one for themselves. must research problems and solutions themselves, write them down, and continue to modify them slowly and openly. A language of these policies or patterns is something like a local constitution, printed in a form easily available to people in the community. In practice, patterns have been useful not so much for resolving problems as for breaching difficult social obstacles. They allow personal questions to arise without hesitation: "do you need a private office or a place to hold a private conversation?" Or "faculty members move around campus all day to teach, research, collaborate or A victim ofsmall-group decisions. Most people had no idea that the Urban Farm project was being halved by building construction. ext:>entmtmt; so why do they get offices with windows when secretaries have to be in their offices all day in interior spaces without contact with the outside world?" A pattern will also suggest a resolution to the problem: in the latter case, it might recommend creating buildings with more rooms that have windows. But the University has mostly put aside the idea of pattern research. This is a major practical difficulty with Alexander's approach. Such introspection takes valuable time needed for more immediate planning problems. And patterns are, by their nature, either dogmatic, incomplete or partly redundant, so drafting them is an unsatisfying task. The solutions seem to beg questions. A good example is the very first pattern in "A Pattern Language": Independent Regions. These are the human scale ideals of grassroots democracy. Keep political control local with local budgets, a very old and very good decentralist idea. For Thomas Jefferson, the incarnation of the ideology mentioned by Alexander, the United States needed to be broken into small independent wards to guard its people from steamrolling by the unaccountable, centralized power of the nation state emerging in his time. Unfortunately, Alexander's pattern "Independent Regions" does not suggest how to achieve decentralized politics when most of the world is already heavily centralized. "Gaining Independence" is a much tougher problem, and there is no pattern for it in Alexander's book. The majority of the student body has no idea that the University is carrying out a planning experiment. The faculty and staff generally understand their rights under The Experiment- many of the principles of planning are understood by anyone who stays on the campus for very long.
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy NTc4NTAz