Whenever possible translate your building program into a building complex, whose parts manifest the actual social facts of the situation. At low densities, a building complex may take the form of a collection of small buildings connected by arcades, paths, bridges, shared gardens, and walls. At higher densities, a single building can be treated as a building complex, if its important parts are picked out and made identifiable while still part of one three-dimensional fabric.

— Christopher Alexander, A Pattern Language

The practice of urban planning often boils down to a set of top-down choices, enforced with almost no correlation between decisions and desired outcomes. Planning per se tries to simplify and formalize inherently informal components of complex processes.¹ It is a modernist ideological effort to quantify and control the growing scale of our shared human condition. Furthermore, like most bureaucratic enterprises, urban planning is highly path-dependent. Jared Diamond explains how “minor cultural features may arise for trivial, temporary local reasons, become fixed, and then predispose society toward more important cultural choices.”² The choices of generations-removed planners have become ingrained not only in the patterns exhibited by our cities, but more crucially in the structures, processes, and procedures of urban plans themselves.

Architects and urban planning professionals have argued for more sophisticated forms of planning for almost a century. The concept of “eyes on the street” is most often perceived as one of Jane Jacobs’s anecdotal findings, from observing life in Greenwich Village. We associate Jacobs with social “bottom-up processes” but not with problems of “organized complexity”—despite her dealing with both topics in her oeuvre.³ Her work seems qualitative in nature, but she is coarse-graining her experience in patterns which we struggle to describe quantitatively more than 60 years after her writing. In “The Science of ‘Muddling Through,’” Charles Lindblom has further argued for the importance of cities as incremental entities: grit and patina slowly build up in successful cities, iterations of urban patterns are repeated, and slowly a city transforms into a living antifragile complex network. Good cities are able to informally digest and metabolize change, great cities often invite and welcome it.⁴

Christopher Alexander affirms that neither towns nor neighborhoods “can be created by centralized authority, or by laws, or by master plans. We believe instead that they can emerge gradually and organically, almost of their own accord.”⁵ He argues that traditionally there was little need for modern urban planning, because the slow pace of change allowed sufficient time for organic adaptation. More recently, Alain Bertaud has argued that a planner’s role should be akin to a midwife for cities.⁶ They should keep their fingers on the urban pulse and heed what people need, rather than implement arbitrary formal schemes which—as seen in examples from Brasilia to Chandigarh—often do not even reflect the needs of citizens, let alone fulfill them. It is by now obvious to many people that top-down carte blanche design simply does not work. The initial conditions of future cities are already fixed—you can gaze at them through your window. At its core, this essay argues that small-scale urban planning coupled with decentralized, interactive local governance can enable Alexander's patterns to emerge into a more complex form of citymaking. Technology, instead of delivering on the paradigm of command-and-control pseudo-smart cities, might empower communities as proactive and coordinated decision-making bodies.

Organic Planning

I believe there’s a case to be made that both Alexander and Jacobs, as well as other “qualitative” urban thinkers, are echoing a deeper order, which we are not yet able to comprehend and might never be able to decode. I suspect however that there are fantastic opportunities in merging desirable urban patterns with various levels of community control. This could transform communities from lethargic participants in tokenistic public consultations to proactive agents of change—which access the deeper order of cities by excelling at community-driven local interventions. Urban acupuncture implements small-scale projects across different areas of a city. The result—the whole—tends to be larger than the sum of all individual interventions. Currently this approach is typically limited to urban design, but a similar, distributed, and well-coordinated exercise in urban planning acupuncture might allow cities to access that higher order that Alexander hints at without the need to fully comprehend it; that kind of local governance might have a much higher impact on cities than current Cartesian attempts of imposed order and legibility.

Urban planning cannot be interpreted as a finite process. Plans should not have an expiry date—they should be circular, continuous, and responsive. Here’s a good analogy: despite popular opinion, DNA is not a top-down blueprint of the human body. It is rather a multitude of bottom-up instructions and switches that express themselves when exposed to local signals and conditions, as Joe Norman has observed. The plans of future cities should similarly look like fields of opportunity—with local context clarifying the range of decisions that local communities may take. A future city might govern itself through a network of decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs), each with its own recombination of urban patterns. It might grow organically through the distributed decisions of local cells, while learning from the synergies and conflicts generated by them, like a loosely coordinated conditional expression of urban features that would enable flexibility and respond to changing circumstances. Such an approach would transform an urban plan from a static document to a tended set of conditional rules and patterns which might express themselves selectively depending on local factors and desires.

Evolving Patterns

Alexander describes citymaking and architecture as living interactions of communities and cultures, a dynamic system that happens simultaneously at different scales. In terms of land governance Alexander attempts to rationalize management by devolving ownership and decision making to the level with the most skin in the game:

Each group makes its own decisions about the environment it uses in common. Ideally, each group actually owns the common land at its “level.” And higher groups do not own or control the land belonging to lower groups—they only own and control the common land that lies between them, and which serves the higher group. For instance, a community of 7000 might own the public land lying between its component neighborhoods, but not the neighborhoods themselves. A cooperative house cluster would own the common land between the houses, but not the houses themselves.⁷

From a complexity point of view, that’s a simplistic approach to land management. How can these entities share, connect, and interact with different aspects of ownership? There’s room for refinement; different rights of land might be managed by different communities. An independent region might take more abstract decisions that can become more meaningful by being detailed at lower levels of organization.

Alexander further expanded on this in another one of his essays. In 1968 he discussed his idea of systems generating systems. In his view a generating system is a kit of parts and rules, which by combination and interrelation generates allowable “things,” as he put it.⁸ In a sense, cities—like most complex systems—are sets of self-assembling Legos. There is an important element of hierarchy and scale in Alexander’s work in A Pattern Language. He constructs the book by zooming in: from a hypothetical world government, to independent self-governed regions, cities, towns, communities, and all the way to the material composition and internal organization of individual buildings. In a real way, Alexander’s hierarchy concerns the physical—it is typically described in terms of geography and place. Technology and communication have radically changed the landscape of hierarchy and context by adding a virtual, non-physical layer to existing locational relations. While a neighborhood or a city is physically constrained by formal or informal demarcations, one’s family, tribe, or professional association is no longer limited by geographic area.

A family has couples and groups within it; a factory has teams of workers; a town hall has divisions, departments within the large divisions, and working groups within these departments. A building which shows these subdivisions and articulations in its fabric is a human building—because it lets us live according to the way that people group themselves.⁹

In most attempts at understanding complexity, our modernist scientific reductionist biases are hard to completely remove from the equation. Jacobs described how most of us typically “wish for easier, all-purpose analyses, and for simpler, magical, all-purpose cures, but wishing cannot change these problems into simpler matters than organized complexity, no matter how much we try to evade the realities and to handle them as something different.”¹⁰ In similar fashion, paradigms of smart cities, algorithmic design, or parametric architecture simply provide brute force optionality, with little intelligence guiding urban challenges. They fail to identify a good fit by attempting to capture all of the possible taxonomic space of a certain design challenge; the parametric planner tries to look at every possible variation of a solution. At the other extreme, the ideological modernist planner believes he or she can envision the singular best design for a certain context.

Truth—as is often the case—is typically found somewhere in the middle: a combination of designed optionality refined by communal decision making. Such an approach might generate Alexander’s centers: individual sets of systems that appear distinctly as part of the larger whole: “They appear because they have noticeable distinctness, which makes them separate out from their surroundings and makes them cohere, and it is from the arrangements of these coherent parts that other coherent parts appear.”¹¹ The philosophical centers of A Timeless Way of Building are similar in scope to the practical mosaic of subcultures in A Pattern Language:

The solution is this. The metropolis must contain a large number of different subcultures, each one strongly articulated, with its own values sharply delineated and sharply distinguished from the others. But though these subcultures must be sharp and distinct and separate, they must not be closed; they must be readily accessible to one another so that a person can move easily from one to another, and can settle in the one which suits him best.¹²

Interactive Local Governance

The potential of diverse and organic urban planning and design is currently limited by the bottleneck of public governance. The sheer creativity of designers remains unexplored because the governance system is optimized for standardization. The scaling efficiencies of urban economies will probably become less important in the future, and production might be more locally devolved.¹³ Decision-making might follow a similar trend. The centralization at a national-scale of economic decision making was crucial when production and manufacturing relations happened between nations. It will be less important when production happens at a sub-national scale; a transition from global value chains to local value loops.¹⁴ Subsidiarity and fragmentation of decision-making can at the same time lower the impact of populism and media-driven politics. It might allow more active civic engagement in politics, which is more typical of local government.

In other fields this transition in governance has already started happening. This is most evident in finance. Decentralized finance—a blockchain-based attempt to emulate and subvert the traditional banking system—currently has more than one hundred billion dollars worth of crypto assets locked in smart contracts.¹⁵ It is foreseeable that after having consumed the most profitable and speculative space of the world economy, decentralization will start challenging tech-enabled enterprises, with a second easy step being what is colloquially known as the sharing economy. Ride-sharing, short-term rentals, and other matching services could easily be coordinated through smart contracts rather than costly middlemen. This would instantly remove overhead costs and needs for profit; it would significantly lower prices—a modern reinterpretation of mutual organizations.¹⁶ At the same time it would allow platforms to be governed democratically by its users and service-providers, rather than shareholders looking for short-term profits.

Networked Decentralized Autonomous Organizations

As a case in point, the past twelve years have seen a gradual boom and bust cycle of innovation in crypto space: beyond financial speculation and crypto trading however there are a number of relevant uses of blockchain tech that could revolutionize the way we govern communities, organizations, governments and, potentially, the cities of the future. This form of government could be recursive not just in scale but also in typology. One could imagine different community governments governing different aspects of the everyday. The way local government, NGOs, unions, and businesses work could be revolutionized. An individual could belong to hundreds of community organizations at different scales and varied expertise. These structures could interlock, connect, and be dependent on one-another without the fuss and bureaucracy of the current system. Policies and actions could be implemented differently and at various scales, increasing individual autonomy while at the same time improving community and collaboration. This brings all sorts of different options to mind. Interactive blueprints could automatically change by responding to neighboring developments; they could expand or restrict the range of possible options available to a specific plot. Rules could be implemented where the decision of one organization impacts the range of patterns of another. As previously mentioned, this could enable the implementation of DNA-like regulated expressions of urban pattern languages. Mistakes will undoubtedly happen. Be it by programming errors or bad-actor coordination – however such a system will be inherently resilient. Decentralization will limit damage and prevent it from propagating throughout the urban system. This will  be a relatively slow but intensely iterative process which might also allow cities to increase their reaction time to cultural change.

DAOs are, at their core, connected blockchain contracts. A smart contract can independently and autonomously store rules on the blockchain. It can connect through application interfaces termed oracles to “sense” the environment, and ultimately execute transactions—acting akin to self-reliant escrows. Smart contracts are able to store, verify, and self-execute rules agreed upon by parties independently and without outside interference. In a sense DAOs and smart contracts could become tools that assist complex planning through patterns by codifying behavior superlocally.

When A Pattern Language was published the internet was but an infant. Networks change everything. A modern pattern language would be connected, cognizant, and continuously adapting to its context. Patterns would respond to and synergize with one another. Alexander’s mosaic of subcultures could be made more accessible through a commonly owned network for communication and negotiation: a new protocol for urban governance. The future of elections and decision making will be less about multi-year representation and more about active individual participation or temporary short-term delegation. This means that one could either research an issue and be involved directly in its decision making, or one could decide to delegate a voting stake to an expert of the domain on which a decision needs to be taken. If the city needs to decide on the morphology of a new art gallery, a cultural operator might be better placed to make that decision, while if the decision concerns matters of infrastructure, an engineer might be the best person to delegate your voting stake to. This could happen temporarily for every single decision, or one could delegate entire domains to excellent individuals. The results and outcomes of decisions can be consulted to see how specific individuals have performed in such a system.

Alexander unburdens any authority from imagining how a future of patterns might come about—rather he delegates implementation to individuals, ensuring it’s “loose and voluntary, based on social responsibility, and not on legislation or coercion.”¹⁷ An attempt to subvert existing power structures could not happen formally. It would be a gradual process of education, community buy-in, and small scale implementation.

Quadratic Voting

When you combine individual greed with communal interests, you often get a situation where the good natural instincts of people are compromised. This might happen even subconsciously to a certain degree. Individuals often feel that their decisions do not have an outsized impact on their environment. Add to this the fact that the “tragedy of the commons” typically emerges when there is a relatively long lag in consequences. One interesting approach and solution to the tragedy of the commons is provided by Nassim Taleb and Elinor Ostrom and typically defined as a problem of scale rather than one of incentives:

The “tragedy of the commons,” as exposed by economists, is as follows—the commons being a collective property, say, a forest or fishing waters or your local public park. Collectively, farmers as a community prefer to avoid overgrazing, and fishermen overfishing—the entire resource becomes thus degraded. But every single individual farmer would personally gain from his own overgrazing or overfishing under, of course, the condition that others don’t. And that is what plagues socialism: people’s individual interests do not quite work well under collectivism. What Ostrom found empirically is that there exists a certain community size below which people act as collectivists, protecting the commons, as if the entire unit became rational. Such a commons cannot be too large. It is like a club. Groups behave differently at a different scale.”¹⁸

One approach being implemented by DAOs in normalizing the voting power of the largest stakeholders while hedging against the tragedy of the commons is finding a balance through mathematics. Quadratic voting is a method of decision making which doesn’t only measure a binary yes/no opinion but also the intensity of people’s preferences in collective decisions. It greatly mitigates tyranny-of-the-majority and factional control problems. Voters receive budgets of “voice credits,” which they allocate to different issues on a ballot to signal the intensity of their conviction. Their voice credits convert to “counted votes” according to their square root. So if you put one voice credit on an issue, that is equal to one vote; four credits are two votes; nine credits are three votes, and so on. You can express the relative conviction you hold for a certain decision—however at an ever escalating cost.

Ultimately all of these tools provide a framework on which to start building a new planning and governance model for cities—a paradigm shift in how we collaborate, coordinate, govern, codesign and implement pattern languages. The imminent failure of as-practiced urban planning is coinciding with the emergence of distributed decisionmaking enabled by networks and tech. For a while now architects and urbanists have argued for more organic context-based interventions; visions have fallen out of fashion. These new technologies might enable citizens to get the best of both worlds: not global supply chains but local value loops, not centralized urban visions but distributed community coordination, not urban planning regulation but living and adaptive frameworks. One might call it a localized metaverse—a virtual place for coordination, negotiation, and decisionmaking. A meeting ground for design and community through technology. Merging the potential of networks with cause-based civic engagement might produce a new way of governing and designing cities—a modern, remote-first Agora.

Notes

1. James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998).
2. Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1997): 418.
3. Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (New York: Vintage Books, 1961).
4. Charles E. Lindblom, “The Science of ‘Muddling Through,’” Public Administration Review 19, no. 2 (Spring, 1959): 79-88.
5. Christopher Alexander, S. Ishikawa, M. Silverstein, M. Jacobson M, I. Fiksdahl-King, and S. Angel, A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977): 3.
6. Alain Bertaud, Order Without Design: How Markets Shape Cities (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2018).
7. Alexander, A Pattern Language, 4.
8. Alexander, Christopher Alexander, “Systems Generating Systems.” Architectural Design 38 (December 1968): 605-610.
9. Alexander, A Pattern Language, 469.
10. Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, 434.
11. Alexander, C. The Nature of Order, The Phenomenon of Life; Center for Environmental Structure: Berkeley, CA, USA, 2001; Volume 1.
12. Alexander, A Pattern Language, 48.
13. Geoffrey B. West, Scale: The Universal Laws of Growth, Innovation, Sustainability, and the Pace of Life in Organisms, Cities, Economies, and Companies (New York: Penguin Press, 2017).
14. Baboci, Joni. Urban Circular Economy: Global value chains to local value loops. Triennale Milano Publications. 2021 https://triennale.org/magazine/larchitetto-joni-baboci-racconta-la-sua-visione-sulleconomia-circolare
15. https://defipulse.com/.
16. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutual_organization.
17. Alexander, A Pattern Language, 5.
18. Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Skin in the Game: Hidden Asymmetries in Daily Life (New York: Random House, 2018): Location 1068-1082 on the Kindle Version.