Author's note: I will present innovative techniques for designing a campus, in a ten-part essay. The most human campuses (corporate, or university) combine adaptive geometric typologies acting in partnership. This is the secret to creating great urban spaces that invite use, above and beyond any formal design. The method helps us to understand the success or failure of urban clusters in promoting pedestrian life. Reference will be made to eight city types as described in the book-length paper “Eight city types and their interactions”. These are labeled: Nourishing-physical, Fractal, Network, Spontaneous self-built, Virtual, Developer, Anti-network, and Inhuman. Every city, and each region of a city, is some mixture of these eight city types. Mixing distinct city types in various proportions makes possible an infinite variety of urban settings with widely different human characteristics.

1. Welcoming open space1

Preamble

In January of 2017, the Vice-president for Building, Development, and Sustainability Strategies of the University of Reims, France invited me to consider designing their new campus. The project would re-design and transform existing buildings, “re-think” the usual approach, and make a master plan for future growth. I had been to the city for a conference, but not to the site of the new campus. I proposed a core team of three New Urbanists who also have knowledge of Alexandrian design methods: our team would invite other New Urbanist friends based in Europe to join us, as needed.

I had a Skype interview with the University President, who is a computer scientist. I presented our approach as an entirely innovative design methodology that parallels Design Patterns in software. He was intrigued and surprised by this connection, as New Urbanism meant nothing to him. So the Alexandrian angle seemed to work better to convince the authorities in this particular case. I prepared some material on the theoretical design foundations and sent it to the President. I outlined four points on how we would like to move forward as a consultancy on the project:

1. We write a set of guidelines for future builders of new campus buildings.

2. Our team diagnoses the existing campuses (3 of them in Rheims) and recommends the most pressing interventions.

3. Our team works with the University to repair the existing public spaces and to propose the siting and design of new buildings.

4. At a later date, we would participate in the competitions of which architect gets to build the new buildings.

Everyone involved (my contacts in Reims plus my team partners) wanted to pre-empt the entire process being given to conventional industrial campus design. Unfortunately, this project never got off the ground, and none of us made a preliminary site visit. But the material explaining the union of New Urbanist and Alexandrian design techniques for a new campus is relevant in general. This is a radical approach to urbanism, and presenting the “open-source” design tools gives others a chance to do something really innovative. I hope these will inspire colleagues to push for the design and re-design of both corporate and university campuses.

Welcoming open spaces

It is possible today to build learning institutions that offer a marvelous, life-enhancing environment for students, faculty, and staff? 

The experience and imageability of any particular campus depend upon its spaces and perceivable organized detail. Those qualities are what the visitor remembers, and what the students, faculty, and staff experience every day. This result is not accidental or haphazard, but can be achieved by deliberately applying mathematical design guidelines. Those combine visually-oriented design with functionality. I list some of the most common mistakes below, so that knowing to avoid them will lead to a much improved campus design.

Many campuses built in the past several decades contain dysfunctional urban spaces. Those spaces do not invite, and in many cases actually prevent pedestrian use expected of an open plaza. The problems can be divided into two categories: (1) impediments to crossing the space, and (2) problems inherent in the surrounding structures.

Physical obstacles to traversing open space include continuous low walls for sitting that cut diagonal paths (but those low walls could be very effective when situated radially/transversely); badly-placed pools of water that do the same thing; misusing green in lawn that is out-of-bounds for people and which prevents direct paths; changes of ground level that cannot be easily negotiated; steps that prompt a pause and mental concentration in the user, which could have been eliminated; unnecessarily steep sloping ground, etc. All of these built features betray a lack of understanding of what mechanisms make an urban space function as such (Salingaros & Pagliardini, 2016).

Paths become robust when reinforced by an adjoining edge (see “Theory of the Urban Web” in (Salingaros, 2005)). Elements such as benches, low walls, lawn boundaries, and stairs need to run next to and parallel to potential paths, not across them. A sufficiently wide staircase encourages flow along its bottom step much more than transverse movement up-and-down the stairs.

The second set of problems concerns the buildings surrounding the open space. The ideal qualities here include compositionally rich and visually welcoming façades, such as found in highly-ordered information, fractal scaling, and multiple symmetry content of traditional buildings. One feels the desire to cross a plaza or open space when attracted by a visible, emotionally-welcoming goal on the other side (whereas minimalist concrete, bonded brick without patterns or features, and glass curtain-walls — none of which attract us emotionally — trigger the opposite effect). Another welcoming quality of the boundary is to be found in porticoes on one or more sides of the plaza (Salingaros & Pagliardini, 2016). Such a protected space encourages pedestrian activity all around the boundary of the open space. Discontinuous arcades may look nice but, are, as a consequence, never used.

2. Alexander’s Oregon patterns2

Alexander's Oregon patterns

Christopher Alexander derived design rules for the University of Oregon campus in 1975, and those rules are universal. 

We can apply the Nourishing-physical + Fractal + Network city (Salingaros, 2017) to design a campus that will contain all the positive qualities of our best-loved historical institutions. A college or university campus represents an urban microcosm, with its limited yet often extensive area and restricted mixture of uses. One needs different buildings for classrooms, research laboratories, libraries, student housing, cafeterias and student activities, sports, maintenance, administration, etc. The pedestrian realm is paramount, since students have to walk from building to building. Essential vehicular connections ideally go around or under the main network of pedestrian paths.

Christopher Alexander created a long-term planning strategy for the University of Oregon based on design patterns. Some of those patterns appear in his classic book A Pattern Language (Alexander et al., 1977), whereas others are to be found only in the lesser-known The Oregon Experiment (Alexander et al., 1975). I recall some of those findings here, and explain how they apply to the eight-fold classification of city types. The pattern descriptions given below are my own summaries.

Oregon Pattern 2: 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.”

Oregon Pattern 3: 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 500 m radius containing ¼ of the resident students; ¼ in a ring between 500 m and 800 m radius; and the rest outside 800 m.”

Oregon Pattern 4: University shape and diameter. “If possible, situate classrooms within a central core of ½ km radius, and non-class activities such as administration, sports centers, and research offices outside.”

Oregon Pattern 5: Local transport area. “Give priority to pedestrian flow in the central core of the campus, within a radius of ½ – 1 km. Vehicular traffic here must be made to go on slow and circuitous roads.”

Oregon Pattern 12: 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.”

Implementing the Network city (Salingaros, 2017) prevents cultural and social fragmentation, while the Fractal city (Salingaros, 2017) helps to distribute forms on many different scales. The Network city emphasizes pedestrian paths forming a network of connected urban spaces, and protects those paths from encroachment by vehicular traffic. It also offers integral connectivity between the campus and the city outside. The special requirements of a campus give it even more urgent pedestrian needs. Every building needs vehicular access, 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 does not produce an ideal learning environment, as it works against mixing and compactness.

The departmental pattern (Oregon Pattern 12 given above) points to a pragmatic approach that has a major influence on planning morphology. Whereas it is standard practice to segregate academic departments into separate buildings, that never works in practice. Suppose the “Chemistry Building” is funded and built. Yet by the time the Chemistry Department gets to move into its new offices and laboratories, it has either grown or shrunk in size, so it no longer perfectly fits the building. It is more practical to adopt the approach that no single building should be expected to contain a university department. Thus, it makes better sense to physically connect a building to adjoining buildings rather than have it standing apart.

3. Avoiding planned isolation3

Avoiding planned isolation

There is no practical reason to isolate a campus from the larger community, and that is only a holdover of single-use planning. 

People perceive campuses with block buildings and hard open spaces as bleak, desolate, threatening, inhuman, and totalitarian. The human scale is missing. And yet this industrial style has shaped a majority of institutional construction for decades. It would appear that school administrators decided to industrialize education, and concluded that industrial-modernist architecture was most appropriate for the task. The campus becomes a piece of the Inhuman city (Salingaros, 2017) in which buildings are placed too far apart to connect.

The planning habit of mono-functional zoning is also applied to unnecessarily separate a campus from a region of “normal city”. This way of thinking is responsible for the “corporate campus” of major companies isolated in the woods, or at least far out in suburbia. But, while that setting has positive biophilic qualities, it is deliberately not part of the city. An even worse precedent is the misleadingly-named “office park”, which is just a cluster of unrelated office buildings. Both of those urban typologies define a life separated from the rest of humankind.

Historical evidence points to the intentional isolation of workers from city life so that they could be totally controlled by the employer during the workday. The corporation tried to force employee allegiance by isolating them. In a similar vein, many people believe that social engineering was applied to High School and college campuses, implementing a fortress typology in order to better control rioting students. But this claim is unsupported: it just happens that architectural style coincided with typologies whose principal concern was security.

While the corporate campus was, at least in name, loosely copied from the traditional university campus, its urban model is the suburban shopping mall surrounded by vast areas of open parking. Everyone commutes by car. But now this typology has come full circle, with institutions of higher learning copying the isolated corporate campus and suburban office park.

From “Eight city types and their interactions”, keynote speech at the 11th International Congress on Virtual Cities and Territories, Krakow, Poland, 6–8 July 2016 (Salingaros, 2017). 

We connect emotionally to specific pieces of the environment

We love a city when we can connect to it intimately. We retain a warm memory of that interaction. This memory consists of visual, olfactory, acoustical, and tactile connections. All of these memories can be formed only on the pedestrian level, far below in scale than the shortest walkable path. Our largely subconscious memory of a city is formed on a visceral level, on the physical scale of our own bodies. The “soul” of a city exists precisely on its smallest architectural scales. This turns out to include the “detritus” which modernism tried so hard to eliminate — unaligned and crooked walls, a bit of color, peeling paint, architectural ornaments, a step, a sidewalk tree, a portion of pavement, something to lean against, someplace to sit down outside, etc.

The anti-fractal movement of the twentieth century began with a call to destroy ornament. Architectural ornament is an intrinsic part of the entire city, however, and destroying it destroys one segment of the city’s scales. Such an action erases the levels in the urban hierarchy spanning the scales 1 mm to 1 m. Soon afterwards, structures that anchored urban space — built structures ranging from 1 m to 3 m, such as kiosks, benches, porticoes, gazebos, low walls for sitting, etc. — were erased. Last came the elimination of sidewalks and the pedestrian connectivity of nearby buildings. What was left was only appropriate to the automobile city, not for pedestrian movement.

The pedestrian city has something important to offer, namely — an emotionally nourishing physical environment. There is visual excitement, the joy of physical movement, the thrilling experience of vibrant city life, the sensory stimulation from urban space filled with other people of different types and different ages. Le Corbusier despised all of this, and he went about eliminating it systematically via the CIAM planning rules. His books on urbanism espouse only the delights of driving around in a sports car. The elimination of urban space, connected green space, and the human scale from the urban fabric removed the unique set of forces that generate and support the pedestrian city.

Urban life requires a connected network of pedestrian urban spaces, whose sizes obey an inverse-power distribution. A multiplicity of pedestrian paths is harbored and protected by open and semi-enclosed urban spaces. One cannot exist without the other. The network of urban space coincides with and supports the network of pedestrian paths. Architects no longer design urban spaces that people wish to spend time in, however, and any built urban spaces are totally disconnected from the pedestrian network, hence from each other.

4. ‘Walkabout’ design with human sensors4

Design methods using emotional feedback from people have a lot in common with how the Spontaneous Self-built City (Salingaros, 2017) arises. Slum dwellers do not follow building regulations, but are instead guided by their intuition and the physical limits of available materials, space, and topography. Incorporating aspects of that design freedom into conventional practice yields a method that adapts better to human feelings and sensibilities. I have proposed implementing this method to upgrade informal settlements and erect new self-built housing around the world (Salingaros, 2011).

Given modern industrial materials and systems of construction, there is an economy to rectangular spaces in terms of standard materials, labor, and utility. Regular building codes have a very limiting effect on design, and act against individual negotiations with existing conditions. And yet, an intuitive method obviously worked for millennia. Ever since people have had to rely on architects and the building industry for one century, they have forgotten or have suppressed their instinctive dwelling-making skills. If today’s industrial-modernist paradigm is to be overcome, or at least modified to obtain a more human design, we need to re-awaken those timeless methods of design (Alexander, 1979).

I’m going to delve into the design methodology known as collaborative, consensus, or participatory design. That approach involves eventual users in an essential manner in producing the design. I will need only one very specific component of the collaborative method, which makes design decisions on the basis of direct emotional feedback (an exploratory method for creating the Nourishing-physical + Fractal + Network city) (Salingaros, 2017). An intuitive judgment based on the users’ feelings and imagination is made before construction, giving birth to the design using only what exists already on the site.

The method is the following: choose a group of about five people, to include a child if children are going to use that place or live there. The group walks the grounds trying to imagine the proposed building fronts already standing; not in some predetermined form, but rather where a built wall and openings would feel best to reinforce those open spaces. The “walkabout” guarantees that urban spaces are well defined on a human scale and are connected by a network of pedestrian paths (Network city) (Salingaros, 2017). For this process not to be ill-defined, the group needs some rules and guidelines of what is possible; and the group should include someone trained and knowledgeable in Alexandrine Patterns to guide the process. Decisions are reached by discussion and consensus.

Christopher Alexander suggests for the group to carry wooden stakes and poles with small flags on them (Alexander et al., 2012). Those are used to mark the paths, the boundaries of open spaces, and the footprint of the imagined buildings. Someone could hold a large Styrofoam panel and stand in particular spots so that the group can decide if that’s the optimal position for a wall. If all goes well, then multiple factors such as solar orientation, adaptive use to wind flows, levelness of the land, and regard for natural elements on the site (trees, boulders, sharp drop-offs, steep hills, etc.) will be accommodated just by the sensory feedback.

After this design walkabout has been carried out on the actual grounds, and checked once again after the positions of other key elements have been decided, the plan is transferred to a measured drawing. “Cleaning up” the design so as to align directions and tidy up the geometry should be resisted, since that may invalidate the empirical discoveries of the group. This is the opposite of the standard procedure, in which everything down to the details is drawn in the office, and then built. In the conventional design approach, the users get to experience the final configuration after it is permanent; i.e. only after it is too late to make any adjustments, or even to correct major errors and omissions.

Alexander himself used this method to build a new high-school/college campus outside Tokyo (Alexander et al., 2012). Once the urban design and the architecture of each individual building had been determined, the construction of the campus was carried out via conventional methods. The resulting cluster of buildings and grounds show a degree of life that is essential for human engagement and wellbeing.

The exploratory design group should include persons who have a strong interest in using the built urban fabric after it’s completed. It is recommended to have someone with sufficient technical knowledge to help provide structure to the decision-making process. Individuals participating in the “walkabout” should be encouraged to draw upon their human intuition and sense of place to guide them in their conclusions. This can be difficult at first, given the decades of industrial-modernist construction led by architects and professional builders, which distanced users from their instinctive sense of dwelling and place-making. The detachment was achieved by institutionalizing both design and construction.

Alexander’s method puts our human sense of place ahead of industrial design practices, by promoting human intuition ahead of formal planning. Exploring the site, on foot, independently of existing paths and road structures (except for features that absolutely cannot be changed) helps to establish an optimal connected network of pedestrian paths linking urban spaces. At the same time, the exploratory process discovers how the pedestrian network should connect to internal and external vehicular networks.

The same method applies to diagnose already built urban fabric. An exploratory design group discovers and then maps those healthy places where it observes intense urban life, and which are deemed by their users to be vital. That quality is judged both by positive emotional feedback and by the density of pedestrian use. Such spots are marked as being protected from damage or encroachment by new projects. Yet those key healthy places could be architecturally modest objects, such as a tree, a wall, a corner, a small structure, etc., that conventional planning would not hesitate one second before eliminating.

Equally important is for the exploratory walkabout to identify pathological paths and places. If a place or pathway triggers psychological distress, there is something wrong with the geometry. The sensations could be a feeling of being oppressed; made anxious or threatened by the geometry or by something else; of being too exposed; ill-at-ease, etc. First identify those spots, and then think of possible restructuring and transformations to fix the problem — which is an emotional and/or intuitive reaction, not something that can be easily discovered from looking at a plan. If the new planning scheme requires that something be destroyed to erect a new building, then care should be taken to leave the healthy places alone while sacrificing the unhealthy ones instead. This way of thinking can help repair the urban fabric by not allowing new construction in arbitrary locations, such as where someone thinks it’s a good idea simply based on the plan.

5. Budgeting for a fractal city5

How to build a fractal city through budget allocation

The geometrical notion of fractals combining components of different sizes translates into a funding formula that allows us to build all the sizes in an urban ensemble. 

How do we optimally distribute the money to be spent on building the Fractal city (Salingaros, 2017)? It has to be done using a fractal distribution of funding. Suppose that we have a central source that allocates different sums to specific projects, and where each project competes with the others for funding. This is the case with a university campus, since the majority of the budget comes from a single source, with the possible exception of specific donations for individual buildings (and even those often have to be “matched” by university funds). The administration has to argue for its projects’ approval in front of the funding agency, its own coordinating board, or the government.

The conventional procurement method is rigidly anti-fractal because it concentrates on the largest projects: those need the most money, and not getting them approved carries the greatest risk. But that top-heavy mindset too often ignores the intermediate and small-scale projects. The budgetary thinking is that those can be accomplished by way of the university’s general operating budget, or from discretionary funds found here and there. Yet that is seldom the case, and a systemic imbalance towards the largest scale remains to shape the built environment in undesirable ways.

A big project is easily presentable, hence an important marketing tool. The architect draws a pretty picture of the large stand-alone new building, which is used to convince the decision makers. The idea of a single structure and its striking image can be linked to expectations of how this new structure will make the University look like it is growing and thus successful, progressive, and modern. But the current system can create dead spaces in-between indifferent stand-alone new structures. It is much harder to use smaller, interlinked projects to market the university’s value. Human psychology works against presenting an intricate, adaptive environment: it has to be experienced in person because its life-affirming qualities do not show in a picture!

The Fractal city suggests a better funding formula. Just as a fractal has components whose sizes obey an inverse-power distribution, we propose the same law to govern funding for projects according to cost/size. An inverse-power distribution is one where the number of objects in a system is inversely proportional to their size: there exist only a few large objects, several more of intermediate size, and very many smaller ones, increasing in number the smaller they get. Fractal funding would support only a few large projects, several of intermediate cost, and very many low-cost projects, in a balanced relationship that favors the lower-budget ones.

A simple means to apply a fractal distribution to the funding formula is to divide the total budget into equal portions; say five. Then assign each 1/5 portion of the budget equally among a group of construction proposals having roughly the same cost/size. That will automatically guarantee that the smaller the projects are in terms of funding, the more of them will be approved. While we may never be able to systematically change the budgetary process, just getting this kind of thinking into the heads of the university planners as they work to prioritize projects might begin the process of seeing how fractal budgeting helps to create a greater equity in overall place-making within the campus.

This revolutionary approach to budgeting is the best way to keep healthy urban fabric in repair. Most interventions and additions that can make a great deal of difference for the better are either of small or intermediate size. Those need to be done often. The largest projects, which the current system is skewed to privilege, are possible only every few years. The university sees these new buildings as visible proof that it is growing, and, while it may not display such a building in a student brochure, it feels satisfied with the news coverage. But those big projects are disastrous when they fail. Of course they make money for the builder, but that’s not the point here.

Christopher Alexander first proposed this fractal funding formula in his long-term urban plan for the University of Oregon (Alexander et al., 1975). Alexander’s result was based on his own original analysis, and came before the introduction of fractals into architectural theory. I explain why this inverse-power distribution is essential for the stability of all systems, as for example ecological systems (see “A Universal Rule for the Distribution of Sizes” in (Salingaros, 2005)). There are really very deep justifications for this approach that have to do with the nature of complex systems. If by past precedent the formula for funding projects has become skewed towards the largest scale, we have to work to remedy this imbalance. How projects are funded is the key to creating more human-scale spaces and places.

From “Eight city types and their interactions”, keynote speech at the 11th International Congress on Virtual Cities and Territories, Krakow, Poland, July 2016 (Salingaros, 2017). 

Fractal distribution of project funding and urban elements

A large lump development includes large projects, but very few medium and small projects. The total amount of money allocated invariably nowadays goes to these large projects, and the larger the project, the more chance it has of being funded. This situation destroys the urban fabric, for the following reason. Ongoing repair of the fabric also requires the allocation of funds for a large variety of projects on all the intermediate levels of scale, and most importantly, for an enormous number of very small projects. What happens in practice is that the giant projects eat up all the available money, and therefore leave nothing to be spent on smaller and intermediate size construction. Without repair, the entire city decays.

A funding distribution skewed heavily towards the large scale gives rise to a particular philosophy of urban growth. By ignoring the small and intermediate scales, urban actions become interventions, and then turn exclusively to the large scale. Any urban solution is erroneously believed to succeed only on the largest scale. Repair of existing buildings is deemed unimaginative or uneconomic, and piecemeal growth by adding successively to existing structures is not even seriously considered. The organic growth of cities, such as occurred for millennia to generate the best-loved urban regions all over the world, is ruled out. This philosophy has transformed our cities by replacing their natural, fractal structure with enormous, unlivable apartment blocks and unused urban plazas.

Traditional cities and towns contain urban elements of many different sizes; from the largest buildings down to street furniture, bollards, and potted plants. I claim that a necessary though not sufficient condition for a living city is that urban units be distributed according to an inverse power-law scaling (where the number of components is inversely proportional to their size). The larger buildings and open spaces should be few, and increase in number as their size decreases. Most important, there must be smaller urban elements, in increasing numbers, down to the human scale. These include clearly-defined subdivisions of larger units, as well as separate autonomous structures. The hierarchy does not stop there, however, but should continue through architectural scales in buildings, into the structural scales found in natural materials.

6. The university campus as a microcosm of tradition6

Well-defined urban space is not merely an aesthetic option; it is a vital necessity to the campus experience on a human level (Salingaros & Pagliardini, 2016). The most valued universities have prominent open spaces, not necessarily large, but always distinctive and very well defined. University open spaces work best of all, and are the most memorable, when flanked by historic buildings (i.e. particularly those with well-developed form languages in their designs). Those spaces frequently define the university’s identity for the rest of the world.

Creating welcoming urban space depends upon building types. Many universities pride themselves on having buildings designed in contemporary styles placed prominently around campus, and newer additions seem to follow an institutional model of stand-alone buildings. Fashionable “contemporary” buildings are being built more and more with donations from wealthy donors (who expect their name to grace that building), but research shows that more traditional biophilic architecture lends itself better to a learning environment (Nourishing-physical city) (Salingaros, 2017).

Pre-modernist buildings provide, through their materials and designs, organized information that helps trigger a greater sense of wellbeing, which in turn promotes greater participation and engagement on the part of students, faculty, and staff. To the contrary, industrial-modernist buildings emulate sensory deprived environments, which can create a degree of hidden anxiety that permeates the learning experience. It is harder to learn and retain information in stressful situations or environments. Parents expect their children to learn from traditional stores of knowledge, and, while innovation is expected and welcomed, it is not supposed to displace inherited knowledge. The traditional center of learning represents cultural inheritance, and that should also show in its buildings.

An informal survey of brochures put online to entice prospective students in the USA (and even more, to convince those students’ paying parents) reveals that the vast majority features strictly traditional buildings. Those older buildings have an instinctive appeal because they link to stable and timeless values. While universities may indeed have industrial-modernist or alarmingly “contemporary” buildings on campus, those are not usually displayed in the brochures. Expensive private institutions, especially, employ psychological marketing techniques to justify the high expense of a university degree with their long-standing prestige. Those present their traditional campus structures instead of their more contemporary (abstract) structures, since people typically respond to the thrill of architectural transgression with alarm, and subconsciously sense that inherited knowledge is also being threatened (Salingaros, 2014).

Two separate design problems are relevant to institutions of learning: (i) choosing an appropriate architecture for new buildings, and (ii) laying out the plan of the campus. The first question leads to a sort of schizophrenia, because parents tend to want traditional “reassuring” buildings, whereas the university is pushed by fashion trends to choose the opposite in new buildings. It would appear that the administration recognizes this conflict, preferring that the parents discover the alarming contemporary buildings on campus — representing transient ideas — only after their children start to attend classes at that institution.

The second problem creates a conflict between the need for additional buildings, and the necessity for all students to reach their classes within a 10-minute walk (the normal break between classes). These two demands are irreconcilable if the campus keeps expanding with singular new buildings, as most do. The solution is to implement an intelligent compactness and intricately folded complexity, such as I discuss here under the Fractal city (Salingaros, 2017). The opposite trend, which is to erect stand-alone industrial-modernist or “signature” buildings, negates compactness and useful urban spaces. For creating intelligent compactness and intricately folded complexity, traditional spatial solutions work best.

Institutions that have gambled with their endowments to erect gleaming new buildings by trendy architects are participating in a very expensive experiment. They invested in flashiness instead of reinforcing the spatial and urban qualities of the campus. They took a massive bet that those cutting-edge university buildings will draw in a new generation of paying students. A separate misconception is that cutting-edge research requires alien structures to house it, and thus universities erect flashy new buildings to draw in research dollars. Whether that occurs or not is a matter to be determined by future applicant statistics and number of grants. Nevertheless, partial results already hint that the experiment of innovation through fashionable but disruptive design is a dismal failure. Lists of “The ugliest campuses in the USA” invariably include precisely those institutions whose buildings’ design purposely panders to pseudo-intellectual pretentions that naturally oppose our biology (Inhuman city) (Salingaros, 2017). Who wants to go to a University that is included in such a list?

A glowingly positive example is Christopher Alexander’s High-School/College campus outside Tokyo, built in 1985 (Alexander et al., 2012). Alexander and his design team researched deeply into Japanese architectural culture to extract a form language appropriate for an institution of learning. The result is a modern campus that has comfortable, timeless qualities. Students, teachers, and parents love it. The only problem that arose was with the local construction companies, which had been expecting to build the usual concrete boxes.

From “Eight city types and their interactions”, keynote speech at the 11th International Congress on Virtual Cities and Territories, Krakow, Poland, July 2016 (Salingaros, 2017). 

Learning institutions embrace fashionable trends

An architecture that reverses structural algorithms so as to create disorder — the same algorithms that in an infinitely more detailed application generate living form — ceases to be architecture. Deconstructivist buildings are the most visible symbols of actual deconstruction. The randomness they embody is the antithesis of nature’s organized complexity. This is despite effusive praise in the press for “exciting” new academic buildings, such as the Peter B. Lewis Management Building at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, the Vontz Center for Molecular Studies at the University of Cincinnati Medical Center, and the Stata Center for Computer, Information, and Intelligence Sciences at MIT, all by Frank Gehry. Housing a scientific department at a university inside the symbol of its nemesis must be the ultimate irony.

Otherwise knowledgeable clients — including academics — have been seduced to commission tortuous buildings in the deconstructivist style. There are fellow architects who proudly proclaim the virtues of a new university building by a famous deconstructivist architect, such as the Aronoff Center for Design and Art at the University of Cincinnati by Peter Eisenman. At the same time, ordinary people consider it ugly, odd-looking, and senseless.

Deconstructivist buildings resemble ruins whose structure has been somehow violated: Warsaw, Dresden and Hiroshima immediately after their bombing; buildings after a major earthquake; Manhattan after 11 September 2001, etc. These structures encode their physical violation in what remains of their destroyed form, and this quality is sought by some deconstructivist architects. Industrial materials tend to produce jagged, fragmented ruins that remain so because they weather very poorly or not at all. But the weathering of natural materials generates an altogether different type of ruin; one in which time and nature — often helped by human interventions at reinforcing and partially restoring what is left of the structure — try to minimize the form’s violation.

7. Why we hug the edge of open spaces7

Human biology, an artifact of our evolution, dictates much of how we behave, and offers the key to how space is actually used. Interactions with the built environment determine our behavior, often in surprising and mysterious ways. For example, people tend to avoid exposed open space and prefer to walk along its protected edges or perimeter boundaries (Salingaros, 2005: pages 32-33). Ann Sussman and Justin Hollander (2015) discuss the mechanism of thigmotaxis, defined as how organisms move in response to edge conditions: research finds that not just humans today but primitive microscopic organisms going back in evolutionary times also tend to avoid open spaces and stick to protected edges. For the human brain, the edges not only help us feel safe, they help us efficiently orient and create a “mental map” of our surroundings.

Our sensory system evaluates every physical setting we inhabit, however briefly. Our neural computations do not present us with a quantitative answer, of course, but instead we get an unmistakable feeling in our body reacting to hormones and nerve signals. Our body’s intuitive response tells us whether the immediate environment is safe or not. The human perceptive system is exquisitely designed to detect variations in the quality of our surroundings. We adapt our behavior accordingly.

A spatial configuration, translated subconsciously but very rapidly into an intuitive assessment of where we are, can be evaluated only in person, directly, using one’s senses — all of them. That is why, ultimately, our perceptual system is the only qualified and dependable judge of where we are and whether it is good for us. Such judgments cannot easily be made from pictures, architectural drawings, intellectual arguments, or others’ opinions.

Almost all architects have been taught to think of space as fixed and static, whereas human movement and life always generate a dynamic interaction with our environment as we move through it. Life couples us to the structures we inhabit, our perception engaging an information field that shifts continuously as we move. Dynamic interaction determines the effect that the environment exerts on us as we move about, and these complex signals are static only when we are stationary. Adaptive design takes into account our visceral responses as a result of movement — the dynamic versus the static nature of information, which are entirely different.

The architectural experience of paths, for example, can be explained by understanding “dynamic biophilia.” Wayfinding, whether inside or outside, depends on our assessment of environmental information changing as we move about. Markers and signals help us navigate a space by continuously reinforcing our perception of how we are expected to flow through it, or, conversely, such signals, if poorly designed, hinder our movement with psychologically confusing cues (Lyons Stewart, 2015). Much directional and navigational information resides in visual patterns on the ground. These engage us and draw us to move forward, and keep us on the path.

In conventional architectural practice, paths in buildings and other built spaces tend to be designed as abstractions. Artistic intent expressed on a plan too often trumps utility and human nature. That approach ignores both biophilia and the dynamics of human interaction with structures. People get lost because the architect or interior designer did not apply adaptive design to direct movement efficiently (Lyons Stewart, 2015). We frequently get ambiguous or even contradictory signals from the built environment as we move. The paths by which we navigate spaces can be disturbing — often generating the sensation that we would rather walk elsewhere but are thwarted by obstacles, either signs denying passage or structures blocking passage. We are biological creatures, after all, and respond subconsciously far more than we realize to the world around us.

A Pattern Language (Alexander et al., 1977) presents design tools for indoor and outdoor paths that pay attention to human sensibilities. The following five living patterns (with my own summaries) provide the elements for a design template that determines paths:

Pattern 98: Circulation Realms. “Navigation must be intuitive and effortless. It helps to have an obvious sequence of flows, a correct positioning of paths, and appropriate supporting structures.”

Pattern 114: Hierarchy of Open Space. “Satisfy the feeling of having one’s back protected by a solid structure (refuge), while being able to see out to the world (prospect).”

Pattern 120: Paths and Goals. “A path is composed of a sequence of intermediate destinations. Flow is governed by the body’s instinctive movements and psychological reactions.”

Pattern 121: Path Shape. “A successful path is also a welcoming space for people to linger in if they are not in a hurry.”

Pattern 132: Short Passages. “Make indoor transition corridors short and visually interesting. Use natural light, and design corridors in the same way as the building’s living space.”

In particular, Pattern 114 (Hierarchy of Open Space) anticipates and contains two notions later used by writers on biophilia: “refuge” is a psychologically safe space where we feel free from threat, whereas “prospect” means the ease of seeing locations some distance away that might attract us if we perceive obvious biophilic properties there (Browning et al., 2014; Kellert et al., 2008).

Results from neurophysiology, living patterns, and biophilia reinforce and tie together concepts necessary for the design of paths. These fruits of our evolutionary development from human ancestral environments are arguably shared by primitive life forms that move about even to this day. Applying these design notions to paths, every portion of the spatial environment along a path must offer refuge so that a person feels safe and comfortable while negotiating that journey. At the same time, a prospect offers us a range of goals for our journey, if we choose to leave our refuge and move toward them. An intelligently designed path will, in theory, reduce our instinctive resistance to doing so.

From Biophilia and Healing Environments (Salingaros, 2015).

How architecture orchestrates our movements

The ambient information field is akin to a force field that ties us to our surroundings (even though there is no physical exchange taking place). But “image-based design” ignores mechanisms responsible for situatedness. Details that define a welcoming environment are either missing, or are juxtaposed incoherently in many of today’s buildings. Architects who focus on the purity of abstract geometry ignore the ensemble of complex forces acting on our body. The result leads to the opposite of situatedness: a sense of “placelessness," and even anxiety.

An abstract design that looked fine in a rendering, but which failed to evaluate — and adjust for — all predictable human sensory reactions could turn out to be a threatening and oppressive environment when built. Users will avoid those architectural spaces, or force themselves to use them while fighting increased stress levels. Apparently benign design decisions based on abstractions can trigger negative physiological responses in the user. This comes from not thinking about the consequences, or worse, having being falsely taught that there are no consequences. Architects stick religiously to the primacy of “image-based design."

The countless complex interactions that combine to generate a visceral signal determine a comparatively simple set of instinctive behaviors for the user. Our body tells us what to do without thinking. This result is more basic than either psychology or medicine, and underlies the physical experience of architecture. It cannot be overridden by formal design. A space designed for a predetermined function and use could be more suitable for a totally different behavior; or it could be dysfunctional, because our body is reacting viscerally to that space’s hostile geometry, surfaces, details, and complexity (or lack of it) in an unexpected way. Those architectural mistakes have been ignored for too long: it’s time to apply science to fix them.

8. Space is experienced positively only when it is coherent

Open space will be used when we feel that it encloses us with a semi-permeable, welcoming perimeter. The design of successful urban space therefore relies predominantly on human psychological responses.8

We find spaces that embrace us gently inviting. Such spaces, formed from concave boundaries, embody the “principle of concavity”, which tells us that we prefer surfaces that enclose us in a more or less organic manner.

 Experiments in psychology document that we have a built-in aversion to sharp objects, especially to those that point at us. Most of us prefer rounded moldings to angular moldings in window frames and sills. At the next architectural scale, walls that are not vertical and ceilings that are neither symmetric nor horizontal, and re-entrant walls and ceilings bulging towards us instead of yielding outward cause alarm. Emotional discomfort can be triggered by protruding design details meant for purely aesthetic effect — undoing real or apparent structural utility of elements such as columns, pilasters, or beams.

If we are to use urban space with pleasure and make us feel reassured, it must be partly surrounded by an enveloping perimeter. It cannot just be leftover space between stand-alone “look-at-me” buildings. In those leftover spaces, we tend to feel exposed and threatened because the nodes and paths they contain are not defined coherently (see “Urban Space and its Information Field” in (Salingaros, 2005)). This is a basic design pattern from A Pattern Language (Alexander et al., 1977) — the pattern summary is my own:

Pattern 106: Positive Outdoor Space. “The built structures partially surrounding an outdoor space, be it rectangular or circular, must define, in its wall elements, a concave perimeter boundary, making the space itself convex overall.”

Yet modernist open spaces consistently violate this pattern. Such exterior space lacks internal connectivity and fails to fit into the expectations formed by our instinctive judgment of space. This expectation is built up over generations, passed down to us by previous users of the built environment as well as originating in our own experiences.

Many showcase 20th and early 21st Century buildings tend to be surrounded by lots of open space that is never used. Hard plazas and green areas designed around the buildings violate all the living patterns for urban space; therefore those areas tend to be unpopulated, hence they are wasted spaces. Sometimes vast in dimension, these spaces tend to be too open; part of them may be semi-enclosed but threatened by an overhanging roof that creates a feeling of alarm.

 For decades, architectural space has been compromised by mistaken assumptions (anti-patterns). Furthermore, the industrialized world continues to create formally striking places that skimp on essential human values. Whether cramped, splintered, or so vast as to engulf human scale, those environments are ultimately useless. The proper connected intimacy of space, offering the psychological protection essential for inviting people to use it, is absent.

Urban space is not two-dimensional. It is not simply a ground plan. Additional geometrical elements are needed to complete the sense of a three-dimensional enveloping boundary. Those elements work in the vertical dimension, and arise from the scales of architecture, not urbanism. Much depends on whether the details of the surrounding walls transmit messages that are either psychologically friendly or hostile to those who visit the open space. Mirrored or transparent curtain-wall façades diminish the visual sense of enclosure of a public space, making it less informative, less interesting, less friendly, less functional. On the other hand permeable solid façades showing organized complexity (as defined by their aligned symmetric doors, windows, and other details) improve the functionality of an urban space.

Like a framed picture, every useful and satisfying urban space reaches visual completion at a certain height off the ground. A roof cornice, for example, on facing buildings adds a horizontal lip to the built perimeter of urban space, creating a degree of concavity that enhances the feeling of enclosure (see “Urban Space and its Information Field” in (Salingaros, 2005)). Yet such framing edges are dismissed as inessential because their original function is not understood; yet they play a major supportive role in the definition of reassuring urban space through the principle of concavity.

In A Vision of a Living World, Book 3 of The Nature of Order (Alexander, 2001-2005) Christopher Alexander introduces the concept of “hulls” (as in the concave hull of a boat) in public space. This reinforces the idea of coherent public space that promotes the sensation of being in a giant outdoor room, a room without a ceiling. Alexander also describes the process of designing indoor rooms whose volume and boundaries offer the qualities necessary to induce psychological wellbeing. Altogether, we possess a set of powerful tools for creating coherent living space, interior or exterior, defined by the characteristics of its enveloping and sheltering boundary.

Buildings shape urban space, and the information on their façades then determines if that space is used9

With Pattern 106: Positive Outdoor Space, Christopher Alexander and his colleagues identify the need for concavity and enclosure in open spaces (Alexander et al., 1977). I derived this result later from informational arguments. A New Theory of Urban Design (Alexander, Neis, Anninou & King, 1987) states this in the strongest terms: “space for pedestrians, streets, gardens, even parking lots, should be formed by surrounding buildings, not vice-versa”. It is the space that is important, and the buildings are the means to define it. Whenever buildings are the focus of attention, space is left undefined. With The Nature of Order (Alexander, 2001-2005), Alexander goes further to anchor the urban fabric on a continuous ribbon of public space.

The materials used in building façades play a crucial role in creating the spatial information field; the surface quality being an independent factor from the geometry. High-tech materials are a necessary component of any new architecture. Of all new materials encompassing a wide range of qualities, however, those favored so far have one feature in common: they minimize surface information. Therefore, one of their principal effects is to diminish information access (and I argue that this is deliberate). If we wish to help the formation of urban space, then we have to start using materials, both old and new, with the aim of enhancing surface information.

Historical buildings employ traditional materials in a way that maximizes optical and acoustical information at all angles: an incident signal is dispersed in all directions so that it can be received by many observers. Surfaces that act in this way have special characteristics. They are: 1. Textured, with articulated relief that reflects signals in different directions; and 2. Painted in bright colors with a high color value close to white. Relief, surface texture, and sculpted decoration reflect sound and light all around (non-specular reflection), whereas pigments absorb an incident ray, then re- radiate the energy in all directions (scattering). The net effect is the same.

Relief patterns throughout traditional architecture distribute sound and light, making a wall partially reflective at an oblique angle. By contrast, smooth polished walls reflect back only at a single normal (orthogonal) angle to their surface. There is no optical contact above eye level. Even worse, a reflective mirror finish prevents all contact because the eye cannot focus on a mirror. At the other extreme, very dark colors of any hue, and especially matte black, dark gray and dark brown, absorb all the visual spectrum and don’t retransmit anything at any angle. Building exteriors in such colors minimize information access, independently of any surface relief. Bare concrete is usually a matte medium gray, with poor reflective and light scattering properties.

Large panes of plate glass create informational ambiguity: the visual signal indicates a surface, but there is no information. Depending on the angle, dark tinted windows are either too transparent, too reflective, or too absorptive to define a spatial boundary. The only way to reinforce the visual signal is to use a structural frame between window panes; enough of it to provide unambiguous information. This solution worked for centuries, as long as glass could only be produced in relatively small panes. The need for small window panes is noted by Alexander as Pattern 239: Small Panes in terms of indoors transmitted light (Alexander et al., 1977), whereas we are concerned here with outdoors reflected light.

9. How life is influenced by physical boundaries

The boundary of a physical space counts for a major part of our spatial experience. Several distinct typologies for spaces contribute to a campus environment that is actively used.10

Science applied to architecture and urbanism uncovers many design typologies that degrade spaces. By “degradation,” I mean that the user experience is not what was originally expected or promised, because the geometry of the spaces makes use difficult or unpleasant in the long term. This negative effect is the opposite of what a good designer and architect ought to aim for: Namely, that the built spaces should accommodate and promote the entire range of human activities that were stated on the design brief.

My claim is surprising to many, because every designer claims that his/her creation makes a positive contribution to the built environment. Therefore, the problem is certainly not one of intent, but rather of misunderstanding the nature of space itself, and of the parameters that need to be satisfied in order to produce an adaptive, usable space. Hopefully, I can point to some neglected phenomena that will help designers generate better spaces in the future.

The problems are traced to the properties of different types of borders, whose properties are either misunderstood, or deliberately suppressed in the interest of expressing a visual “style.” Yet results responsible for adaptive solutions are documented in existing built fabric, available for all who wish to learn from those examples. New scientific insights combined with older techniques for building a more adaptive human environment can create a new type of nourishing human space.

Modernism and its contemporary successors represent largely self-referential design methods. Those buildings stand alone to grab our attention. Most signature buildings today concentrate attention from the surroundings onto themselves, leaving no coherent geometry in the surroundings External space is consequently left over, and modernist urban space is not bounded. In it, we feel threatened and exposed. When open exterior space fails our instinctive perception, it is never used. Leftover space is junk.

Urban space relies upon using the surrounding buildings as an enclosure to define the space. Open space is usable in the psychological sense only when it has a built border with special characteristics (Salingaros & Pagliardini, 2016). This situation where buildings become perimeters is topologically the opposite of a free-standing “look-at-me” building that uses open space as its own perimeter. That doesn’t work for human use: it switches the roles of user and building. The basis of our understanding of open space was negated when the topology was reversed. Modernism erased evolved human patterns guaranteeing the use of urban space. Needless to say, modernist urban space mostly lies unused when compared to traditional public spaces.

Christopher Alexander’s A Pattern Language (Alexander et al., 1977) discovered and documented spatial configurations that optimize the users’ experience. These design patterns provide a repository of timeless solutions on how human beings use space, thus offering a crucial and invaluable aid to design. I review here five more design patterns, with my own descriptors, which generate distinct yet essential types of welcoming spaces on a campus.

Pattern 69: PUBLIC OUTDOOR ROOM. “A partially enclosed public space with roof and columns but no walls, containing places to sit, focuses pedestrian activity.”

Pattern 101: BUILDING THOROUGHFARE. “Connect pedestrian paths of two exterior sides by going through the middle of a large building. This interior space must be interesting and large enough to linger in.”

Pattern 119: ARCADES. “Reinforce major pedestrian paths along the sides of a building by creating arcades to shelter them.”

Pattern 124: ACTIVITY POCKETS. “The success of urban space depends on what can occur along its boundaries. A space will be lively only if there are pockets of activity all around its inner edges.”

Pattern 160: BUILDING EDGE. “Design the ground perimeter of a building’s exterior with a special complexity that invites walking, leaning, and sitting.”

The above patterns define complex borders, connections, and edges. A boundary’s complex geometry invites activities in real time, leading to the use of the adjoining urban space. Arcades are misunderstood as simply providing shelter against the weather, whereas their major function is psychological. The life of an urban space depends upon the ease of activities occurring along its inner edges: again, the dynamic complexity of the border determines the use of the interior.

An inviting courtyard space works because it provides several psychologically attractive features. It should have complex visual interest along its border, surfaces that can be used (they do not repel a person, nor are they ambiguous), and smaller sheltering spaces along the perimeter of the larger space. Pedestrians will use the protected space, yet have immediate access to the connecting paths and entrances. Working the same way, a line of bollards protects pedestrians, both physically and psychologically, from vehicles moving next to them.

Beginning with early modernism, a major design objective has been to eliminate borders from the built environment: window and door frames; transitional spaces; and the distinction between inside and outside. Many practitioners explicitly state this as their goal. Their justification, however, is a confused appeal to aesthetics.

All the solutions for creating intermediate spaces and protective semi-permeable borders are thrown out by designers who focus exclusively on “design purity”. Unfortunately, that stylistic approach gets rid of important geometrical elements of an accommodating environment. Without those elements, the built urban environment becomes both deadening and dangerous because specific protective barriers are no longer erected. Bollards, colonnades, and arcades are deemed to be “geometrically impure”.

Modernist ideology is not enough to explain the remarkable insularity of architectural culture. The tenacity of an exclusive and inward-looking philosophy is due to vast money interests that profit from modernist industrial building techniques. The global material industries of steel, plate glass, and reinforced concrete found it highly profitable to promote early modernist projects, and have never seen any reason to change that formula for maximizing profit. For this reason, extractive industry goes hand-in-hand with architectural ideology based on glass and steel buildings, which in turn are cheaper to design according to minimalist modernism. Architectural stars are hand-picked by global construction companies, because they best represent their financial interests.

Three laws of human-scale urbanism11

Here is the basic problem: What appears to work and connect on paper in an abstract, formalistic manner does not necessarily work and connect on the ground. This is the first law of human-scale urbanism. Moreover, there is no way to predict whether some plan drawn on paper will be successful or not without testing it at least in part at full scale. Informal settlements actually work because they are computed at full scale on the ground. On the other hand, non-interactive algorithms used to build urban fabric turn out to be irrelevant to human actions and needs. Whether some elements of this design strategy are going to be successful, or not, cannot be predicted in advance.

The second law of human-scale urbanism is that adapted computed solutions are not transferable. General, common constraints do apply in helping to compute each result, but the computation has to be done in every case under very specific local conditions, otherwise the result can never be adaptive. Even quite similar situations, if independently computed, will evolve to show substantial individual differences and modifications. The results as built on the ground are going to be different every time. These elementary lessons have been ignored by generations of post World-War II urbanists.

The third law of human-scale urbanism is that genuinely adaptive computation is based on complex urban algorithms, not algorithms for generating visual graphic effects. Urban morphology is meant to contain and promote human activities and should not be confused with visual sculptural art. Random designs disguised as “contemporary forms” are in fact arbitrary, because they are not adapted to any priorities of actual people on the ground. The way in which the final buildings, roads, paths, and open spaces are actually experienced is usually a surprise to users, after everything is built and it is too late to make any adjustments. The surprise could in fact be unpleasant, to the point of condemning the award-winning project as dysfunctional.

10. Car-pedestrian interactions and the parking ribbon

Giant surface parking destroys the geometrical coherence and pedestrian connectivity of a campus. The solution lies in limiting the width of the parking without reducing the number of parking spaces.12

Because business in sprawl depends on attracting the drive-by customer, then, it must announce to all drivers that there is ample free parking everywhere. Thus we have the shopping mall surrounded by a vast parking lot; the office tower in the middle of farmland surrounded by its parking lot; the university campus in the middle of nowhere surrounded by its parking lots, and so on. Urban morphology is determined in most places by highways and parking lots. Again, the priorities are exactly backwards. Thoroughfares and parking lots should conform to a compact urban structure, not the other way around.

The compact city is a city for people, but it still accommodates cars and trucks. However, surface parking lots interrupt the urban structure and sense of an outdoor “room”; they are dangerous and exhausting for pedestrians, and visually destroy any pleasant walking. They also create runoff from impervious surface, encouraging flooding.

Instead of taking over a vast open area, parking should occur in a ribbon of intentionally constrained road: I am proposing a radically different parking geometry, to be generated by new zoning codes. A parking “lot”, then, is just another road, not an open space. These long and narrow parking ribbons will branch into each other, assuming a networked form just like urban streets. A maximum dimension of about two car lengths will be stipulated for the width of any parking ribbon, accommodating only one side of head-in or diagonal parking. Parking ribbons don’t need to be straight, but can be made to fill up otherwise useless narrow spaces.

Furthermore, pedestrians should be given priority when crossing an existing large parking lot. This means building a raised footpath, sometimes covered by a canopy, and also giving it a distinct color coding for visual separation. Giant, uniform parking lots are hostile to human beings and essentially anti-urban. They can be reformatted into parking ribbons by building other structures inside them. Inserting sections of water-permeable surface into giant parking lots will also solve the serious problem of flooding from storm run-off. Such infill solutions can be written into a new code.

Parking ribbons already exist in traditional urbanism: as curbside parking on slow-moving roads, and on the sides of a fast-moving boulevard. Most parking garages are indeed wound-up parking ribbons. What I’m suggesting is that ALL parking should conform to the ribbon geometry. A parking lot should never again be confused with an urban space, and cars should never be allowed to take over an urban space.

Another solution is to have orthogonal flow for pedestrians and vehicles (working simultaneously with protected parallel flow). Their intersection must be non-threatening. The two distinct flows cross frequently at places that are protected for pedestrians. In this way, the two flows do not compete except at crossing points. Introducing a row of bollards saves many situations where pedestrians are physically threatened by vehicles. An amalgamation of pedestrian paths defines a usable urban space. This must be strongly protected from vehicular traffic. Any paved space that children might use for play must be absolutely safe from traffic (Salingaros, 2005).

Priority for creating pedestrian paths13 

The urban web consists of overlapping networks of connections. There is no reason to suppose, as many planners do, that the distinct networks have to coincide. Different types of connections exist on different scales, so mathematically they cannot coincide. The web has structural strength only when networks on different levels cross and overlap, providing cross-connectivity. When connections are forced to coincide they become singular (too many are concentrated along one path). Singular connections do not work because they overload the carrying capacity of the channel.

The number of pedestrian paths in the urban web should be far greater than exists today. An unfortunate trend of the last seventy years has been to eliminate footpaths by arbitrarily imposing a rectangular (or other restrictive) road grid for all connections. A second error has been to give priority to car paths over pedestrian paths. Alexander and his associates have looked into the process of establishing the web connections (Alexander et al., 1987). They conclude that there is an optimal sequence to be followed: define the pedestrian and green spaces first, followed by pedestrian connections, buildings, and roads, in that order. The greatest cities of the past were built by following the order proposed here. A careful study of the urban web clearly shows that following the reverse order, as is done today, eliminates pedestrian and usable green areas.

Reviving the car/pedestrian interface14

The most glaring omission in contemporary cities is a totally inadequate car/pedestrian interface. Two networks of entirely distinct characteristics have to interface seamlessly without damaging each other. Christopher Alexander et al. (1977: Patterns 11 LOCAL TRANSPORT AREAS, 22 NINE PER CENT PARKING, 32 SHOPPING STREET, 52 NETWORK OF PATHS AND CARS, 54 ROAD CROSSING, 55 RAISED WALK, 97 SHIELDED PARKING, 100 PEDESTRIAN STREET, 103 SMALL PARKING LOTS, and 113 CAR CONNECTION) pointed out the fundamental importance of creating and maintaining this fractal interface, and offered practical solutions. Unfortunately, cities instead chose to follow CIAM’s opposite suggestions, as they worked very hard to erase their pedestrian network. The first step to destroying a system is to cut its entry points — i.e., its interface to other systems. The crossover between car and pedestrian realms was eliminated so that the pedestrian city could then be declared “redundant”.

The connective interface between people, green spaces, urban spaces, and built surfaces is just as important as the interface between cars and people. We connect most strongly on the most intimate scales. That’s the reason we love our cars — we touch their interiors, which in turn surround our body. Urban spaces (with or without green components) were meant to surround us with an inviting, comfortable boundary, but we have recently made them alien and hostile. Without a spatial intimacy connecting us to the smallest scales, urban space is ineffective. Following the dictates of a puritanical architectural modernism, we scorned spatial intimacy in today’s cities as something “unmodern”, and eliminated it.

  • 1. Expanded from a keynote speech “Eight city types and their interactions”, 11th International Congress on Virtual Cities and Territories, Krakow, Poland, 6–8 July 2016. Published in: Technical Transactions – Architecture, 2017 Volume 2, Politechnica Krakowska (Krakow Technical University), Krakow, Poland, pages 57-70. http://www.ejournals.eu/Czasopismo-Techniczne/2017/Volume-2/
  • 2. Expanded from a keynote speech “Eight city types and their interactions”, 11th International Congress on Virtual Cities and Territories, Krakow, Poland, 6–8 July 2016. Published as (Salingaros, 2017).
  • 3. From “Connecting the Fractal City”, keynote speech at the Fifth Biennial of Towns and Town Planners in Europe, Barcelona, 2003 (Salingaros, 2005).
  • 4. From “Eight city types and their interactions”, keynote speech at the 11th International Congress on Virtual Cities and Territories, Krakow, Poland, July 2016 (Salingaros, 2017). 
  • 5. From “A Universal Rule for the Distribution of Sizes” (Salingaros, 2005).
  • 6. From “The Derrida Virus” (Salingaros, 2014).
  • 7. From “Why we need to “grasp” our surroundings: object affordance and prehension in architecture” (Salingaros, 2017).
  • 8. From Design Patterns and Living Architecture (Salingaros, 2017).
  • 9. From “Urban Space and its Information Field” (Salingaros, 2005).
  • 10. From “Borders in Architecture and Urban Design”, invited talk at the conference Architecture and Cities in Transition, Tampere Design and Architecture Week, Tampere, Finland, September 2016 (unpublished). 
  • 11. From “Urbanism as Computation”, keynote speech at the Complexity Theories of Cities Conference, Delft, Holland, September 2009 (Salingaros, 2012)
  • 12. From “Compact City Replaces Sprawl”, invited talk at the Inaugural Conference of the Delft School of Design, Holland, June 2004 (Salingaros, 2006).
  • 13. From “Theory of the Urban Web” (Salingaros, 2005).
  • 14. From “Connecting the Fractal City”, keynote speech at the Fifth Biennial of Towns and Town Planners in Europe, Barcelona, April 2003 (Salingaros, 2005).