"The city of Detroit has a very strange, wild appearance, in some parts like a city of ruins many years older than it actually is, where nature reasserts itself in vegetation that spreads over the city’s crumbling structures."
At any given moment, in any part of the world, there is a deep wholeness that exists there. This is the structure of the whole: the largest and deepest physical configuration that is present there. It can be felt and seen.
The most fundamental way to treat the land - whether it is an open field, an existing village, or a street in town - is to respect what is there, protect it, continue it, and make it better. Heal it. Make it more whole. The great towns and villages have always been built this way, and it is this process which gave them beauty. The deep seeds of structure run through the place in its geometry, its colors, its smells and its sounds. It takes skill to preserve and extend these. It requires loving attention to what is there...
The unfoldings on this website guide you in the process of envisioning, diagnosing, planning and building on your physical site, always with the purpose of extending wholeness -- the basis of a living neighborhood.
http://www.livingneighborhoods.org (Christopher Alexander and crew, authors of the books A Pattern Language, the Timeless Way of Building, and the Nature of Order)