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book:the-process-of-creating-life-the-nature-of-order-vol-2The Process of Creating Life (The Nature of Order, Vol. 2)
Volume 2 of The Nature of Order, in which this chapter appears.
Extracted from this book
Claims (19)
- Almost any social process can have a relatively more living character, or have a relatively less living character.
- It is precisely those innovations which attempt to change the system of processes most deeply, that are hardest for society to accept, and therefore hardest to implement.
- Modern society, as it has been organized during the past sixty years or so, was inherently unable to create life in the environment.
- One could not call this process a life-creating process.
- Social process must necessarily be architectural process, and that architectural process must necessarily be life-creating.
- Such a process will not—in general—create living structure.
- The barriers themselves are physically ugly; they have a mechanical and unpleasant structure.
- The CAD-based system does not encourage the use of structure-preserving transformations. It does not encourage the creation of living centers.
- The humanity of the environment comes about only when the processes are morphogenetic, are whole-seeking, are placed in a context that gradually allows people to work towards a living whole.
- The larger task of making these processes genuinely morphogenetic so that they generate deeper and more coherent living structure—still lies on the horizon.
- The presence of living centers is thereby reduced. That, in turn, damages the connective fabric of the neighborhood.
- The primary function of society would be understood as the function of generating a healed structure in the world through morphogenetic processes.
- The pure cost-based process is therefore implicitly a life-destroying process.
- The second process is a more living process because it helps create gradual improvement in living centers in the world.
- There is no such thing as neutrality in such matters. A process is either life-creating, or it is not.
- This is a more living process. The result is likely to be more humane, better for the neighborhood.
- This process is harmful, and has a strong tendency to work against creation of living structure in building design.
- We evaluate the relative life of a process by making predictions based on thought-experiments or simulations.
- We must therefore find a way—a practical way—of slowly, gently, transforming today's processes from what they actually are today, to making them better.
Neighborhood — ranked by edge-count
Chapters (1)
chapter
- Encouraging Freedomchapter_ofChapter 18 of Vol 2, on making everyday social processes more living and ultimately morphogenetic.
Thinkers (1)
thinker
- Christopher Alexanderauthored