Introduction: What do processes actually look like in everyday society?

These current processes — and the hundreds of thousands of others like them, as formulated at present — are not primarily intended to generate, or modify, or heal, or create a living environment. They are processes which have grown up for many reasons, some concerned with planning and construction, some concerned with other aspects of day-to-day life in society.
Most of them, nearly all, have an impact — usually indirect — on the shape of the world. Some of them are living, that is “healing” in their effect. But even these, for the most part, do not look like the idealized processes which I have drawn in chapters 6-17. They are more banal, perhaps more ordinary, more down to earth. They are not directly concerned with the life of the result, are not concerned whether they have impact on living structure or not. They are simply rule-defined procedures (some defined through informal or unspoken rules, others through formalized written rules) which thousands, often millions, of men and women use in daily life.
These processes, with their effects, form the backbone of what we know as our society.

They are not chiefly living processes. They are not all non-living processes. But they do all have effects.
Most of them have some kind of effect on the geometry and structure of the world — hence on the architecture and cities we create. The world is shaped by these processes, is given its style, order, character, and functional form by these hundreds of thousands of processes acting in concert over the surface of the Earth.

#book/The Nature of Order/2 The process of creating life/18 Encouraging freedom#