I like the second link. From a network scientists perspective, one way how to model such structures is by overlapping hierarchical stochastic block models, or generally “community structure”. (Alexander’s essay predates network science by several decades.)
Which also makes “partonomy” and “mereonomy” possibly problematic labels (because of tree structures).
I was very interested in the “city is not a tree” post, but found it juuust confusing/dense enough to bounce off of it. I’d be interest in a link-post or comment that summarizes the key insights there in layman’s terms.
To some extent the ideas seem to be now “in the water”. The maths part is something now more developed under the study of complex networks. Alexander’s general ideas about design inspired people to create wikis, patterns in software movement, to some extent objective oriented programming, and extreme programming, and some urbanists… which made me motivated to read more from of him.
(Btw in another response here, I pointed toward Wikipedia as a project with some interesting social technology behind it. So, it’s probably worth to note that a lot of the social technology was originally created/thought about at wikis like Meatball and the original WikiWiki by Ward Cunningham who was in turn inspired by Alexander.)
.
I like the second link. From a network scientists perspective, one way how to model such structures is by overlapping hierarchical stochastic block models, or generally “community structure”. (Alexander’s essay predates network science by several decades.)
Which also makes “partonomy” and “mereonomy” possibly problematic labels (because of tree structures).
I was very interested in the “city is not a tree” post, but found it juuust confusing/dense enough to bounce off of it. I’d be interest in a link-post or comment that summarizes the key insights there in layman’s terms.
My rough understanding:
To some extent the ideas seem to be now “in the water”. The maths part is something now more developed under the study of complex networks. Alexander’s general ideas about design inspired people to create wikis, patterns in software movement, to some extent objective oriented programming, and extreme programming, and some urbanists… which made me motivated to read more from of him.
(Btw in another response here, I pointed toward Wikipedia as a project with some interesting social technology behind it. So, it’s probably worth to note that a lot of the social technology was originally created/thought about at wikis like Meatball and the original WikiWiki by Ward Cunningham who was in turn inspired by Alexander.)