11 Morphological features of public space created by living processes

When public space unfolds under the impact of living process, the following features are likely to emerge: * What emerges will be based on the natural features in the landscape, and will expand and deepen the natural character already present. The spaces will enhance, deepen, and expand what is there and which is familiar * Within this geometry, the public spaces are gradually transformed to become a continuous, connected system of distinct centers, well-shaped, partly surrounded, enclosed, positive spaces. * The centers include, but are not dominated by, what we now think of as streets. * To give the hulls their definition, the boundaries of these public spaces are shaped as a system of living centers surrounded by buildings, walls, trees, natural contours, even views. Each of these hulls is visibly contained, so as to make it a hull. * All activity opens from these hulls, their effect is like Circulation Realms — a system of partly closed precincts opening off one another, arranged that everything important opens off one of them. * Hulls will be more than courtyards; they will turn out to be made of pieces of space, each piece a place where it is pleasant to be.

From the way spaces develop naturally under the impact of the fundamental process, it will slowly, and naturally, become clear that the spaces belong to everyone — to people. Each one is thought, felt, judged, given its dimensions — in the place itself, by people standing in the place, using their common sense, their instinct, their sense of rightness. For each one, its size, diameter, length, width, edges, height of the edges — these are all formed while people are standing there, from the judgements they make in the actual place as they decide how to make each place strengthen and support the wholeness that exists. It is that, ultimately, which helps each place achieve its centeredness.
These marked, defined centers, form the whole of the system of public space in the environment. We move from one to the next, there is nothing “left over”.

Finally, in geometric terms, what is the shape and character of the hulls that are likely to emerge?
There is likely to be an unusual combination of looseness and symmetry. What will strike, above all, are the local symmetries, with attendant complex syncopated smaller symmetries, modifying the larger ones in asymmetric fashion.
All parts of the unfolded public space are shaped, fashioned, treated, as if each were a kind of larger living room. Each seems symmetrical, and yet is not — just as each human face looks symmetrical, and yet is not.

#book/The Nature of Order/3 A Vision of a Living World/3 The hulls of public space#