Christopher alexander - A pattern language

The number 50 comes from Mumford’s argument:

The first thing to be determined is the number of aged people to be accommodated in a neighborhood unit; and the answer to this, I submit, is that the normal age distribution in the community as a whole should be maintained. This means that there should be from five to eight people over sixty-five in every hundred people; so that in a neighborhood unit of, say, six hundred people, there would be between thirty and fifty old people. (Lewis Mumford, The Human Prosfect , New York, 1968, p. 49.)

As for the character of the group house, it might vary from

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40 OLD PEOPLE EVERYWHERE

case to case. In some cases it might be no more than a commune, where people cook together and have part-time help from young girls and boys, or professional nurses. However, about 5 per cent of the nation’s elderly need full-time care. This means that two or three people in every 50 will need complete nursing care. Since a nurse can typically work with six to eight people, this suggests that every second or third neighborhood group house might be equipped with complete nursing care.

Therefore:

Create dwellings for some 50 old people in every neighborhood. Place these dwellings in three rings . . .

1. A central core with cooking and nursing provided.

2. Cottages near the core.

3. Cottages further out from the core, mixed among the other houses of the neighborhood, but never more than 200 yards from the core.

. . . in such a way that the 50 houses together form a single coherent swarm, with its own clear center, but interlocked at its periphery with other ordinary houses of the neighborhood.

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	nearby cottages

further cottages

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Treat the core like any group house; make all the cottages, both those close to and those further away, small—old age

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cottage(155), some of them perhaps connected to the larger family housesin the neighborhood—the family(75); provide every second or third core with proper nursing facilities; somewhere in the orbit of the old age pocket, provide the kind of work which old people can manage best—especially teaching and looking after tiny children—network of learning(18), children’s home (86), settled work(156), vegetable

GARDEN ( 177) . . . .

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between the house clusters }around the centers }and especially in the boundaries between neighborhoods }encourage the formation of work communities;

41 . WORK COMMUNITY

42 . INDUSTRIAL RIBBON

43. UNIVERSITY AS A MARKETPLACE

44. LOCAL TOWN HALL

45. NECKLACE OF COMMUNITY PROJECTS

46. MARKET OF MANY SHOPS

47. HEALTH CENTER

48. HOUSING IN BETWEEN

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41 WORK COMMUNITY**

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. . . according to the pattern scattered work (9), work is entirely decentralized and woven in and out of housing areas. The effect of scattered work—can be increased piecemeal, by building individual work communities, one by one, in the boundaries between the neighborhoods; these work communities will then help to form the boundaries—subculture boundary (13), neighborhood boundary (15)—and above all in the boundaries, they will help to form activity nodes (30).

When someone tells you where he “lives,” he is always talking about his house or the neighborhood his house is in. It sounds harmless enough. But think what it really means. Why should the people of our culture choose to use the word “live,” which, on the face of it applies to every moment of our waking lives, and apply it only to a special portion of our lives—that part associated with our families and houses. The implication is straightforward. The people of our culture believe that they are less alive when they are working than when they are at home; and we make this distinction subtly clear, by choosing to keep the word “live” only for those places in our lives where we are not working. Anyone who uses the phrase “where do you live” in its everyday sense, accepts as his own the widespread cultural awareness of the fact that no one really “lives” at his place of work—there is no song or music there, no love, no food—that he is not alive while working, not living, only toiling away, and being dead.

As soon as we understand this situation it leads at once to outrage. Why should we accept a world in which eight hours of the day are “dead”; why shall we not create a world in which our work is as much part of life, as much alive, as anything we do at home with our family and with our friends?

This problem is discussed in other patterns—scattered work (9), SELF-GOVERNING WORKSHOPS AND OFFICES (80). Here We

TOWNS

focus on the implications which this problem has for the physical and social nature of the area in which a workplace sits. If a person spends eight hours a day working in a certain area, and the nature of his work, its social character, and its location, are all chosen to make sure that he is living, not merely earning money, then it is certainly essential that the area immediately around his place of work be a community , just like a neighborhood but oriented to the pace and rhythms of work, instead of the rhythms of the family.

For workplaces to function as communities, five relationships are critical:

1. Workplaces must not be too scattered, nor too agglomerated , but clustered in groups of about 75.

We know from scattered work (9) that workplaces should be decentralized, but they should not be so scattered that a single workplace is isolated from others. On the other hand, they should not be so agglomerated that a single workplace is lost in a sea of others. The workplaces should therefore be grouped to form strongly identifiable communities. The communities need to be small enough so that one can know most of the people working in them, at least by sight—and big enough to support as many amenities for the workers as possible—lunch counters, local sports, shops, and so on. We guess the right size may be between 8 and 20 establishments.

2. The workplace community contains a mix of manual jobs, desk jobs, craft jobs, selling, and so forth.

Most people today work in areas which are specialized: medical buildings, car repair, advertising, warehousing, financial, etc. This kind of segregation leads to isolation from other types of work and other types of people, leading in turn to less concern, respect, and understanding of them. We believe that a world where people are socially responsible can only come about where there is a value intrinsic to every job, where there is dignity associated with all work. This can hardly come about when we are so segregated from people who do different kinds of work from us.