A Pattern Language: Cities in the 70s

I have some time off between my summer and fall terms, so I started reading a classic in the urban studies/architecture field, A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction by Christopher Alexander. I was drawn to the book because Alexander had previously written The Oregon Experiment about community planning at the University of Oregon, where I attend school. Several members of the architecture faculty are fans of his, too, so I figured it wouldn’t hurt to have some familiarity.

I’ve only read through pattern 20 out of 253, so I don’t yet have an overall view of the book, but I have been stopping to think after just about each of the patterns so far. Many of my thoughts center around one theme: Christopher Alexander’s view of cities is shaped by the 1970s. This is a really obvious statement, since the book was published in 1977. But so much has changed in urban America since the 1970s that many of his patterns that deal with cities seems dated.

Now, I wasn’t alive in the 1970s, so I don’t have first-hand evidence for what it was like, but I get the sense that America’s cities were in a state of upheaval. If you look at the time period from 1960 to the mid-1970s, cities in the US were dealing with race riots, urban renewal, high crime, and suburbanization. “White flight” was in full swing as the white middle class bought homes in the suburbs and left the urban core while the urbanization of blacks in America continued.

It was in this environment that Christopher Alexander was writing A Pattern Language and I give him credit for not being more pessimistic about cities. In fact, he rails against the suburbs, stating bluntly:

The suburb is an obsolete and contradictory form of human settlement.

His preference for human habitation is to spread the population throughout a region in small communities, with only a few larger cities. Furthermore, he thinks it’s best to split urban cores into smaller, more accessible cores.

I can’t help but think that some of his prejudice against large cities comes from the fact that urban cores in the 60s and 70s were nothing like they are today (maybe not all cities, but many). If he saw New York City (for example) in 2009, I don’t think he’d believe it was the same city. New York City of the 60s and 70s saw a blackout, garbage strike, transit strike, Stonewall Riots, and economic stagnation. Nearly a million people left the city during that period. If America’s flagship city was facing what must have seemed like irreversible decline, I’d also be suggesting that we all move to small towns in the countryside!

Alexander doesn’t explicitly say that the sorry state of cities in the 70s is why he recommends spreading people out. Instead, he offers up two fairly weak reasons for why people shouldn’t be living in cities. He thought that the migration to cities is unnatural and unsustainable (he was looking across 100 years, not 10 or 20). People are not meant to live far away from nature. Furthermore, if everyone moves to the city, nobody will be left to take care of the countryside. I find both of these arguments against urban living somewhat ridiculous, looking at it in 2009. Unless you’re living in a city with over 10 million in the metro area, like New York, Los Angeles, or Chicago, it’s hard to feel like you’re living in an urban prison with no escape to nature. Sure, you may not have your own garden, but it’s hardly unnatural to be living that way.

His argument about neglecting the countryside just doesn’t make sense. He presumes that cities are a magnet that are so powerful that given enough time will attract every single person. It’s been my experience that some people will always prefer a rural lifestyle. In the 32 years since the book has been published, cities haven’t absorbed everyone.

I think that, while understandable given the time period, his views on how a population should be spread throughout a region are ecologically dangerous. On my first day of college, my professor said that if someone could come up with a catchy phrase that meant the opposite of “The solution to pollution is dilution”, that person would receive extra credit. The reason he offered this challenge is because some scientists and environmentalists believe that that phrase should apply to human habitation. They believe if we spread people out, the earth can handle the impact better than if we group people in cities.

Alexander agrees with the misguided environmentalists:

An overconcentrated population, in space, puts a huge burden on the region’s overall ecosystem. As the big cities grow, the population movement overburdens these areas with air pollution, strangled transportation, water shortages, housing shortages, and living densities which go beyond the realm of human reasonableness. In some metropolitan centers, the ecology is perilously close to cracking. By contrast, a population that is spread more evenly over its region minimizes its impact on the ecology of that environment, and finds that it can take care of itself and the land more prudently, with less waste and more humanity[.]

Of course, this is nonsense. People who live in cities have access to public transit, live in more efficient dwellings, and simply take up less space. That space can instead be inhabited by trees, squirrels, and other wild creatures. While he does propose humans be good stewards to the environment, his proposals include thing like ribbons of habitation along country roads that dissect animal habitat into square mile postage stamps. People living along those roads will likely have to commute farther than their urban counterparts, with fewer transit options. They won’t be able to share water treatment, and they won’t be able to share heat like an urban apartment building.

I think if Christopher Alexander wrote this book today, some of these early patterns would be different. He would likely be more bullish about urbanization and have different ideas about how to manage natural space. I believe that the state of cities in the 1970s, combined with prevailing environmental wisdom of his day made him come to the conclusions he did. A Pattern Language was in many ways ahead if its time (and still is, which I’ll write about in a future post), but on the subject of cities, it just feels a bit dated.