Therefore:
Encourage a birth and death process for towns within the region, which gradually has these effects:
1. The population is evenly distributed in terms of different sizes—for example, one town with 1,000,000 people, 10 towns with 100,000 people each, 100 towns with 10,000 people each, and 1000 towns with 100 people each.
2. These towns are distributed in space in such a way that within each size category the towns are homogeneously distributed all across the region.
. . . once buildings and arcades and open spaces have been roughly fixed by building complex (95), wings of light (107), positive outdoor space (106), arcades (119)—it is time to pay attention to the paths which run between the buildings. This pattern shapes these paths and also helps to give more detailed form to degrees of publicness (36), network of paths and cars (52), and circulation realms (98).
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The layout of paths will seem right and comfortable only when it is compatible with the process of walking. And the process of walking is far more subtle than one might imagine.
Essentially there are three complementary processes:
I. As you walk along you scan the landscape for intermediate destinations—the furthest points along the path which you can see. You try, more or less, to walk in a straight line toward these points. This naturally has the effect that you will cut corners and take “diagonal” paths, since these are the ones which often form straight lines between your present position and the point which you are making for.
 | (rtT6*M6J>IA-|T£goal. |
Path to a goal.
2. These intermediate destinations keep changing. The further you walk, the more you can see around the corner. If you always walk straight toward this furthest point and the furthest point keeps changing, you will actually move in a slow curve, like a missile tracking a moving target.
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Series of goals.
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| - o - -A8The actual faih. |
3. Since you do not want to keep changing direction while you walk and do not want to spend your whole time re-calculating your best direction of travel, you arrange your walking process in such a way that you pick a temporary “goal”—some clearly visible landmark—which is more or less in the direction you want to take and then walk in a straight line toward it for a hundred yards, then, as you get close, pick another new goal, once more a hundred yards further on, and walk toward it. . . . You do this so that in between, you can talk, think, daydream, smell the spring, without having to think about your walking direction every minute.
In the diagram above a person begins at A and heads for point
E. Along the way, his intermediate goals are points B, C, and
D. Since he is trying to walk in a roughly straight line toward
E, his intermediate goal changes from B to C, as soon as C is visible; and from C to D, as soon as D is visible.
The proper arrangements of paths is one with enough intermediate goals, to make this process workable. If there aren’t enough intermediate goals, the process of walking becomes more difficult, and consumes unnecessary emotional energy.
Therefore:
To lay out paths, first place goals at natural points of interest. Then connect the goals to one another to form the
BUILDINGS
paths. The paths may be straight, or gently curving between goals; their paving should swell around the goal. The goals should never be more than a few hundred feet apart.
All the ordinary things in the outdoors—trees, fountains, entrances, gateways, seats, statues, a swing, an outdoor room—can be the goals. See family of entrances (102), main entrance ( I IO) , TREE PLACES (171), SEAT SPOTS (241), RAISED FLOWERS
(245); build the “goals” according to the rules of something roughly in the middle (126); and shape the paths according to path shape (I 2 I). To pave the paths use paving with cracks BETWEEN THE STONES (247) . . . .
| I 21 PATH SHAPE* |
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| 589 |
. . . paths of various kinds have been defined by larger patterns-PROMENADE (3l)> SHOPPING STREET (32), NETWORK OF
PATHS AND CARS ($2), RAISED WALK (55), PEDESTRIAN STREET
(100), and paths and goals (I 20). This pattern defines their shape: and it can also help to generate these larger patterns piecemeal, through the very process of shaping parts of the path.
* * *
Streets should be for staying in, and not just for moving through, the way they are today.
For centuries, the street provided city dwellers with usable public space right outside their houses. Now, in a number of subtle ways, the modern city has made streets which are for “going through/’ not for “staying in.” This is reinforced by regulations which make it a crime to loiter, by the greater attractions inside the side itself, and by streets which are so unattractive to stay in, that they almost force people into their houses.
From an environmental standpoint, the essence of the problem is this: streets are “centrifugal” not “centripetal”: they drive people out instead of attracting them in. In order to combat this effect, the pedestrian world outside houses must be made into the kind of place where you stay, rather than the kind of place you move through. It must, in short, be made like a kind of outside public room, with a greater sense of enclosure than a street.
This can be accomplished if we make residential pedestrian streets subtly convex in plan with seats and galleries around the edges, and even sometimes roof the streets with beams or trellis-work.
Here are two examples of this pattern, at two different scales. First, we show a plan of ours for fourteen houses in Peru. The street shape is created by gradually stepping back the houses, in plan. The result is a street with a positive, somewhat elliptical shape. We hope it is a place that will encourage people to slow down and spend time there.
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| The path shape formed by fourteen houses. |
The second example is a very small path, cutting through a neighborhood in the hills of Berkeley. Again, the shape swells out subtly, just in those places where it is good to pause and sit.
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| A spot along a path in the hills of Berkeley. |