Repeated application of living process in city and in countryside

The world should be created by adaptive processes which act as nature does, itself. They allow us to create a harmonious while that embraces nature and creates buildings, streets, and towns, in a fashion which has the same depth structure as nature, and has the same deep effect on us as a result. This, I believe, is how true life in our world has always been formed and must be formed. […] We who build the world must do our work within this framework.

Living process = each process of step-by-step adaptation through which living structure can be made.

In the course of all planning, building, conceiving, designing, landscaping, or making a building, throughout, at every stage, all the processes are composed of millionfold repeated applications and combinations of a single type of unfolding process, governed by certain transformations which make each center help the larger centers and thus keep creating living wholes.

All living processes, in my definition, are combinations and sequences of this fundamental process.

The fundamental process

-> The fundamental process

1. At each step, the process begins with a perception of the whole. At every step (whether is it conceiving, designing, making, maintaining or repairing) we start by looking at and thinking about the whole of that part of the world where we are working. We look at this whole, absorb it, try to feel its deep structure.
2. Within the whole, we consider the latent centers which might be worked on next. These latent centers, are dimly, partially visible, large, medium, and small.
3. We choose that one of these latent centers which, if established or strengthened next, will do the most to give the whole an increase of life. We work to intensify that living center, intensifying it in a way which, we judge, does the most good to the whole.
4. At the same time that we try to enhance the living quality of this chosen center, we also try to make it intensify the life of some larger center that it belongs to.
5. Simultaneously, we also make or strengthen at least one center of the same size as the center we are working on, and make it positive, next to the center we are currently concentrating on.
6. Simultaneously, we also start to see, and make, and strengthen smaller centers within the one we are working on — increasing their life, too.
7. Once the whole has been modified by this operation, we start again.

#book/The Nature of Order/3 A Vision of a Living World/Preface#