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

From the document:
# Write a poem like the one for Samarkand, for your own new, imagined neighborhood. Allow yourself free reign, free imagination, and make it poetically whole. Capture the spirit of the very best, and most serious that this new neighborhood could be.
# If possible, pin up the poem you have written, on the wall where people can see it, and listen to what they say.

People of Dichato, you are poets, start making poetry!

1. In traditional cultures, successful environments were always built by using pattern languages. They showed people how to make an almost infinite variety of buildings by combining and recombining the patterns, and contained within the process a modest guarantee that the buildings would be successful. Hence the great variety and beauty built by traditional societies.

2. Each culture had its own pattern language. The pattern languages reflected differences from culture to culture, and often nearly embodied the culture as a whole, in the form of rules which defined the spatial structure of the built environment.

3. The patterns were, for the most part, based on human needs, understanding, and necessity. They reflected the deep practical daily concerns of people and were, as rules, expressed in a form which made it possible to put these things into the built environment in an immediate, practical, and effective form.

4. At the same time, although patterns vary from culture to culture, and while human needs vary and are highly specific in different human cultures, there is a core of material – a central invariant structure – which is common to all cultures. A portion of this invariant core – or at least a sketch of such a thing – is described in A PATTERN LANGUAGE.

This much of the theory is descriptive. But for the most part, the main purpose of the pattern language theory was not descriptive, but prescriptive. We discovered that it is possible to create pattern-language-like systems, artificially. That is:

5. It is possible to create pattern languages for our own time, which, like traditional languages, embody knowledge, cultural subtlety, human need, and empirical information about the structure of living environments, in a form which may then be used to generate living centres by a combinatorial unfolding process.

6. It is possible to invent and create new pattern languages, artificially, by trying to see what new patterns will solve problems that exist in a given context. Although these may be new, in the sense that they are newly defined, many of them may, obviously, be versions of ancient patterns, familiar in different cultures, but so deep that in some form they are still relevant to our new era and new settings.

7. The objectivity of the patterns is context-sensitive, and always includes a built-in reference to be the context for which the patterns work.

8. The patterns, because of their explicitness, allow discussion, debate, and gradual improvement of the material.

9. The artificial language will work well only to the extent that it embraces A WHOLE – that is to say, to the extent that it comprises everything that needs to be said about a given building situation, and that the various patterns it contains work together as a whole system, which accounts for all morphology that is required to design, plan or make, a complete building of that type and its immediate surroundings.

10. These artificial languages, like traditional languages, can then be used to steer processes of design and building, just as traditional languages played that role in traditional society.

11. For any new building project it is necessary to construct such a language, merely to provide a clear functional basis for the character and organization of the building. The language that is written down, at the beginning of a project may be invented from scratch, composed of known languages that have been re-combined, or may be a modification of a known language developed earlier. This will vary, according to the degree that the project is new, not yet fully understood, or old and familiar.

“The Process of Creating Life” by Christopher Alexander, page 344-345.

Please help these people to create a new, beautiful and shared pattern language, which to use to create a new, beautiful and shared town for themselves. A town which is whole, full of life and meaning, a town of Permaculture!

“In this sense it is like the natural order of an oak tree. The final shape of any one particular oak tree is unpredictable.

When the oak tree grows, there is no blueprint, no master plan, which tells the twigs and branches where to go.

We know in general that it will have the overall form of an oak, because its growth is guided by the pattern language of an oak tree (its genetic code). But it is unpredictable, in detail, because each small step is shaped by the interaction of this language with external forces and conditions – rain, wind, sunlight, the composition of the earth, position of other trees and bushes, the thickness of the leaves on its own branches.

And a town which is whole, like an oak tree, must be unpredictable also.

The fine details cannot be known ahead of time. We may know, from the pattern language which is shared, what kind of town it will be. But it is impossible to predict its detailed plan : and it is not possible to make it grow according to some plan. It must be unpredictable, so that the individual acts of building can be free to fit themselves to all the local forces which they meet.

The people of a town may know that there is going to be a main pedestrian street, because there is a pattern which tells them so. But, they cannot know just where this main pedestrian street will be, until it is already there. The street will be built up from smaller acts, wherever the opportunity arises. When it is finally made, its form is partly given by the history of happy accidents which let the people build it along with their own more private acts. There is no way of knowing, ahead of time, just where these accidents will fall.

This process, exactly like the emergence of any other form of life, alone produces living order.

It is a process by which the small acts of individuals, almost random, are sieved and harnessed, so that what they create is orderly, even though the product of confusion.

It creates order, not by forcing it, nor by imposing it upon the world (through plans or drawings or components) : but because it is a process which draws order from its surroundings – it allows it to come together.

But of course, by this means far more order can come into being, than could possibly come into being through an invented act.

It is vastly more complex than any other kind of order. It cannot be created by decision. It cannot be designed. It cannot be predicted in a plan. It is the living testament of hundreds and thousands of people, making their own lives and all their inner forces manifest.

And finally, the whole emerges.”

The Timeless Way of Building, by Christopher Alexander, page 510.

I wonder if these people can get a neighborhood house-rotating party going and turn the shacks northward.