From Michael Mehaffy
Fred Pearce refers to professor of architecture Christopher Alexander saying that when your friends don’t live next door, neighbourhoods become not just irrelevant but stifling “military encampments designed to create discipline and rigidity” (16 June, p 36). Alexander was and is a well-known critic of sprawling, car-dominated and segregated settlement.
In a celebrated 1965 paper titled “A city is not a tree”, he offered an elegant mathematical demonstration of how precisely the doomed “grand plans” you mention do in fact fail.
The article’s larger thesis suffers from a similar confusion: to the extent that the mega-cities you advocate are themselves “grand plans”, they too are doomed to failure. The problem is structural, and it is not solved merely by density alone, or any other single variable of that sort. As we now understand, this is not the way complex ecologies function – including human ecologies.
Fred Pearce writes:
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• The editing of the article created some confusion about whether Christopher Alexander was for or against the grand schemes of modernist planners. Michael Mehaffy is right to point out that the paper “A city is not a tree” attacks the planners. Indeed, I quoted him describing their “military encampments”. But, far from offering opposition to car-dominated settlements, the paper argues that the solution lies in personal freedom through maximum mobility – in cars. And therein lies the problem.
Lake Oswego, Oregon, US
