The Prophet’s Fingers: City Country Fingers

Pattern 3, City Country Fingers. Continuous sprawling urbanization destroys life, and makes cities unbearable; but the sheer size of cities is also valuable and potent. Keep interlocking fingers of farmland and urban land, even at the center of the metropolis. — Christopher Alexander, *A Pattern Language* (1977)

Identify spaces, however small, which are good candidates for communally managed plots stewarded by self-governing communities.
Recruit locals and provide educational and material resources relevant to the projects they commit to.

The following three projects lay the groundwork for broader implementation of the City Country Fingers pattern by establishing small working examples embodying its underlying principle.

Pilot project 1POWER LINE GARDENS

Coordinating between power companies and the neighbors whose residences abut or are near power lines to manage the growth of the area under the lines through community gardens. Shares of plant stock, produce and, where applicable, animal products are divided among the members of the collective, who together establish protocols for managing those spaces.

Pilot project 2RECLAIMING ASPHALT

Neighborhoods securing code variances to reclaim space from cars for pedestrians, using the process Christopher Alexander lays out in The Nature of Order, Book 3, A Vision of a Living World.

The neighborhood is mapped in four colors: red for cars, yellow for people on foot, green for gardens and gray for buildings. Variances are then sought step by step to shrink the red and break up its continuity, so that the yellow can grow and the green can take on a coherent shape.

Four-colour plan of a few blocks in Berkeley: wide red roads, thin yellow sidewalks, small green yards around gray houses.

An unhealthy pattern: the 20th-century norm. (Original caption.)

Four-colour plan of an imagined neighborhood: a network of yellow paths, coherent green gardens, little red.

A new kind of norm: a healthy pattern. (Original caption.)

Christopher Alexander, The Nature of Order, Book 3: A Vision of a Living World

Pilot project 3MICRO COURTYARDS

Micro courtyards established where four residential house plots meet, eventually opening into green corridors that serve as rights of way connecting one multi-home micro courtyard to another. Each courtyard is governed by its own members. Where courtyards connect, they form a second level of self-governance for the shared corridor.

Plan of a suburban block today, with fenced back yards meeting at a circled corner. — 1 · today. Four fenced back yards meet at a single corner (circled). Red: cars. Yellow: people on foot. Green: gardens. Black and gray: houses.

The same block with a shared yellow courtyard where four back yards meet, and paths to each back door. — 2 · a micro courtyard. Each of the four plots gives a corner of its back yard to a shared courtyard, reached by a path from each back door.

The same block with courtyards at several corners joined by a planted corridor that crosses the side streets. — 3 · courtyards joined by a corridor. Courtyards form at more corners, and a planted strip along the rear lot lines joins them into a green corridor and right of way that crosses the streets to the next block.

Scanned excerpt from A Pattern Language, p. 201: the deed to one home carries part ownership in its cluster and neighborhood; each level is a political unit. — Christopher Alexander, *A Pattern Language* (1977), p. 201