...Within SANCTUARY zones, place school campuses, distributed according to need.

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Problem-statement: School campuses too often turn their backs on the surrounding city or suburb, and create dead zones in the urban fabric as well as isolated, boring places for students.

Discussion: Schools are certainly unique elements that have special requirements — among them safety for students, ample space for recreation, and sufficient size to provide for economies of management. Yet there is no fundamental reason that they must be isolated, or pose impenetrable barriers to the city.

Perhaps the best example of a necessarily large school is the university campus, which often must accommodate many thousands of students. Yet even large university campuses can be integrated directly into the walkable urban fabric, served by streetcars and other public transit, thus forming an integral part of the city separated from it by a semi-permeable (not solid) boundary.[1]

The special requirements of a campus give it even more urgent pedestrian needs. Every building generally needs vehicular access for services, but that must take second place to the pedestrian connectivity. An obsession with mono-functional zoning often forces all student dormitories on a campus to be clustered together, while all administrative functions are housed in a single, imposing building, etc. Yet functional segregation works against mixing and compactness, and does not produce an ideal learning environment.

Left, an isolated and boring university “supercampus” in Olympia, Washington, and right, a lively campus integrated into the urban 85 5. SPECIAL USE PATTERNS fabric of Portland, Oregon
Left, an isolated and boring university “supercampus” in Olympia, Washington, and right, a lively campus integrated into the urban 85 5. SPECIAL USE PATTERNS fabric of Portland, Oregon: The latter campus is in a walkable, bikeable setting, and served by streetcar and other transit.

Therefore:

Do not isolate school facilities and surround them with dead inactive edges, but weave them into the city fabric, providing stimulation to students and non-students alike. Wherever possible, put buildings on the edges, and where sports fields must go to the edges, build attractive pergolas and other structures to promote walkability. Assure that buildings are attractive at pedestrian scale, and offer interesting window views to surround- ing streets.

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Assure that the school campuses have a WALKABLE STREETSCAPE with a well-articulated PLACE NETWORK...

  1. It is helpful in this context to review patterns by Christopher Alexander and colleagues for a campus at the University of Oregon. See Alexander, C., Silverstein, M., Angel, S., Ishikawa, S., & Abrams, D. (1975). The Oregon Experiment, New York: Oxford University Press. The pattern descriptions given below are our own summaries:
    OPEN UNIVERSITY. Do not isolate the university by surrounding it with a boundary; instead, interweave at least one side of the campus into an adjoining city, if that is possible.
    STUDENT HOUSING DISTRIBUTION. Locate some student housing within the center of the campus, with different percentages in regions as one moves away from the center. The first 500m radius containing 1⁄4 of the resident students; 1⁄4 in a ring between 500m and 800m radius; and the rest outside 800m.
    UNIVERSITY SHAPE AND DIAMETER. If possible, situate classrooms within a central core of 1⁄2 km radius, and non-class activities such as administration, sports centers, and research offices outside.
    LOCAL TRANSPORT AREA. Give priority to pedestrian flow in the central core of the campus, within a radius of 1⁄2 - 1 km. Vehicular traffic here must be made to go on slow and circuitous roads.
    FABRIC OF DEPARTMENTS. While each academic department ought to have a home base, it should be able to spread over into other buildings and interlock with other departments.
    For further reading see Salingaros, N.A. (2019). Planning, Complexity, and Welcoming Spaces — The Case of Campus Design. In Handbook on Planning and Complexity, De Roo, G., Yamu, C. and Zuidema, C. (Eds.) Cheltenham UK: Edward Elgar Publishers.

Design Patterns are easy-to-understand, easy-to-apply rules for creating human buildings and cities. They provide the long-term antidote to recent trends such as cutting down urban trees, creating heat islands, and erecting glass-and-steel high-rises. Rising temperatures in such urban environments threaten the population catastrophically. Violating patterns makes a city highly fragile, establishing a dangerous reliance upon imported energy. Systemic problems cannot be saved by industrial-technological fixes, but by efficient and climate-appropriate design that implements smart thermal planning (shading devices, earth-sheltering designs, etc.). Our cities will survive only if their structure follows patterns.

Mehaffy, Michael W., Yulia Kryazheva, Andrew Rudd, and Nikos A. Salingaros. A New Pattern Language for Growing Regions: Places, Networks, Processes. Portland, Oregon, USA: Sustasis Press, 2019.

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In a special agreement, Sustasis Press has given Architexturez the rights to present twenty of the eighty new patterns from this book, for the exclusive use of architecture students in Asia. These patterns are relevant to a new era of urban challenges, meant to complement the classic 1977 book "A Pattern Language" by Christopher Alexander et al. The new book "A Pattern Language for Growing Regions" implements the New Urban Agenda and the Sustainable Development Goals, including the need for urban resilience, sustainability, and quality of life. The publication of this volume also launches an online pattern language "repository", developed in collaboration with Ward Cunningham, the original wiki developer and pioneer of pattern languages of programming.