Christopher Alexander has died
> In 1965, Alexander wrote a much-cited essay, A City Is Not a Tree, one of the earliest and most trenchant critiques of the dendritic, sprawl pattern of city planning and development.<p>On the other hand, all dense old-world cities (London, Paris, Rome, even Tokyo, say) are... "dendritic".  There's nothing wrong with that, and it has everything to do with the history of the ownership of all the bits of property on the city.<p>Sprawl is a problem, but sprawl is a new world problem that has to do with its <i>very</i> short history.<p>We've got about 500 years of old world folk moving to the new world, but the old world has thousands of years of history.  Besides new world cities starting from much lower population density overall than the old world already had four to five centuries ago, there's also the fact that the last 100+ years of that history has had personal motor vehicles in it -- that's 1/4th to 1/5th of all the Americas' post-Columbus era, while it's more like less than 1/20th of the old world's history.<p>You can critique things like this all you like, but trying to do away with the "dendritism" that arises naturally is... unnatural, and requires a great deal of market distortion or use of force.  Is that really something we want?<p>EDIT: Yeah, I probably read too much into that sentence!