ALEXANDER’S HEALING OF THE CITY

The seven rules that Alexander and his colleagues
developed all attempt to guide the urban-design
process by fostering a good fit between new construction
and the existing environment.’ For example, rule
1 — “piecemeal growth — says that the best construction
increments are small, thus there should be an even
mix of small, medium, and large construction projects.1 Building on rule 1, rule 2 — “the growth of
larger wholes” — directs how specific design projects
can be seen to belong together and therefore requires
that “every building increment must help to form at
least one larger whole in the city, which is both
larger and more significant than itself” (pp. 38-39).6

In presenting such specific directives for urban
design, Alexander seems to be saying that there must
be some sort of reasoned procedure, or instrument as
I will call it here, for the actualization of wholeness,
which for Alexander is his seven rules through which
decision-makers should gain understanding and the
city should gain realization.

In contrast, Kemmis appears to have little interest in
such a line of practical understanding and clearcut
procedure; rather, he seems to believe that, if citizens
and politicians begin to put the welfare of their city
first, an understanding of what the city is and needs
to become will automatically arise through civil
discussion, mediation, and compromise: “As citizens
become more practiced at working together with the
city’s best interests at, heart, it is precisely such
structures of wholeness that recommend themselves
to their attention” (Kemmis, 1995, p. 194).

Alexander might not disagree with this perspective,
provided the participants had some degree of conscious
awareness of what the wholeness of place is
and some set of guidelines to hold this wholeness in
mind. On the other hand, Alexander says little about
how these directives, through citizen involvement,
can actually go forth into building. How, in other
words, can his instrument — the seven rules — be given
direction through various human participants?

In the studio experiment summarized above, the
rules were given direction by the students and teachers
of the design studio, who role-played a developer/committee
relationship founded in dialogue and
continual group awareness as to who was planning
what where and when. Procedurally, the students
were asked to represent developers and community
groups, while the studio faculty — Alexander and his
colleagues — took the role of an “evaluation committee.”
This committee was responsible for guiding the
growth process, and no student “vision” could be
constructed until the committee had evaluated the
idea and suggested strengths and weaknesses. All
faculty and students were involved in all discussions
about every project, so there was much mutual
understanding as to the project’s progress and ultimate
aims.’

Obviously, this method of direction is entirely
artificial and arbitrary. Ultimately, students had to
agree with the judgements of Alexander and the other
instructors and to work in relation to the rules
whether they personally agreed with them or not. At
the same time, the resulting designs were completed
only as paper plans and wooden models that never
had to face the real-world evaluation of the residents,
developers, city officials, politicians, and others who
would ultimately provide approval and funding.

In regard to applied direction, this is where Kemmis’s
ideas are a crucial complement to Alexander’s
approach: Kemmis provides an extended picture of
what is necessary, in terms of getting different parties
to discuss and compromise, if urban wholeness and
healing is to happen. On the other hand, Kemmis is
less aware of how a city works physically and
spatially. Again, we come to the basic phenomenological
principle that people are immersed in their
worlds, which first of all are physical and spatial.
The many ways that this materiality supports or
stymies human worlds and contributes to or weakens
Kemmis’s notion of the “good life and the good city”
needs the attention provided by Alexander!

In Kemmis’s inspiring work, we have the start of a
phenomenology of the process by which individuals
and groups become the engine for a city of distinctive
places, liveliness, and wholeness. At the same time,
we must better understand how existing “good cities”
work, especially the contribution of material qualities
like path layout, arrangement of land uses and
activities, qualities of architectural form, and so
forth. As a politician, Kemmis emphasizes interpersonal
and inter-group process; such a focus is crucial,
since it is always human decisions and interventions
that in the end build the city.

I am much less certain than Kemmis, however, that
citizens putting their place first will always envision
the next right move that the city must take to become
more whole. An integral part to this healing is
precise understanding and expertise grounded in the
lived-city, especially its physical, spatial, and environmental
base. In this sense, Alexander’s design
vision is an essential complement to Kemmis’s
hopeful politics of community and place.

Notes

1. Though he does not say so explicitly, one supposes that
Alexander’s model of the city is grounded very much in the
ideas of urban critic Jane Jacobs (1961), who argued that streets
are the heart of the city and should be alive with pedestrian
activity that accepts both residents and visitors. Jacobs claimed
that the grounding for a vital street life is diversity — a lively mix
of land uses and building types that supports and relies on a
dense, varied population of users and activities. She also
believed that crucial to diversity and lively streets are qualities
of the physical city -e.g., small blocks, direct surveillance from
buildings to street, high proportion of built-up areas, and so
forth. Note that Jacobs’ ideas are also an essential guide for
Kemmis’ ideas about the city.

2. Kemmis examines the political basis for this argument in his
earlier Community and the Politics of Place, which argues for
,a politics which rests upon a mutual recognition by diverse
interests that they are bound to each other by their common
attachment to a place” (Kemmis, 1990, p. 123).

3. Kernmis more thoroughly discusses the differences between
republican and federalist approaches to government in his first
book; see Kernmis, 1990, chap. 1.

4. These seven rules are: (1) piecemeal growth; (2) the growth
of larger wholes; (3) visions; (4) positive outdoor space; (5)
building layout; (6) construction rules; and (7) formation of
centers, In studying the rules carefully, one realizes that these
rules have two related functions: first, rules 1, 2 and 7 help the
designer to recognize and understand environmental wholes;
second. rules 3, 4, 5 and 6 help to create new parts in the whole
that will lead to healing and a stronger environmental order.

S. In the waterfront simulation, Alexander and his group
defined physical size in terms of floor space (less than 1,000
square feet, 1,000- square feet, 10,000-100,000 square
feet), while types of uses were defined in terms of “reasonable
distribution of functions” (p. 34) The functions of housing,
parking, and community were allotted the most space (26, 19,
and 15 percent respectively) while manufacturing, shops and
restaurants, and hotels allotted the least (12, 7, and 5 percent).

Small projects for the waterfront included fountains, kiosks,
gateways and individual houses, while medium projects included
a cafe, bakery, row houses, and waterfront park. Yet again,
large projects included apartment houses, a theater, a community
bank, a main square, an electronics factory, and a pier for
ship repairs.

6. For example, the very first project was a high, narrow
arching gate to mark the entrance to the site [see drawing on p.
1]. In terms of rule 2, this gate was important because it
generated a sense of passage that started beneath the arch and
continued south. In this way, the gate hinted at a larger whole — a
street and pedestrian mall going south into the heart of the site.
This pedestrian street was then defined more exactly by the next
two projects: a hotel and a cafe, which fixed its west side and
width (an existing building on the east fixed the street’s east
side). Soon after, another project — a community bank — established
the far end of the street, which was then completed by a
series of increments that included an apartment house, an office
building, and various construction details such as a gravel walk
and low wall.

In terms of rule 2, the key point is that each project defining
the pedestrian street did several things at once: first, it helped
to complete one major center already defined; second, it helped
to pin down some other, less clearly defined center; third, it
hinted at some entirely new center that would emerge later. One
example is the hotel, which wrapped around a garden courtyard.
First, in conjunction with the gate, this building helped complete
the southern edge of the simulation site; second, it helped to pin
down the pedestrian street by fixing its western edge; third, in
shaping itself around an outdoor courtyard, it hinted at a new
center that in later increments would become a large public
garden running south from the hotel and shaped by a series of
apartment buildings.

7. Interestingly, Alexander points out that this unspoken
agreement became stronger as the students had more experience
with the rules: “in the last stages of development, the students
were able to function almost entirely without guidance from the
committee, since the rules had been completely absorbed and
understood” (p. 110).

8. Though here, too, Alexander’s picture is incomplete and
needs complementary discussion grounded in the efforts of other
designers and planners. For example, architects and environment-behavior
researchers are only beginning to understand the
ways that the spatial patterning of pathways in the city contribute
to whether specific streets and districts have or do not have
lively, dense pedestrian movement (e.g., Hillier, 1996).

The key point is that the physical design of the city and its
districts plays an integral role as to whether urban life will be
successful (Seamon, 1994). The dilemma is that, once pathways,
buildings, and other physical elements are in place, they are not
easily or inexpensively changed. To start with a clear understanding
of the physical dimensions of place and to support
design and policy that make use of this understanding is
therefore crucial from the start of any civil discourse.

References

Alexander, C. 1985. The Production of Houses. New

York: Oxford University Press.

Alexander, C. 1987. A New Theory of Urban Design. New>

York: Oxford University Press.

Alexander, C., Ishikawa, S., & Silverstein, M. 1977. A Pattern Language. New York: Oxford University Press.

Heidegger, M. 1971. Building Dwelling Thinking. In Poetry,
Language, and Thought, pp. 145-61. New York: Harper &Row.

Hillier, B., 1996. Space Is a Machine. New York: Cambridge

University Press.

Jacobs, J., 1961. The Death and Life of Great American Cities.

New York: Vintage.

Jacobs, J., 1984. Cities and the Wealth of Nations. New York:

Kemmis, D., 1990. Community and the Politics of Place.

Norman: University of Oklahoma Press.

Kemmis, D., 1995. The Good City and the Good Life: Renew
ing the Sense of Community. New York: Houghton Mifflin.

Seamon, D., 1994. The Life of the Place, Nordisk Arkitelaurforskning
[Nordic Jrnl. of Architectural Research], 7, 4:35-48.