The Beady Ring

Christopher Alexander's first book in his Nature of Order series describes a physical pattern of certain cities that strongly correlates with strong sense of community among people who live there. This structure is called "beady-ring" by the researchers,  Bill Hillier and Julienne Hanson, actually influences communication in a village or neighborhood. The general structure is a series of small interlocking streets, creating positive space between them.

If the structure of a street can create community or communication, or work against it, as is the case of the huge grid in Overland Park, KS, where I grew up, what does this say about communication and community?  This research and the correlation to patterns of organization in a town implies that people respond to the context of their lives, not just topics or people.

I have been thinking about the pattern of an individual moving through the day, in terms of moving from the world of the PRIVATE to the world of the PUBLIC. Here's the pattern:

PRIVATE --------------+---------------- PUBLIC

  x                                                                 You wake up in the morning, essentialy alone
       x                                                            If you share a bed or house, you get ready
                                                                          for the day and begin to interact with one or two familiar people.
                   x                                                You walk through your immediate neighborhood, seeing a few
                                                                          familiar faces perhaps.
                                x                                   You drive or travel through your general neighborhood, seeing
                                                                           people who you may know or may not know. You are moving
                                                                           from the private to the public realm.
                                          x                         You arrive at your destination. A few familiar faces may be here if
                                                                           it's a place you park or visit.
                                                        x           You walk through a public place on the way to work, surrounded by
                                                                           strangers. Fully in the public sphere.
                                          x                         As you near your work place, you are still in public, but you begin to
                                                                           recognize some people, even if they are strangers.
                                 x                                  You enter the building where you work, and you see more familiar
                                                                           faces. People begin to greet you and say "hi". You are moving
                                                                           out of the public and back to the private sphere.
                        x                                           You enter the office, see coworkers, many of whom you know. 
            x                                                       You see team members who you collaborate with on projects.
       x                                                            You near your desk, greet those who you interact with on a daily basis.
 x                                                                  Back at your desk, you sit down to work, by yourself, at your desk.

This arc of a morning commute, moving from the private to public and back, reveals some insights into why the beady-ring structure might create community. At the far extreme of the PUBLIC arc, the individual is anonymous, part of a crowd, with no communication or exchange with others. At the other extreme, the PRIVATE, the individual is alone, with no communication or exchange with others. Somewhere between the two extremes is a zone of communication and collaboration. If you move the endpoints in just slightly, you can see something like this:

PRIVATE --------------+---------------- PUBLIC
       FRIENDS --------+-------- NEIGHBORS
                       COMMUNITY

The range of contexts can be expressed using different words, too:

ALONE   --------------+----------- ANONYMOUS
    CONTRIBUTOR ---+---- MEMBER           
                       PARTICIPANT

Note the above distinctions imply a sense of accomplishment by the person in the context itself.

The beady-ring structure causes people to stay more within the center of these extremes for longer; the structure causes familiarity among and between neighbors, especially those who share the segment or block of the ring structure. Instead of leaving the neighborhood immediately into the PUBLIC realm, individuals re-enter new rings, each slightly less familiar, but each having some familiarity and identity in themselves.

Growing up in Overland Park, when I left the house, with its large yard, I did know a lot of the neighbors, but the straight roads quickly (and efficiently) took me right into the public and anonymous realm, with very little transition between private and public. The suburbs also require everyone to own a car, making interactions in the neighborhood much less common.

This thought of prolonging the time within the inner zone between public and private has implications on organizing time, space, teams, and interest groups. Like a gardener, one cannot direct vegetables to grow by fiat, but you can organize a context in which the vegetables will naturally flourish. Similarly, you can't make people interact as a community, but you can organize a context in such a way that community can flourish. This insight of the beady rings points the way to one aspect of how to do this.

© Copyright 2005 Steve Land. Last update: 4/21/2005; 8:22:56 AM.