6 What should be the pattern of yellow, green, gray, and red?

Mapping colors to structural elements of a neighborhood

- yellow = pedestrians and public outdoor space
- green = private outdoor space (gardens)
- gray = buildings
- red = cars and parking

In today’s typical neighborhoods, the relation among the four percentages is often quite bad. Usually the yellow is too small, the red is too big, the green is too disorganized, and the gray is in lumps that are sometimes too large.

Even before you see the arrangement of the plan, its badness is already predictable merely from the relative quantities of yellow, green, gray and red, as reflected in the four numbers by themselves.

What would a better plan look like?
Essentially, we would see a much larger core of yellow structure, forming a branching and continuous hull of pedestrian space, large in the center, with large wide paths going towards the largest spaces, and with a network of smaller yellow paths, forming the branches and twigs. That would be a continuous hull of pedestrian space that gives people a safe place, gives children a safe place, gives people by their daily movement a sense of identity and continuity with the neighborhood.
Then the gray structure, reflecting the individually owned houses and businesses, would be made of more small buildings on their own separate lots. That means, if the density were to increase, these lots would be small, too. And to reflect a vital kind of mixture of work and family, the businesses and houses would be at least partly mixed so that dark gray (for businesses) and light gray (for houses) would be intermingled. Further yet, the dark gray would form some natural kinds of strands or spines so that economic synergy, allowing businesses to support one another through proximity of related interests, might be visible geometrically within the pattern.
The green structure, too, would be very different. Instead of circles of narrow green strips that occur on each lot around the buildings […], we would see each patch of green as a positive and constructive space, a useful shape, a substantial garden or outside yard, with its own quality of positive space, its own coherence. Thus, to put it in the simplest terms, the green would be made up of coherent rectangles, and almost no green space would be in any other form. […]
Finally, the red would exist in the form of narrow looping irregular lanes connecting small gatherings of parking spaces. Above all, this red pattern would be indirect — less direct, certainly, than the yellow which reflects the easy way pedestrians move — and would reflect, rather, an indirect pattern of movement through the neighborhood where cars, not dominating, could nevertheless approach their individual parking spaces easily.

#book/The Nature of Order/3 A Vision of a Living World/9 The reconstruction of an urban neighborhood#