Natural and Artificial Cities - Trust Annual Report 1966
The essay entitled "A city is not a Tree" by Christopher Alexander, was selected for one of the 1965 Kaufmann International Design Awards. The writer is a member of the Faculty of Environmental Design at the University of California. He is also a mathematician and architect.
Those cities which have grown more or less spontaneously he terms "natural cities", and those which have been deliberately created by planners, either in part or in whole, as "artificial cities". Winchester is an example of the former and British New Towns of the latter.
Artificial cities, he points out, have some essential ingredient missing, and attempts to create cities artificially are, he submits, entirely unsuccessful.
It is noted that architects themselves like living in old houses in preference to new ones. The general public regards the growth of new cities as a sad necessity and escape whenever possible to old cities. In other respects people like to move with the times, and the rejection of the modern artificial environment expresses a longing for some quality which escapes their grasp. Although many designers and architects are trying to solve this problem, the results have rarely approached success.
It is vital to try and discover what gave these old towns life, and it is equally vital to preserve the cities which have this quality. It is the one thing which we cannot now re-create.
Alexander believes that cities have been created by planners with the growth pattern of a tree, and while this seems logical at first glance, it leads to the isolation of each extremity. Instead he prefers the plan of a semi lattice which gives a much more diverse pattern of development.
This concept might well be kept in mind when considering Winchester's Traffic Plan. The City is a receptacle for life. If the receptacle is cut across with a major road, the life within will be cut to pieces.