City Country Fingers

Imagine living in a city, with all the amenities like late night tacos, early morning cafes, and nearby schools. Imagine living in the country, with gorgeous wide open fields and quiet solitude. Jam ’em together, what do you get? City country fingers. This is just one of the many patterns in Christopher Alexander’s “A Pattern Langauge”. You can read the specifics straight from the book here, but a quick summary is below.

The main takeaways:

• Interlock city and farmland, with city never being more than a mile wide, and farmland being at least a mile wide.
• While the farmland can be cultivated, it should remain free for anyone to respectfully enjoy and wander.
• The limit of a mile of city ensures that everyone is within a 10 minute walk of country.

Imagine it! Is there anyplace in the world that has this? I’m guessing towns in Europe, perhaps where the mountains have limited construction. Otherwise, urban places are packed tight — giving the feeling of being pushed into the ocean in New York City.

This book is filled with awesome ideas and facts, like a chart plotting “nuisance distances,” that is where a trip becomes a nuisance depending on how far away something is and how frequent the trip is. Apparently, if something is greater than 50 feet away and you have to make the trip twice an hour, it’s right on the border of being a nuisance. I’ll highlight more of these ideas in coming posts.