5 Laying out a larger neighborhood by a dynamic process: a fully generated plan

I am showing this theoretical process because it is — as a process — unlike almost any process that city planners or developers currently think about. It creates a different physical structure, one which is obviously more lively, more capable of being responsive to people’s wishes. It has the capacity, on every block, to create an ambience which is truly unique.
What is unusual about this process?
First, it is driven by the creation of living centers — in a form which ordinary people could make their own, and which creates a unique and beautiful environment.
Second, the dynamical aspect of the process, the way it generates form slowly, is unmistakable and huge in its impact on the design. I show it, therefore, because it enables me to show, most vividly, just what a truly dynamic structure-preserving process is like in the way that it creates life in the morphology of gardens, streets, and buildings.

1. Establish location and shape (boundary) of main center in the “best spot”
2. Smaller streets placed to help the main street
3. Swelling which forms the center of a street
4. House positions placed (before lots) to form and shape the perimeter of a street volume
5. After the house is placed, a garden, itself a positive space with a good shape, is also placed to supplement the house — but under its own rules, with its own integrity.
6. A closer look at the character of the house-volume-plus-garden, now differentiating the house volume to form an entity which has a courtyards in it, and an entrance.
7. Three houses and their gardens, showing how stepwise placement of the house volumes, and THEN the gardens, in places each one of which is “good”, leads inevitably to a syncopated complex structure, even in a simple case, because each entity receives its own uniqueness from the process.
8. Now we see what a street looks like when its space is differentiated by twelve houses, places successively with their positively-shaped gardens.
9. Lots which can allow the house volumes.
10. Houses and lots and gardens formed together.

Only after the courtyards and gardens have been established as coherent centers, in relation to the houses, then the lot lines are laid in, because that it the necessary sequence in order to get the centers to work.

So, in summary, the process is first of all concerned with the formation of the street as a center. The street is to be formed by houses. As each street is formed, the houses which can support that street are defined as volumes — then the gardens, and then finally, after that, the lots which can support these houses and gardens are defined and established legally.

Every single bit of space has the loose local symmetry which produces a center. We see the gardens, the pieces of the lots which are outside the houses, forming centers. We see that in those cases where the garden is broken into two, it is made of two centers. The house itself, as a small courtyard, forms a center in its own right. Each section of the street forms a center. Where streets meet, there is another center in the form of a small square.
In many traditional societies, such plans were commonplace because the process of placing and building was an unfolding process which produced them almost automatically. But in our present era there are few plans built which have this dense structure in which every bit of space that exists forms a strong center.

We need an explicit process of street creation, where the all-important character of the street as a center is recognized by everyone concerned, and then houses are brought in, one by one, as centers, in such a way as to form the space of the street. This will require a technical process unfamiliar to present generation public-works administrators and engineers. There is nothing inherently impossible or even difficult about this process. But it is simply different from the process which most people took for granted, and considered “normal” in 1988 (the year this process was invented). The whole process is explicitly center-creating and structure-preserving throughout.

The structure-preserving process and the centers it creates

- Land
- Outline of the neighborhood
- Streets placed to enhance the center of the neighborhood
- House fronts to form the streets
- Gardens
- Houses
- Courtyard which forms the center of the house
- …

If we think carefully about the organic, truthful and biological quality which is obvious in the drawings […] we see that the only kind of process which could produce this structure is one which does produce it step by step.
This is the kind of dynamic process which is needed to produce a living field of centers in a new neighborhood. The traditional neighborhoods which we love in various parts of the world were all produced by this kind of process (different in geometry, similar in character of process). It cannot be done any other way. To build new neighborhoods with life, we must find ways, like this, of constructing an intense (and unpredictable) field of centers to create the spaces of the neighborhood.

The essence of the process is that is generates coherent, yet quite unpredictable structure, simply by applying a few simple rules to a piece of land and its natural idiosyncrasies. That alone, and the interaction of the process with the previous outputs of its own effects, is enough to produce the most beautiful order. I do not believe it can be done in any other way.

#book/The Nature of Order/3 A Vision of a Living World/11 Necessary further dynamics of any neighborhood which comes to life#