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19.13
The reality of urban planning
 
     
  We tend to think of strategic urban development as something as a whole- a gigantic task, rather than a system of simple rules, not complicated patently applied, until they gradually form a thing. The thing may be formed gradually and built all at one, or built over time.  
  An organism cannot be made. It cannot be conceived by a willful act of creation and then built according to the blueprint of the creator. It is far too complex far too subtle to be born from a bolt of lightning in the creator's mind. It has a thousand billion cells, each one adopted perfectly to its conditions- and this can only happen because the organism is not "made" but generated by a process which allows the gradual adoption of these cells to happen hour by hour- it is the process of life that creates the organism.  
  In panic, people try to replace the lost order of the organic building process, by artificial forms of order based on control. Since the natural processes of building towns no longer work, in panic, people look for ways of "controlling" the design of towns and buildings.  
  Those architects and planners who have become concerned by the insignificance of their influence on the environment make 3 kinds of efforts to gain" total design" control of the environment  
  1. They try to control larger pieces of the environment (this is called urban design)  
  2. They try to control more pieces of the environment (this is called mass- production or systems- building)  
  3. They try to control the environment more firmly by passing laws (this is called planning control)  
  These totaliterian efforts, although they do control more of the environment, have exactly the wrong effect. They cannot create a whole environment, because they are not sufficiently responsive to the real needs, forces, demands, problems of the people involved. Instead of making the environment more whole, they make it less whole.  
  At this stage, the pattern languages become still more fragmented and more dead. They are controlled by even fewer people; they have even less of the living connection with the people which they need.  
  Experts try tomake towns and buildings which are adopted to people's needs, but they are always trivial. They can only deal with general forces which are common to all people and never with the particulr forces that make one particular person unique and human.  
  Even when experts make buildings which are "adaptable" to solve this problem, the result is still trivial, because the unique particulars are still subservient to the common generalities. Huge machine- like buildings which allow people to move the walls around so that they can express themselves, still make them subject to the "system".  
  The central task of architecture should not be design and central planning but the creation of a single, shared, evolving pattern language which everyone controbutes to and everyone can use.  
  If we hope to bring our towns and buildings back to life, we must begin to re-create our languages, in such a way that all of us can use them with the patterns of life in them so intense, so full of life again that what we make within these languages will, almost of its own accord begin to sing.  
     
     
     
     
     
   
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
 
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