READING: A City is Not a Tree: Christopher Alexander

Author: Christopher Alexander (Architect, mathematician)

“when a city is endowed with a tree structure, this is what happens to the city and its people”

 

 ‘The reality of today’s social structure is thick with overlap’

MAIN POINTS:

The city is a semi-lattice, but it is not a tree.

What is the inner nature, the ordering principle, which distinguishes the artificial city from the natural city?

“Natural cities”: have arisen spontaneously over many years. Organisation of natural city: semi-lattice. Contain overlapping units.

“Artificial cities”: Deliberately created by designers and planners.

Organisation of artificial city: Tree. Individual parts either wholly contained in others or disjointed.

Subdivision after subdivisions of each other.

Zoning (such as in Canberra).

THOUGHTS:

This reading clarified for me why it is that planned cities sometimes miss something in the life of the cities and gave me some concrete reasoning behind the feeling that when we try to organise things too much we lose something crucial.

 EXAMPLES OF SEMI LATTICE STRUCTURES:

Social networking groups… they overlap but are not subdivisions of each other. Maybe this is why they are growing in use so rapidly. They co-exist and link into each other to allow people to use them as a wider network, but they are not controlled by each other. 
 

Universities.. traditional American models isolate. Those evolved naturally eg Milan.. the university is a multitude of buildings spread throughout the city centre, with no clear distinction between those buildings which are part of the university and those which aren’t. It is physically a campus distributed throughout the city. We didn’t travel between uni and the city each day.. we simply went about our plans for the day, including classes, and everyday.

‘The reality of today’s social structure is thick with overlap’… I think this is partly due to our accessibility and rapidly diverging avenues of opportunities and speed of decisions.

 

APPLIED TO OUR GOVERNMENT:

Our whole government system is a tree, in a hierarchical sense. The people cannot participate in the national level of government without going through State, or on the State level without going through local (electorate). The whole system of representation of the whole country through the people who sit in the House of Representatives, or of the State by the States government representatives…….. the whole problem with the tree like structure. As a typical run-of-the-mill Australian, we cannot access our national government without plowing back through the tunnels of subdivided power and we hit a blockade very early because to progress any further we must resign our power to the next line of power to represent us until they ultimately must resign in turn to those standing between them and the center of power.

The visual and conceptual power of architecture needs to be recognised here. Subliminally, when we isolate the processes and the architecture of the government from the rest of our lives we are in effect convincing ourselves that it is completely separate from our lives, and it becomes something we…"really need to learn about one day". But if we integrate it with our lives the connection will be clear and we will participate in our government processes and live our lives simultaneously.

In the same token, architecture also has the power to open our minds and broaden our perspectives. If we can lose some of that restriction that space can put onto people and replace it with architectural solutions which invite an personal interpretation, and continual reinterpretation.