THE SPACE SHAPERS

Some Christopher Alexander-isms, 'A Pattern Language – Towns, Buildings, Construction' '(1977)

Despite the age and US origins of the text, it still has significant value for our site and could assist with establishing a design framework for our concept. Alexander advocates enabling, through urban design, the potential for sub-cultures to flourish. This is in tune with our aims of enabling an arts and creative quarter to develop; the communities that we are designing for can be considered a distinctive sub-culture, with further sub-cultures within.

Our project could therefore be less about the usual urban design objectives, integration, connections, legibility etc. and more about creating a series of 'citidels'; Shoreditch, Manchester Northern Quarter, St. Ives developed because they are both distinctive and separate from their neighbouring communities. Alexander argues that the more communities become integrated with their neighbours the more they influence each other, resulting in a 'dull' lack of extremes.

How we encourage this within our own sites could be entirely down to us as individuals, moreover, a lack of coordination as we do it could be useful for creating distinctive quarters within the wider city; this seems more radical to me.

'In the heterogeneous city, people are mixed together, irrespective of their life style or culture. This seems rich. Actually it dampens all significant variety, arrests most of the possibilities for differentiation, and encourages conformity. It tends to reduce all lifestyles to a common denominator.' (p43)

Alexander argues that useful design methods for realising this goal are:

• Public squares/forums for people to come together (within their sub-culture group)
• Quality of light
• Access to soft landscape/countryside
• Enable a specialisation of work within each sub-culture – live/work, employment units etc
• Reduce vehicles moving through a community (though I think we can also use roads as effective buffers)
• Design buffers between communities that enable them to thrive in isolation – 200m at least but with meeting points where services essential to various adjacent sub-cultures can be accessed – clubs, clinics, pubs etc
• Reduce entry/exit points to individual communities – more than 200 pcus per hour reduces the quality of life for residents.
• Turn buildings away from neighbouring communities, facing into the sub-culture zone
• Distribute essential shops across neighbourhoods so they can operate autonomously
• Limit building heights to four storeys-unless dealing with major civic buildings
• Build in water – of some sort
• Open up educational centres, so that they better interact with local communities 'a market place of education'

...Tailored to the sub-culture one is designing for.