There’s been a fair
amount of talk on the web lately about the book
A Pattern Language, by Christopher Alexander et al.
Although it’s a book on architecture and urban planning, I first heard of
it in the context of software engineering. Alexander uses the term
“pattern” to mean an archetypal solution to a certain kind of problem–a
solution you can apply over and over again in different situations which
nevertheless match the pattern. For a while, patterns were the next
silver bullet in software engineering; that initial glow has faded, but
both the idea of patterns and a number of specific patterns have taken
firm root in the software community.

But I’m not intending to talk about patterns in software; instead, I want
to talk about Alexander’s book. It’s been recommended to me by several
people, some on line, and some I’ve actually met; the idea of patterns is
appealing to me; and the recent discussions piqued my curiousity to the
extent that I actually bought a copy. But the thing is, I find I can’t
review it the way I ordinarily would. It’s a big, thick book, chock-full
of ideas, all of them cross-referenced to other ideas. It’s not the sort
of thing you read cover to cover; it’s the sort of thing you browse. And
any short review I might right will utterly fail to do it justice. So
I’ve decided to embark on a rather more ambitious plan.

I’m going to browse in it, and read it, and browse some more, and every
so often I’m going to write about one single pattern. That’s an idea
that’s completely incompatible with Alexander’s goals, by the way; the
patterns aren’t intended to stand alone. But it’s the only way I’ll be
able to present my thoughts.

The book is divided into three sections, called “Towns”, “Buildings”, and
“Construction”. The first section contains patterns on how to lay out
towns and the things in them so as to make them delightful places to
live. And the first of those is called Independent Regions
(1). (That “1” is the pattern number; by convention
that’s always included in the name, to help people look them up.)

In Alexander’s view, the world should be divided into a thousand
or more independent regions, each with its own local government, and each
part of a world federation. (What this has to do with architecture, I’m
not sure.) Surprisingly, he doesn’t suggest this as a
means of centralizing urban planning within each region; Alexander
doesn’t believe in central planning. Within the region, each city and
town is responsible for its own land; and within each city and town, each
group or individual is similarly responsible for its own territory. If
all of them conscientiously rely on Alexander’s patterns as they do their
planning, the world will be a beautiful place.

Instead, he lists several other reasons: government becomes unwieldly
at any other size; the current trend toward globalization is homogenizing
cultures the world over, whereas his notion would preserve them; those
times and places where the basic political unit has been the city-state
have been seen an outpouring of art and architecture.

What he seems to forget is that those same times and places
also saw frequent outpourings of blood. The Italian Renaissance produced
Leonardo, Michelangelo, Raphael, Donatello, and scads of other
noteworthy turtles–ah, artists–but it was also the golden age of the
European Mercenary Company, and the city-states of Italy were constantly
at war. The great ruling families were patrons of the arts, it’s true,
but there’s a reason why the names Borgia and Medici have an ominous
sound in our ears.

I suppose he thinks this “world federation” will somehow manage to keep
the peace among the thousand regions. But just because fifty states can
be stable, it doesn’t follow that 1000 states will also be stable.
With fifty states, every state is important; even little New Hampshire is
the star of every presidential campaign. With 1000 states, no individual
state is important enough to make its voice heard in the assembly. I
can’t see that such a body can keep order without instituting such tight
control over the member regions as to destroy the indepence that’s their
reason for being.

And then, I think that there’s another reason the United States has
gotten along so well (mostly) for over two centuries–they began with a
relatively homogeneous political, legal, and moral culture rooted in the
rights of Englishmen and the English common law. It’s true that America
is a melting pot, and I’ve no wish to disparage the contributions of
any of the other groups involved. But there’s a distinct different
between the American Bill of Rights and the French Declaration of the
Rights of Man–the Bill of Rights is a record of rights the founding
fathers felt that they already had, even if they sometimes had them only
in the breach. They wrote the Bill of Rights to
protect those rights, and to make sure that no one could take them away
in the future. They’d gone to war with England because England hadn’t
respected their rights as Englishmen. The Declaration of the Rights of
Man, by contrast, is a record of rights most Frenchmen had never enjoyed
up until that time, the rights the leaders of the Revolution felt that
they should have–and given that the French have since had two
emperors, a number of kings, and (if I recall correctly) five or six
republics, not to mention two German invasions, it’s not clear how often
they’ve enjoyed them since.

Thus, I think the diversity of cultures that Alexander wishes to protect
with his thousand independent regions would instead prevent
his “world federation” from keeping the peace–and his plan would
degenerate into warfare and bloodshed until the regions would be forced to
join into larger countries for their own safety. Just as they did
historically.

So OK, Alexander’s a utopian dreamer. I suppose that shouldn’t surprise
me. But it does bug me a little that this is one of the patterns he and
his co-authors marked with two asterisks, “**”, indicating that it
presents a solution that they are absolutely, positively, 100% sure of
despite being architects rather than political theorists or historians.
But I gather that no one has ever accused Alexander of modesty.