the authors, it lays the “basis for an entirely new approach to architecture, building and planning” – stemming from a belief that the built environment springs up naturally from the physical and spiritual needs of the people inhabiting it, if guided by certain foundational principles. And that these principles or patterns, overlaid and interlocking, create a kind of poetry within the places we live.

The book consists of a series of short chapters on everything from practical matters – such as how far apart to space towns of 1000 people (“The Distribution of Towns”) – to the metaphysical – such as how to accommodate the complete lifecycle of a person within a single village (“Life Cycle”), or how to situate sacred space (“Holy Ground”). Then there are my favorites, “Dancing in the Street” and “Sleeping in Public”. And that’s just the first half of the book, covering topics greater in scale than a single building. There’s much, much more on how to construct patterns within a building itself.

For today, though, I will share from the chapter “Children in the City” because it speaks so well – I think – to the tendency amongst those who seek to live sustainably (and especially to raise kids in a healthy environment) to envision this life in the countryside. For those who cannot or prefer not to make this move, is there a way to incorporate this ethic into the city-dwelling life?

“The need for children to have access to the world of adults is so obvious that it goes without saying. The adults transmit their ethos and their way of life to children through their actions, not through statements. Children learn by doing and by copying. If the child’s education is limited to school and home, and all the vast undertakings of a modern city are mysterious and inaccessible, it is impossible for the child to find out what it really means to be an adult and impossible, certainly, for him to copy it by doing.

“This separation between the child’s world and the adult world is unknown […] in traditional societies. In simple villages, children spend their days side by side with farmers in the fields, side by side with people who are building houses, side by side, in fact, with all the daily actions of the men and women round about them:  making pottery, counting money, curing the sick, praying to God, grinding corn, arguing about the future of the village.

“But in the city, life is so enormous and so dangerous, that children can’t be left alone to roam [….]. The problem seems nearly insoluble. But we believe it can be at least partly solved by enlarging those parts of cities where small children can be left to roam, alone, and by trying to make sure that these protected children’s belts are so widespread and so far-reaching that they touch the full variety of adult activities and ways of life.

Bridge trail in Yorktown, NY: Photo courtesy of
Wee Westchester

“We imagine a carefully developed childrens’ bicycle path, within the larger network of bike paths […]. The path is always a bike path; it never runs beside cars. Where it crosses traffic there are lights or bridges. There are many homes and shops along the path—adults are nearby, especially the old enjoy spending an hour a day sitting along this path, themselves riding along the loop, watching the kids out of the corner of one eye.

“And most important, the great beauty of this path is that it passes along and even through those functions and parts of a town which are normally out of reach:  the place where newspapers are printed, the place where milk arrives from the countryside and is bottled, the pier, the garage where people make doors and windows, the alley behind restaurant row, the cemetery.”

– A Pattern Language. Christopher Alexander, Sara Ishikawa, Murray Silverstein et al. Oxford University Press: New York, NY, 1977, p. 294-295.

Indianapolis Cultural Trail: Photo courtesy of Visit Indy.

Does Bowling Green have something that might pass as the beginnings of this network, or that with time and intentionality might flourish to become one? How could it start here?