I bought A Pattern Language when Christopher Alexander died. His work was appreciated in the software community, and I saw report of his death on Hacker News. I read a portion of this book previously and took notes in an old iteration of this software. I only made it to page 34 or so, so I embark now on a complete reading. My previous notes pertained a lot to the building in Chicago I am redeveloping to open a coffeeshop and my own home. These will likely be themes of this reading as well.
This idea of working piecemeal cuts directly against im pei’s failed urban renewal projects in Oklahoma City, as described in the book Boom Town, and elsewhere.
I pondered the societal breakdowns of communication toward the end of my reading of Lean Thinking. The liquidation of farmers traditional way of doing things in the Netherlands under a climate policy has to be seen as an example of quashing small and local culture.
Dublin has a striking poverty at the edge of its urban area. It then leads to traditional countryside.
Can the per capita costs of high rises really be more than housing?
Chicago provides ready access to nature in the form of the waterfront, but it is not quite the same as the countryside. The countryside is mostly inaccessible, even from the northern suburbs, such that where I live, in Highland Park, my only interface with nature is the lake and parkland. Some parkland is part of prairie restoration and rather beautiful.
Illinois has no valleys due to glacial movement. Do the pollutants from the hills not roll down to the valley?
When people design housing developments near me, they build in amenities, but their presence robs somewhat from the area and neighborhood outside the complex. I wonder if the designers of these developments struggle with this, or if they have simply adopted the perspective that allows them to continue their work unabated. They even give them facades reminiscent of farm houses.
It is easy to view this statement that politics and economics are structures where the free for all has been supplanted by cooperative mechanisms with ethical content, but that is, in part, their current status in the west, and Aldo Leopoldo qualifies his own assertion with the words in part.
A service like Papertrail falls into one of these buckets or another, and structures can be put in place to encourage a mosaic of subcultures. With any group of users, the nature of reading, and the nature of books, in that they encourage both convergence and divergence of fealty to one group of ideas or another, there is sure to be opportunities for individuals to exit their ghetto. Any one title can produce this vehicle. focusing this service around books may well be one of its natural assets.
Without a basis like books, the internet evolves into ideological ghettos.
This reminds me of piano and athletics. The frame needs to be very robust and well developed, but it is in the points of articulation, that being the pianists expression, or the basketball players release, where the individual substance is, just as it is with an individual that can settle upon a community with a wealth of options open to them.
This dynamic and the mindset of its enforcers is breaking down at last.
From a lean perspective, this arrangement of villages might be pure muda. A book like this is incredibly helpful to read in relation to the lean books because it elucidated tensions and paradox necessary for a deep consideration of the organization of work.
In effect, the modern American economy has achieved something like this. Workers exchange information to control the flow of goods from home more and more. This achievement, though, produces the unseen consequence of creating concentrated work environments in foreign nations.
The North Shore of Chicago has made vast improvements in this respect. Ravinia in Highland Park was always a unique cultural offering for a suburb, but the restaurants and shops have come a long way as well.
These estimates of how many shops a population can sustain needs to be revisited in consideration of the internet.
I wish I knew some of the se measurements for locations nearer to me. There is no four story limit in Chicago, not anywhere that I am aware of. Chicago appears to have 12,000 people per square mile.
My biggest complaint about where I live currently is the driving habits it encourages.
Ring roads make me think of DC, which does feel different than most places due to its layout. I could see myself live in DC.