A City is Not a Tree - what is a company not?

As the Congress for New Urbanism prepares to start celebrating the influnence of architect Christopher Alexander, I would like to share with you some thoughts inspired by passages from his much-cited essay, "A City Is Not Tree".

"When the elements of a set belong together because they co-operate or work together somehow, we call the set of elements a system."

To make a crowd into a team, make them aware of the problems they all share. That way, the will easily start to care for each other.

"For example, in Berkeley at the corner of Hearst and Euclid, there is a drugstore, and outside the drugstore a traffic light. In the entrance to the drugstore there is a newsrack where the day's papers are displayed. When the light is red, people who are waiting to cross the street stand idly by the light; and since they have nothing to do, they look at the papers displayed on the newsrack which they can see from where they stand. Some of them just read the headlines, others actually buy a paper while they wait."?

People generally have the tendecy to reach out to each other. They can be clumsy, but if gently nudged in the right direction by thoughtfull design choices, they will make each others ideas flourish into great things. Don't expect happy accidents to create fruitful opportunities, be as intentional as you can.

"The units of which an artificial city is made up are always organized to form a tree. So that we get a really clear understanding of what this means, and shall better see its implications, let us define a tree once again. Whenever we have a tree structure, it means that within this structure no piece of any unit is ever connected to other units, except through the medium of that unit as a whole. The enormity of this restriction is difficult to grasp. It is a little as though the members of a family were not free to make friends outside the family, except when the family as a whole made a friendship."

Making the contribution of each person as visible as you can makes people more aware of the importance of their contribution. Don't rely on word of mouth. Don't quarantine achievements: let their glory spread and inspire like the Sun shines every day, even through thick clouds.

"It is for this reason - because the mind's first function is to reduce the ambiguity and overlap in a confusing situation and because, to this end, it is endowed with a basic intolerance for ambiguity - that structures like the city, which do require overlapping sets within them, are nevertheless persistently conceived as trees."

How many dreams are not materialized because we dare not even dream them?

"Another favourite concept of the CIAM(Congrès Internationaux d'Architecture Moderne) theorists and others is the separation of recreation from everything else. This has crystallized in our real cities in the form of playgrounds. The playground, asphalted and fenced in, is nothing but a pictorial acknowledgment of the fact that 'play' exists as an isolated concept in our minds. It has nothing to do with the life of play itself. Few self-respecting children will even play in a playground. "

Highlighting done by me.

Play itself, the play that children practise, goes on somewhere different every day. One day it may be indoors, another day in a friendly gas station, another day down by the river, another day in a derelict building, another day on a construction site which has been abandoned for the weekend. Each of these play activities, and the objects it requires, forms a system. It is not true that these systems exist in isolation, cut off from the other systems of the city. The different systems overlap one another, and they overlap many other systems besides. The units, the physical places recognized as play places, must do the same."

If someone tells you they work eight hours a day, they are flat out lying to you and probably to themselves. "Even more than eight hours, you say? LOL!".

I remember being taught in school to take care of my neurons, because once neurons die, I won't get a refill. However, neuroscientists begs to difer: a large body of evidence strongly suggest that new neurons are created, even in adults, in a brain region called the hippocampus. This process, known as neurogenesis, is stimulated by exercise[1][2][3]. All work and no play really does make dull girls and boys, regardles of their age. Some parts of ourselves just never grow up. Instead, allow people to move around and play, and you increase the chance that, as their bodies grow more vigorous, so do their ideas.

What ideas does Christopher Alexander's essay give you?