A pattern language

“Decor” and the conception of “interior design” have spread so widely, that very often people forget their instinct for the things they really want to keep around them.

There are two ways of looking at this simple fact. We may look at it from the point of view of the person who owns the space, and from the point of view of the people who come to it. From the owner’s point of view, it is obvious that the things around you should be the things which mean most to you, which have the power to play a part in the continuous process of selftransformation, which is your life. That much is clear.

But this function has been eroded, gradually, in modern times because people have begun to look outward, to others, and over their shoulders, at the people who are coming to visit them, and have replaced their natural instinctive decorations with the things which they believe will please and impress their visitors. This is the motive behind all the interior design and decor in the women’s magazines. And designers play on these anxieties by making total designs, telling people they have no right to move anything, paint the walls, or add a plant, because they are not party to the mysteries of Good Design.

But the irony is, that the visitors who come into a room don’t want this nonsense any more than the people who live there. It is far more fascinating to come into a room which is the living expression of a person, or a group of people, so that you can see their lives, their histories, their inclinations, displayed in manifest form around the walls, in the furniture, on the shelves. Beside such experience—and it is as ordinary as the grass—the artificial scene-making of “modern decor” is totally bankrupt.

Jung describes the room that was his study, how he filled the stone walls with paintings that he made each day directly on

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13 SUBCULTURE BOUNDARY

very different in style from another one next to it. People will be afraid that the neighboring area is going to “encroach” on their own area, upset their land values, undermine their children, send the “nice” people away, and so forth, and they will do everything they can to make the next door area like their own.

Carl Werthman, Jerry Mandel, and Ted Dienstfrey (Planning and the Purchase Decision: Why People Buy in Planned Communities, University of California, Berkeley, July 1965) have noticed the same phenomenon even among very similar subcultures. In a study of people living in tract developments, they found that the tension created by adjacencies between dissimilar social groups disappeared when there was enough open land, unused land, freeway, or water between them. In short, a physical barrier between the adjacent subcultures, if big enough, took the heat off.

Obviously, a rich mix of subcultures will not be possible if each subculture is being inhibited by pressure from its neighbors. The subcultures must therefore be separated by land, which is not residential land, and by as much of it as possible.

There is another kind of empirical observation which supports this last statement. If we look around a metropolitan area, and pinpoint the strongly differentiated subcultures, those with character, we shall always find that they are near boundaries and hardly ever close to other communities. For example, in San Francisco the two most distinctive areas are Telegraph Hill and Chinatown. Telegraph Hill is surrounded on two sides by the docks. Chinatown is bounded on two sides by the city’s banking area. The same is true in the larger Bay Area. Point Richmond and Sausalito,

Subculture boundaries.

CONSTRUCTION

the stones—mandalas, dream images, preoccupations—and he tells us that the room came gradually to be a living thing to him—the outward counterpart to his unconscious.

Examples we know: A motel run by a Frenchman, mementos of the Resistance all around the lounge, the letter from Charles de Gaulle. An outdoor market on the highway, where the proprietor has mounted his collection of old bottles all over the walls; hundreds of bottles, all shapes and colors; some of them are down for cleaning; there is an especially beautiful one up at the counter by the cash register. An anarchist runs the hot dog stand, he plasters the walls with literature, proclamations, manifestoes against the State.

A hunting glove, a blind man’s cane, the collar of a favorite dog, a panel of pressed flowers from the time when we were children, oval pictures of grandma, a candlestick, the dust from a volcano carefully kept in a bottle, a picture from the news of prison convicts at Attica in charge of the prison, not knowing that they were about to die, an old photo, the wind blowing in the grass and a church steeple in the distance, spiked sea shells with the hum of the sea still in them.

Therefore:

old adventures

Do not be tricked into believing that modern decor must be slick or psychedelic, or “natural” or “modern art,” or “plants” or anything else that current taste-makers claim. It is most beautiful when it comes straight from your life —the things you care for, the things that tell your story.

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

We have had a great deal of help and support over the eight years it has taken us to conceive and create this work. And we should here like to express our feelings of gratitude to everyone who helped us.

The Center has always been a small workgroup, fluctuating in size from 3 to 8, according to the demands of the work. Since the Center was incorporated in 1967, a number of people have worked with us, for different lengths of time, and helped in many ways. Denny Abrams was financial manager of the Center for three years. He played a critical role in the early days of the Center, helping to shape our nature as a work group. He also helped with layout and photographic experiments in the early drafts of the book and worked with us on the Oregon experiment. Ron Walkey spent two years at the Center, and helped especially to develop the patterns and the overall conception of the city portrayed in the first section of the book. The two of them were very close to the development of the pattern language, from the beginning; and above all, their music, after lunch, made unforgettable times together for all of us.

In more general terms, both Sim Van der Ryn and Roslyn Lindheim gave us help and encouragement when we first began the project, years ago. Christie Coffin, Jim Jones, and Barbara Schreiner all helped us develop the contents of the earliest versions of the language.

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Jim Axley helped more than anyone on the very difficult development of the structural patterns, in the last part of the language. And earlier, Sandy Hirshen, collaborating with us during the Peru project, had begun to develop our attitude to construction techniques.

Harlean Richardson has worked tremendously hard on the detailed design of the book itself. And we have had wonderful secretarial help over the years from Helen Green, who typed many many versions of the patterns, and from Mary Louise Rogers who helped in many ways coordinating the work and providing support.

Another invaluable kind of help we have had was that given by people who believed in what we were trying to do, gave us an opportunity to work on it, and to do projects for them which incorporated these ideas. Ken Simmons, who allowed us to develop our very first pattern language in a professional job, Johannes Olivegren, John Eberhard, Bob Harris, Don Conway, Fried Wittman, Hewitt Ryan, and Edgar Kaufmann all helped us in this way. What they gave us in confidence, and emotional support, and friendship, and, often, in money that supported the work, cannot be counted.

Even more specifically, we want to thank Dick Wakefield, Coryl Jones, and Clyde Dorsett at the National Institute for Mental Health. The evolution of the pattern language was supported for the four most important years by a sequence of grants from the Center for the Study of Metropolitan Problems of the National Institute for Mental Health—and it would have been quite impossible for us to do the work if it had not been for those grants.

Finally, we owe a great deal to Oxford University Press, especially to James Raimes, our editor, who first

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

agreed to try and publish all three books, in a series, and also to James Huws-Davies and Byron Hollinshead. All three of them supported the publication of this book, and the other books, before they had even seen them: and once again, gave us enormous energy to do the work, by putting their confidence in us at a time when we badly needed it. During the production of the book, we have often created severe difficulties for Oxford; but they have stood by us throughout.

It is only because all of our friends have helped us as they did that it has actually been possible.

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PHOTO ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Many of the pictures we have selected for this book come from secondary and tertiary sources. In every case we have tried to locate the original photographer and make the appropriate acknowledgment. In some cases., however, the sources are too obscure, and we have simply been unable to track them down. In these cases, we regret that our acknowledgments are incomplete and hope that we have not offended anyone.

I I 71

r

two of the most distinctive communities in the greater Bay Area, are both almost completely isolated. Sausalito is surrounded by hills and water; Point Richmond by water and industrial land. Communities which are cut off to some extent are free to develop their own character.

Further support for our argument comes from ecology. In nature, the differentiation of a species into subspecies is largely due to the process of geographic speciation, the genetic changes which take place during a period of spatial isolation (see, for example, Ernst Mayr, Animal Species and Evolution, Cambridge, 1963, Chapter 18: “The Ecology of Speciation,” pp. 556-85). It has been observed in a multitude of ecological studies that members of the same species develop distinguishable traits when separated from other members of the species by physical boundaries like a mountain ridge, a valley, a river, a dry strip of land, a cliff, or a significant change in climate or vegetation. In just the same way, differentiation between subcultures in a city will be able to take place most easily when the flow of those elements which account for cultural variety—values, style, information, and so on—is at least partially restricted between neighboring subcultures.

Therefore:

Separate neighboring subcultures with a swath of land at least 200 feet wide. Let this boundary be natural—wilderness, farmland, water—or man-made—railroads, major roads, parks, schools, some housing. Along the seam be-

13 SUBCULTURE BOUNDARY

tween two subcultures, build meeting places, shared functions, touching each community.

-{• 4*

Natural boundaries can be things like the countryside (7), SACRED SITES (24), ACCESS TO WATER (25), QUIET BACKS (59), ACCESSIBLE CREEN (60), POOLS AND STREAMS (64), STILL WATER

(71). Artificial boundaries can include rinc roads (17), parallel ROADS (23), WORK COMMUNITIES (4 I ) , INDUSTRIAL RIBBONS (42), TEENAGE SOCIETY (84), SHIELDED PARKING (97). The interior organization of the subculture boundary should follow two broad principles. It should concentrate the various land uses to form functional clusters around activity—activity nodes (30), work community (41). And the boundary should be accessible to both the neighboring communities, so that it is a meeting ground for them—eccentric nucleus (28) . . .

I 4 IDENTIFIABLE NEIGHBORHOOD**

8o

. . . the mosaic of subcultures (8) and the community of 7000 (12) are made up of neighborhoods. This pattern defines the neighborhoods. It defines those small human groups which create the energy and character which can bring the larger community of 7000 (12) and the mosaic of subcultures (8) to life.

People need an identifiable spatial unit to belong to.

Today’s pattern of development destroys neighborhoods.

They want to be able to identify the part of the city where they live as distinct from all others. Available evidence suggests, first, that the neighborhoods which people identify with have extremely small populations; second, that they are small in area; and third, that a major road through a neighborhood destroys it.

I. What is the right population for a neighborhood?

The neighborhood inhabitants should be able to look after their own interests by organizing themselves to bring pressure on city hall or local governments. This means the families in a neighborhood must be able to reach agreement on basic decisions about public services, community land, and so forth. Anthropological evidence suggests that a human group cannot coordinate itself to reach such decisions if its population is above 1500, and many people set the figure as low as 500. (See, for example, Anthony Wallace, Housing and Social Structure, Philadelphia Housing Au-

A famous neighborhood: the Vuggerei in Augsburg.

thority, 1952, available from University Microfilms, Inc., Ann Arbor, Michigan, pp. 21-24-.) The experience of organizing community meetings at the local level suggests that 500 is the more realistic figure.

2. As far as the physical diameter is concerned, in Philadelphia, people who were asked which area they really knew usually limited themselves to a small area, seldom exceeding the two to three blocks around their own house. (Mary W. Herman, “Comparative Studies of Identification Areas in Philadelphia,” City of Philadelphia Community Renewal Program, Technical Report No. 9, April 1964.) One-quarter of the inhabitants of an area in Milwaukee considered a neighborhood to be an area no larger than a block (300 feet). One-half considered it to be no more than seven blocks. (Svend Riemer, “Villagers in Metropolis,” British Journal of Sociology, 2, No. I, March 1951, pp. 31—43.)

3. The first two features, by themselves, are not enough. A neighborhood can only have a strong identity if it is protected from heavy traffic. Donald Appleyard and Mark Lin tell have found that the heavier the traffic in an area, the less people think of it as home territory. Not only do residents view the streets with heavy traffic as less personal, but they feel the same about

14 IDENTIFIABLE NEIGHBORHOOD

the houses along the street. (“Environmental Quality of City Streets,” by Donald Appleyard and Mark Lintell, Center for Planning and Development Research, University of California, Berkeley, 1971.)

neighborhood with light traffic 2000 vehicles/day 200 vehicles/peak hour 15-20 mph Two-way

Residents speaking on "neighboring and visiting”

I feel, it’s home. There are warm people on this street. I don't feel alone.

Everbody knows each- other.

Definitely a friendly street.

Residents speaking on "home territory”

The street life doesn't intrude into the home . . . only happiness comes in from the street.

I feel my home extends to the whole block.

neighborhood with moderate traffic 6000 vehicles/day 550 vehicles/peak hour 25 mph Two-way

Residents speaking on “neighboring and visiting”

You see the neighbors but they aren't close friends.

Don't feel there is any community any more₎ but people say hello.

Residents speaking on “home territory”

It's a medium place—doesn't require any thought.

neighborhood witJi heavy traffic 16,000 vehicles/day 1900 vehicles/peak hour 35-40 mph One-way

Residents speaking on “neighboring and visiting”

It's not a friendly street—no one offers help.

People are afraid to go into the street because of the traffic.

Residents speaking on “home territory”

It is impersonal and public.

Noise from the street intrudes into my home.

How shall we define a major road? The Appleyard-Lintell study found that with more than 200 cars per hour, the quality of the neighborhood begins to deteriorate. On the streets with 550 cars per hour people visit their neighbors less and never gather in the street to meet and talk. Research by Colin Buchanan indicates that major roads become a barrier to free pedestrian movement when “most people (more than 50%) . . . have to adapt their movement to give way to vehicles.⁵’ This is based on “an average delay to all crossing pedestrians of 2 seconds ... as a very rough guide to the borderline between acceptable and unacceptable conditions,” which happens when the traffic reaches some 150 to 250 cars per hour. (Colin D. Buchanan, Traffic in Towns, London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1963, p. 204.) Thus any street with greater than 200 cars per hour, at any time, will probably seem “major,” and start to destroy the neighborhood identity.

A final note on implementation. Several months ago the City of Berkeley began a transportation survey with the idea of deciding the location of all future major arteries within the city. Citizens were asked to make statements about areas which they wanted to protect from heavy traffic. This simple request has caused widespread grass roots political organizing to take place: at the time of this writing more than 30 small neighborhoods have identified themselves, simply in order to make sure that they succeed in keeping heavy traffic out. In short, the issue of traffic is so fundamental to the fact of neighborhoods, that neighborhoods emerge, and crystallize, as soon as people are asked to decide where they want nearby traffic to be. Perhaps this is a universal way of implementing this pattern in existing cities.

Therefore:

Help people to define the neighborhoods they live in, not more than 300 yards across, with no more than 400 or 500 inhabitants. In existing cities, encourage local groups to organize themselves to form such neighborhoods. Give the neighborhoods some degree of autonomy as far as taxes and land controls are concerned. Keep major roads outside these neighborhoods.

max. population of 500

max diameter of 300 yards

Mark the neighborhood, above all, by gateways wherever main paths enter it—main gateways (53)—and by modest boundaries of non-residential land between the neighborhoods—neighborhood boundary (15). Keep major roads within these boundaries —parallel roads (23) ; give the neighborhood a visible center, perhaps a common or a green—accessible green (6o)—or a small public square (61); and arrange houses and workshops within the neighborhood in clusters of about a dozen at a time— HOUSE CLUSTER (37), WORK COMMUNITY (41). . . .

A PATTERN LANGUAGE

want to lay out a green according to this pattern, you must not only follow the instructions which describe the pattern itself, but must also try to embed the green within an identifiable neighborhood or in some subculture boundary, and in a way that helps to form quiet backs3 and then you must work to complete the green by building in some positive outdoor space, tree places, and a garden wall.

In short, no pattern is an isolated entity. Each pattern can exist in the world, only to the extent that is supported by other patterns: the larger patterns in which it is embedded, the patterns of the same size that surround it, and the smaller patterns which are embedded in it.

This is a fundamental view of the world. It says that when you build a thing you cannot merely build that thing in isolation, but must also repair the world around it, and within it, so that the larger world at that one place becomes more coherent, and more whole 3 and the thing which you make takes its place in the web of nature, as you make it.

Now we explain the nature of the relation between problems and solutions, within the individual patterns.

Each solution is stated in such a way that it gives the essential field of relationships needed to solve the problem, but in a very general and abstract way—so that you can solve the problem for yourself, in your own way, by adapting it to your preferences, and the local conditions at the place where you are making it.

For this reason, we have tried to write each solution in a way which imposes nothing on you. It contains only those essentials which cannot be avoided if you really

15 NEIGHBORHOOD BOUNDARY*

86

. . . the physical boundary needed to protect subcultures from one another, and to allow their ways of life to be unique and idiosyncratic, is guaranteed, for a community of 7000 (12), by the pattern subculture boundary (13). But a second, smaller kind of boundary is needed to create the smaller identifiable NEIGHBORHOOD (iq).

The strength of the boundary is essential to a neighborhood. If the boundary is too weak the neighborhood will not be able to maintain its own identifiable character.

The cell wall of an organic ceil is, in most cases, as large as, or larger, than the cell interior. It is not a surface which divides inside from outside, but a coherent entity in its own right, which preserves the functional integrity of the cell and also provides for a multitude of transactions between the cell interior and the ambient fluids.

Cell with cell wall: The cell wall is a place in its own right.

We have already argued, in subculture boundary (13), that a human group, with a specific life style, needs a boundary around it to protect its idiosyncrasies from encroachment and dilution by surrounding ways of life. This subculture boundary,

then, functions just like a cell wall—it protects the subculture and creates space for its transactions with surrounding functions.

The argument applies as strongly to an individual neighborhood, which is a subculture in microcosm.

However, where the subculture boundaries require wide swaths of land and commercial and industrial activity, the neighborhood boundaries can be much more modest. Indeed it is not possible for a neighborhood of 500 or more to bound itself with shops and streets and community facilities; there simply aren’t enough to go around. Of course, the few neighborhood shops there are— the street cafe (88), the corner crocery (89)—will help to form the edge of the neighborhood, but by and large the boundary of neighborhoods will have to come from a completely different morphological principle.

From observations of neighborhoods that succeed in being well-defined, both physically and in the minds of the townspeople, we have learned that the single most important feature of a neighborhood’s boundary is restricted access into the neighborhood: neighborhoods that are successfully defined have definite and relatively few paths and roads leading into them.

For example, here is a map of the Etna Street neighborhood in Berkeley.

Our neighborhood, compared with a typical part of a grid system.

There are only seven roads into this neighborhood, compared with the fourteen which there would be in a typical part of the street grid. The other roads all dead end in T junctions immediately at the edge of the neighborhood. Thus, while the Etna Street neighborhood is not literally walled off from the community, access into it is subtly restricted. The result is that people do not come into the neighborhood by car unless they have

15 NEIGHBORHOOD BOUNDARY

business there 5 and when people are in the neighborhood, they recognize that they are in a distinct part of town. Of course, the neighborhood was not “created” deliberately. It was an area of Berkeley which has become an identifiable neighborhood because of this accident in the street system.

An extreme example of this principle is the Fuggerei in Augsburg, illustrated in identifiable neighborhood (14). The Fuggerei is entirely bounded by the backs of buildings and walls, and the paths into it are narrow, marked by gateways.

Indeed, if access is restricted, this means, by definition, that those few points where access is possible, will come to have special importance. In one way or another, subtly, or more obviously, they will be gateways, which mark the passage into the neighborhood. We discuss this more fully in main gateways (53). But the fact is that every successful neighborhood is identifiable because it has some kind of gateways which mark its boundaries: the boundary comes alive in peoples’ minds because they recognize the gateways.

In case the idea of gateways seems too closed, we remark at once that the boundary zone—and especially those parts of it around the gateways—must also form a kind of public meeting ground, where neighborhoods come together. If each neighborhood is a self-contained entity, then the community of 7000 which the neighborhoods belong to will not control any of the land internal to the neighborhoods. But it will control all of the land between the neighborhoods—the boundary land—because this boundary land is just where functions common to all 7000 people must find space. In this sense the boundaries not only serve to protect individual neighborhoods, but simultaneously function to unite them in their larger processes.

Therefore:

Encourage the formation of a boundary around each neighborhood, to separate it from the next door neighborhoods. Form this boundary by closing down streets and limiting access to the neighborhood—cut the normal number of streets at least in half. Place gateways at those points where the restricted access paths cross the boundary; and

TOWNS

make the boundary zone wide enough to contain meeting places for the common functions shared by several neighborhoods.

The easiest way of all to form a boundary around a neighborhood is by turning buildings inward, and by cutting off the paths which cross the boundary, except for one or two at special points which become gateways—main gateways (53); the public land of the boundary may include a park, collector roads, small parking lots, and work communities—anything which forms a natural edge—parallel roads (23), work community (41), QUIET BACKS (59), ACCESSIBLE GREEN (60), SHIELDED PARKING

(97), small parking lots (103). As for the meeting places in the boundary, they can be any of those neighborhood functions which invite gathering: a park, a shared garage, an outdoor room, a shopping street, a playground—shopping street (32), pools

AND STREAMS (64), PUBLIC OUTDOOR ROOM (69), GRAVE SITES (70), LOCAL SPORTS (72), ADVENTURE PLAYGROUND (73). . . .

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connect communities to one another by encouraging the growth of the following networks:

16. WEB OF PUBLIC TRANSPORTATION

17. RINGROADS

18. NETWORK OF LEARNING

19. WEB OF SHOPPING

20. MINI-BUSES