3. Central Places Hierarchies & Networks

Networks of Centres & Sub Centres are built around:

1.Districts, nodes, landmarks, paths, edges and service hubs

2.Neighbourhood Plans, with focus points & Activity centres which match communities & centres

Copyright 2011 Phil Heywood

Nodes as Meeting Points of Paths & People

4. Places & Place Making

1. Planning with the Whole Body, Spirit, Mind & Senses

2. Randy Hester’s subconscious Landscapes of the Heart –the old Pier in Mateo

3. Joe’s sacred Place on Rough Land in Teneriffe

Lynch’s Image of the City & Vocabulary of Imagery

Alexander & The Nature of Order

Christopher Alexander has conducted a 50 year public inquiry into: 1.Relationships between intentions, activities and spaces; and2.Natural order which can underpin a pattern language for their design

This commenced with 1.his doctoral thesis Notes on the Synthesis of Form (1963), developing a theoretical basis for multiple criteria design;2.continued through A Timeless Way of Building (1977) the much celebrated A Pattern Language (1979) and A New Theory of Urban Design (1989) 3.and climaxed in his 2003-6 series The Nature of Order

Christopher Alexander’s Nature of Order

• He has now published his definitive 4 volume The Nature of Order (2002-4) including :

1. Volume One, The Phenomenon of Life, 2. Volume Two, The Process of Creating Life, 3. Volume Three, A Celebration of Life &4. Volume Four The Luminous Ground.

• In these books, he develops and demonstrates a coherent philosophy connecting science and design to express physical form as the interpretation and management of natural order.

• His argument is that people can experience and enjoy environments consisting of harmonious and living wholes. These should be designed as representations and new extensions of an ordered world, which is sustainable because of its inner balance.

Alexander’s has now crystallized natural order into 15 Principles of Good Design that underlie the 253 ideal types that constitute his Pattern Language. They are not techniques, but they are a powerful guide to good design method :

Strong Centres in Nature:A milk splash creating a corona of secondary centres

Credit: C. Alexander, 2002

Strong Centres in Daily Life:Foci Interacting to Create New Wholes

Credit: C. Alexander, 2002

Strong Centres & Wholeness in Natural Science

Credit: C. Alexander, 2002

Refraction of light particles into waves on passing through an observation slit, forming natural peaks of concentration and intervals of diminution.

A strongly centred entrance composed of practical and related elements -stairs, bench, railings, archway etc. -that invites entry and explorationCredit: C. Alexander, 2002

Interaction of Many Centres to Create Places Alive with Interaction

Bangkok Riverside dwellings, combining numerous functional centres

Playing with fire hydrants in 1930s New York: space and structure that encourage many centred life.

Credit: C. Alexander, 2002

Levels of Spatial Scale

Hierarchies of scale in tile work in Mescel and design of entrance porch to Isfahan mosque contrast with Le Corbusier's crude street level entrance design in his Marseilles Flats. Contrasts of scale should not dominate spaces, but rhythmically relate elements to each other

Credit: C. Alexander, 2002

Levels of Functional Scale:Balancing the Human & the Corporate

• When working within the broad scope of Community Planning, we need to be able ingrate wide ranges of activities and services to provide unified physical forms to link:

1. New and existing living areas2. Suburban hubs to co-locate different activities3. Intensive and iconic city centres and metropolitan scale developments

• Principles of wholeness, centeredness, contrast, alternating repetition, and most of all, linked levels of scale, can assist this process

• Though processes are universal, specific locations and functions will demand different physical forms, densities and masses.

• As a result, the form of a metropolis may come to resemble a large festival tent, rising to great heights of hundreds of metres in the centre, with a corona of pinnacles of secondary centres around public transport nodes, descending to a specifically human e scale at the city’s edges.

Boundaries

Designs, Buildings, Spaces & Settlements need strong boundaries to contain & sustain their energy: examples range from cathedral doorways to urban footprintsCredit: C. Alexander, 2002

Alternating Repetition

Good design should reflect natural patterns of self organization, as with waves, atoms & crystals.

Structural examples include tiles, columns, ridges, spaces, landforms, valleys, districts, etc.Credit: C. Alexander, 2002

Positive Space

Positive spaces are ones filled to their brims with functional life and activity without leftover areas and marginalised groups.

They include objects , structures, streets & suburbs. This example of Nolli’s17thC Plan for Rome is full of activities and active spaces. Credit: C. Alexander, 2002 Credit: C. Alexander,

2002

Good Shape

This example of an early Persian carpet displays strong recursive repetition of basic geometric elements, each with well-marked centres and internal symmetries .

These characteristics of good shape apply equally to carpets, buildings & settlements

Credit: C. Alexander, 2002

Credit: C. Alexander, 2002

Local Symmetries

Although irregular detail is often a sign of life, growth needs to adopt least effort principles and create legible new wholes. These needs will employ local symmetries that reflect and promote natural order.

Examples are related facades in harmonious street frontages & regularly distributed neighbourhood centres

Credit: C. Alexander, 2002

Deep Interlock & Ambiguity

Links between centres and surrounds is found in magnetic attraction and many other living patterns of nature.In urban design, it helps shape features like country town pavement awnings, arcades and galleria. Credit: C. Alexander, 2002

Contrast

Contrast is similar to Alternating Repetition and reflects the deep differentiation of life, including the contrasts between work and play, shelter and wilderness & movement and rest, and extension and solidity.Credit: C. Alexander, 2002

GradientsGradients create harmonious transitions between contrasting elements and opposites.

They apply equally to buildings, as in the Doge’s Palace in Venice(below), land uses, spaces, regions and cities, where gradients of dwelling densities & building heights will help create integrated settlement patterns. Credit: C. Alexander, 2002

Roughness

Irregularity, individuality, diversity, creative innovation, the random mutations of species, and systemic & spatial evolution all generate and require roughness.

Roughness can also help recognize the needs of different people and elements. Credit: C. Alexander, 2002

Echoes

This is a rhythmic quality familiar to all talented designers, musicians and writers whereby common themes in different forms and at different scales unify elements and relate them to their settings. Vernacular and compatible designs echo their environments in their form and components. Examples are Tibetan Monasteries, the Sydney Opera House & Italian hill top towns. Credit: C. Alexander, 2002

Echoes of space, time, belief & state of mind Credit: C. Alexander, 2002

The VoidDifferent from the fullness of Good Shape, the Void is a recognition of the need to leave spaces for spontaneous life to be born and for contemplation to occur. Voids can be central spaces giving calm to a room or opportunities for meeting to a community.

The eye of the storm, the flat bed of the river valley and the courtyard which is the most important space in the Cairo Mosque are powerful examples of the role of the Void

Credit: C. Alexander, 2002

Simplicity & Inner Calm

• Removal of unnecessary features results in simple designs and spaces which are flexible and comforting like the perfect simplicity of the desert sand sea, the back deck of a Queensland house or the main street of a country town.Credit: C. Alexander, 2002

Wholeness & Connectedness:Alexander’s Not Separateness

This principle, which incorporates many of the others, is equally true for nature, activities and structures. It includes, paintings, music, buildings, creek corridors, suburban social mix and regional settlement patterns.

This example , of part of the Potalain Tibet demonstrates strong interaction of centres in 3 dimensional space, as do the water lillies in their pond. Credit: C. Alexander, 2002

Unity in Diversity: Places composed of linked centres

Credit: C. Alexander, 2002

Gauguin’s Beach Scene:Centres of Nature & People combine to create a place of fulfilment

Credit: C. Alexander, 2002

Place in Our World

1. Places provide the fields where the community life and activities that we have planned and designed actually occur. They are the ground tests which show if our proposals and designs have been good or bad, and work or fail.

2. Places are where our minds and senses experience the emotions and feelings of everyday life. They can frustrate ideas or transform them into memorable experiences.

3. Our systems of towns, cities and regions can be viewed as a sheet of interacting centres of different sizes, all connected in a web of flows of people and goods. Each centre, down to the level of the individual person, is itself a system whose life is maintained through healthy links with similar , smaller, and larger entities.

Conclusions1. Place design is the outcome, test and expression of the values,

activities and investments of each community. It should reflect, like community life, the connectedness of one person to others, one place to others and one scale of community to others.

2. Place character may range from the national scale of: • Britain’s urban containment & evolved settlements; • Netherlands’ intense settlements and alternating expanses of land and water; &• Australia’s bush settings, waterside settlement and garden suburbsThrough the regional character of:•elegant Tuscan landscapes, grand Oregon mountain areas, the rich mixes of the Niger Delta and Bangladesh’s Sundabans

to the local character of :• your favourite bushwalk or local market.