An encounter with the school board this week reminded me that there is an entire genre of books missing from our world, and we need them. Badly.
The phrase "design pattern" experienced a strong moment of vogue many years ago when the book Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software came out, explaining a number of different ways that source code could be organized, with terms like "Adapter" (make component X behave correctly in environment Y) and "Factory" (make component X that builds new Y components with extra knowledge neither X or the client environment has). Design Patterns of Software has since been generalized into a documentation discipline, leading to the backlash idea that design patterns are documentation to cover missing features of a programming language.
All of this is a bit of a shame, because the very idea of patterns like this come from Christopher Alexander's wonderful book, A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction, which is a book about architecture and urban design, not software. And Alexander's greatest point, throughout his book, is that his architectural pattern language is a formal system for making choices, both at the level of the community and at the level of the home, that lead to feelings.
A couple of times in my stories I've made a joke that this idea could be taken up. In both The Journal Entries and in The Star Kingdom of Arendelle, characters make reference to a book called A Pattern Language of Polities: City States, Nation States, and Worlds. A "polity" is any government organized over a geographic region, like a town, a state, or a nation.
Alexander describes the different kinds of foyer you want depending on whether you live in a place that's warm or cold, wet or dry, all of them involve transitioning from the outside to the inside, and all of the patterns he uses on the concept of the foyer describe the trade-offs and choices one makes in manipulating the feelings of those who use it: both those who live there and those who visit. Foyers can communicate trust or distrust; responsibility or easy-going; tidiness or spontaneity.
We need books more like Alexander's, and less like the programming type: more about how we make people feel and less about trying to make larger engineering features into Lego blocks we just fit together.
I was reminded of this when dealing with a school board issue whereby the state had mandated a certain physical education standard, the school board had issued policy guidance on meeting that standard, and the district's Director of Physical Education confessed to Omaha that he spent more than an hour trying to gather all the relevant information and figure out what the policy actually was.
Both of my daughters have taken a physically demanding dance class since they were young. We were informed that my younger daughter may not qualify for graduation since she was lacking physical education credits, and their reasoning was that (1) a dance teacher was not called a "coach", (2) dance is not a competitive sport, (3) the dance school's seasons did not exactly line up with the district's schedule, and (4), my daughter had not finished the required physical education written requirements.
The Director admitted he was actually unaware that any of those were requirements. And, as it turned out, the system was completely a mess and full of contradictory requirements described in different places. Ultimate, he agreed that yes, a four-hour-a-week dance program qualified just as strongly as a four-hour-a-week soccer program.
But it blew my mind that this was so... complicated. Like, there are thousands of school districts in this country. Why isn't there a book like A Pattern Language of School Districts? It could have various organizational schemes from the community down to the individual student, that describe how a US school district interacts with its community, its polity, and its state policies, with trade-offs and work-arounds, in the kind of clear and concise language Alexander used?
Why isn't there a book like A Pattern Language of Polities that describes the temporal patterns of governing a town? The trade-offs between a mayor and a city-manager, between an elected council and a civil bureaucracy, and the different choices lots of towns and cities have made and their consequences? Things like: "Exhaustable extracted resource: Your town is situated near a mine or oilfield. Here are common patterns, their trade-offs and advantages, on how to manage the wealth now, and how to plan for transition when the resource is exhausted or prohibitively expensive to recover."
I'm watching my home town gyrate through an almost bipolar attitude toward homeless people, with very few policy decisions that make sense for anyone. The argument "That wouldn't work here" when discussing power-law homelessness policy1 is nonsense: it's only one experiment, but thousands have been run, surely we could learn something from those experiments rather than blindly running our own.
The purpose of governing is to make it possible for individual citizens to get to work and to school, to make it possible for a geographic region to feed, teach, compete, and enertain its members. Whether the government takes on those responsibilities or private companies do is a pattern, and I really want a series of books that explains the trade-offs of these patterns in terms of feelings. Cities communicate feelings, whether it's cold and lonely or open and welcoming, whether it's possible to be different or required to be conformist, whether it's big enough for diverse niches or too small for you to be anything but what the locals require. A pattern language book that lays out "If have this (for example: a natural resource, a population that's 90% one religion, or a dominant industry), you can do these things, and here are the costs and benefits of each in terms of your citizenry's well-being" (with footnotes to individual studies on polities that did each thing) would be invaluable.
Somewhere out there, there have to be young, hungry sociological students with good writing skills who can start to put together these books, right? Something that can be read not just by city managers with PhD's, but by newly elected city council and school booard members who need to understand what they've gotten themselves into. Alexander's book is such a pleasure to read, it would be nice if there were similar books that made it possible to get away from Brutalist approaches to governing.
1 That article, by the way, discusses some interesting trade-offs, but the phrase "our principles" grates on my nerves because it's a perfect picture of kyriarchy as the writer's guiding principle: dealing with the dysfunctions of the "expensive homeless" prevents us from dealing with the "deserving homeless"; this story is predicated on the notion that the Wealthiest Country on Earth™ can't solve both problems)
The phrase "design pattern" experienced a strong moment of vogue many years ago when the book Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software came out, explaining a number of different ways that source code could be organized, with terms like "Adapter" (make component X behave correctly in environment Y) and "Factory" (make component X that builds new Y components with extra knowledge neither X or the client environment has). Design Patterns of Software has since been generalized into a documentation discipline, leading to the backlash idea that design patterns are documentation to cover missing features of a programming language.
All of this is a bit of a shame, because the very idea of patterns like this come from Christopher Alexander's wonderful book, A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction, which is a book about architecture and urban design, not software. And Alexander's greatest point, throughout his book, is that his architectural pattern language is a formal system for making choices, both at the level of the community and at the level of the home, that lead to feelings.
A couple of times in my stories I've made a joke that this idea could be taken up. In both The Journal Entries and in The Star Kingdom of Arendelle, characters make reference to a book called A Pattern Language of Polities: City States, Nation States, and Worlds. A "polity" is any government organized over a geographic region, like a town, a state, or a nation.
Alexander describes the different kinds of foyer you want depending on whether you live in a place that's warm or cold, wet or dry, all of them involve transitioning from the outside to the inside, and all of the patterns he uses on the concept of the foyer describe the trade-offs and choices one makes in manipulating the feelings of those who use it: both those who live there and those who visit. Foyers can communicate trust or distrust; responsibility or easy-going; tidiness or spontaneity.
We need books more like Alexander's, and less like the programming type: more about how we make people feel and less about trying to make larger engineering features into Lego blocks we just fit together.
I was reminded of this when dealing with a school board issue whereby the state had mandated a certain physical education standard, the school board had issued policy guidance on meeting that standard, and the district's Director of Physical Education confessed to Omaha that he spent more than an hour trying to gather all the relevant information and figure out what the policy actually was.
Both of my daughters have taken a physically demanding dance class since they were young. We were informed that my younger daughter may not qualify for graduation since she was lacking physical education credits, and their reasoning was that (1) a dance teacher was not called a "coach", (2) dance is not a competitive sport, (3) the dance school's seasons did not exactly line up with the district's schedule, and (4), my daughter had not finished the required physical education written requirements.
The Director admitted he was actually unaware that any of those were requirements. And, as it turned out, the system was completely a mess and full of contradictory requirements described in different places. Ultimate, he agreed that yes, a four-hour-a-week dance program qualified just as strongly as a four-hour-a-week soccer program.
But it blew my mind that this was so... complicated. Like, there are thousands of school districts in this country. Why isn't there a book like A Pattern Language of School Districts? It could have various organizational schemes from the community down to the individual student, that describe how a US school district interacts with its community, its polity, and its state policies, with trade-offs and work-arounds, in the kind of clear and concise language Alexander used?
Why isn't there a book like A Pattern Language of Polities that describes the temporal patterns of governing a town? The trade-offs between a mayor and a city-manager, between an elected council and a civil bureaucracy, and the different choices lots of towns and cities have made and their consequences? Things like: "Exhaustable extracted resource: Your town is situated near a mine or oilfield. Here are common patterns, their trade-offs and advantages, on how to manage the wealth now, and how to plan for transition when the resource is exhausted or prohibitively expensive to recover."
I'm watching my home town gyrate through an almost bipolar attitude toward homeless people, with very few policy decisions that make sense for anyone. The argument "That wouldn't work here" when discussing power-law homelessness policy1 is nonsense: it's only one experiment, but thousands have been run, surely we could learn something from those experiments rather than blindly running our own.
The purpose of governing is to make it possible for individual citizens to get to work and to school, to make it possible for a geographic region to feed, teach, compete, and enertain its members. Whether the government takes on those responsibilities or private companies do is a pattern, and I really want a series of books that explains the trade-offs of these patterns in terms of feelings. Cities communicate feelings, whether it's cold and lonely or open and welcoming, whether it's possible to be different or required to be conformist, whether it's big enough for diverse niches or too small for you to be anything but what the locals require. A pattern language book that lays out "If have this (for example: a natural resource, a population that's 90% one religion, or a dominant industry), you can do these things, and here are the costs and benefits of each in terms of your citizenry's well-being" (with footnotes to individual studies on polities that did each thing) would be invaluable.
Somewhere out there, there have to be young, hungry sociological students with good writing skills who can start to put together these books, right? Something that can be read not just by city managers with PhD's, but by newly elected city council and school booard members who need to understand what they've gotten themselves into. Alexander's book is such a pleasure to read, it would be nice if there were similar books that made it possible to get away from Brutalist approaches to governing.
1 That article, by the way, discusses some interesting trade-offs, but the phrase "our principles" grates on my nerves because it's a perfect picture of kyriarchy as the writer's guiding principle: dealing with the dysfunctions of the "expensive homeless" prevents us from dealing with the "deserving homeless"; this story is predicated on the notion that the Wealthiest Country on Earth™ can't solve both problems)
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}