"The city is a receptacle for life. If the receptacle severs the overlap of the strands of life within it, because it is a tree, it will be like a bowl full of razor blades on edge."

Entities in the same semantic neighborhood but without a typed relation to this one — candidates for new edges or unrecognized duplicates.

• Cities structured as trees cut life to pieces; semilattices preserve life's strandsclaim0.821
  Alexander's position in 'A City Is Not a Tree' that hierarchical tree structures sever urban life while semilattices enable overlapping, living systems.
• Neighborhoods and cities can be restored to life... if we can break free locally from the death grip of conventions and rules that block the smooth, natural, step-by-step processes.claim0.787
  Conditional assertion that local deregulation enables living process.
• the city is not, cannot, and must not be a tree.quote0.783
  Core anti-hierarchical proclamation from Alexander's 1965 article, frequently cited to show his shift to semilattice thinking.
• According to present-day biological terminology, a city is not a living system.claim0.779
  A statement of current orthodoxy used to highlight the need for a broader definition.
• What we call 'life' is a general condition which exists, to some degree or other, in every part of space: brick, stone, grass, river, painting, building, daffodil, human being, forest, city.quote0.772
  Verbatim statement of the fundamental hypothesis, defining the scope of life.
• The structure of living centers appears in natural things — snowdrops, waves, clouds, mountains, foxes, grains of sand — and these too resemble the human self, requiring that there be a deep connection under the surface.claim0.771
  Alexander's argument that self-likeness in natural forms cannot be explained by artistic intention alone, requiring Proposition 2 for theoretical coherence.
• If we can break free locally from the death grip of conventions and rules that block the smooth, natural, step-by-step processes, neighborhoods and cities can be restored to life.hypothesis0.771
  The overarching conditional that local process freedom leads to urban restoration.
• "There is a central quality which is the root criterion of life and spirit in a man, a town, a building, or a wilderness. This quality is objective and precise, but it cannot be named"quote0.765
  Verbatim quote from Alexander (1979, p.19) defining the Quality Without a Name, used to motivate the exploration.