People+Ecology+Place


 * For a full explanation of this project go to** [|**www.culturalecology.info/pep**]

The ability to perceive pattern and make connections, to see parts in relation to the whole, is vital to us in the West. This is because our culture has developed by thinking in compartments (e.g art-science, material-spiritual, etc). It has been led by a rapidly developing technology which concentrates on specialist building blocks at the expense of visualising the whole.

A good example of the outcome of thinking in compartments are the visual patterns that define a village, town or neighbourhood. These can never be "designed" or "built" in one fell swoop. They develop through patient piecemeal growth, designed in such a way that every individual act is always helping to create or generate these larger global patterns. Slowly and surely, over the years, a community comes to have these global patterns in it. This development by accretion also applies to the smaller sub-units of communities, such as parks. Such constructed patterns are an expression of human ecology, and can only be analysed visually.

In an effort to describe these built patterns a Pattern Language was created by Christopher Alexander in the late 1960's and early 1970's. Alexander, in his book "//A Pattern Language//", sets out the most comprehensive method for organising the patterns organized into a "language". This language has a vocabulary like any other language. In this case the vocabulary is made up by the patterns themselves. It also has a grammar, a proper relation of the patterns to each other. The individual patterns have meanings, like words in a spoken or written language. Patterns such as "Household Mix", or "Mosaic of Subcultures" say something about the social and physical characteristics of "neighborhood" while patterns like "Bed Alcove" or "Window Place" describe the nature of "home".

Pattern language relies primarily on visuality for its definition and understanding. The chunks of information for analysing the meaning of place are pictures and photographs. The former are well thought out expressions of personal insight and the latter are momentary flashes of insight, when a scene demands to be recorded. Both may be assembled with a minimum of words to make a multidimensional body of knowledge.

http://www.livingneighborhoods.org/unfoldings/poeticpl.htm


 * Now go to the following page and help build a visual pattern language for Renaissance green space in and around the city of Florence. As an experiment the idea is to assemble images of the Bardini-Boboli Gardens of Florence to author a multidimensional pattern in pictures with words.**

=Bardini-Boboli Gardens, Florence=