Special Issue "New Applications and Development of Christopher Alexander’s The Nature of Order"

Bin Jiang, Faculty of Engineering and Sustainable Development, Division of GIScience, University of Gävle, Sweden; and Nikos Salingaros, Department of Mathematics, University of Texas at San Antonio, San Antonio, USA, served as guest editors with Urban Science Journal to present this special issue on Christopher Alexander’s work.

The work of Alexander has proven enormously influential, if sometimes controversial, spanning from his early work on Notes on the Synthesis of Form, through his seminal paper “A City is Not a Tree”, to later books A Pattern Language and A New Theory of Urban Design.  His ideas have found remarkable applications in software engineering, communications, management theory, and many other fields. Among the spinoff innovations are design patterns (also known as “pattern languages of programming”), popular software programs like “The Sims”, platforms like wikis (and Wikipedia), and new methodologies like Agile, Scrum and others.

Later in his career, Alexander devoted over 27 years to his most ambitious work of all: The four-volume magnum opus, The Nature of Order: An essay on the art of building and the nature of the universe  (Alexander 2002–2005). In this far-ranging book, Alexander presents an intriguing account of the fundamental phenomenon of order, the processes of creating order, and even a new cosmology—as he describes it, a deeper conception of how the physical universe is put together. The book argues that order in nature is essentially the same as that in what we build or make, and underlying order-creating processes of building or making of architecture and design are no less important than those of physics and biology. The book presents an argument for a new kind of beauty—structural beauty—that exists in fine structure of space and matter, and subsequently it argues for a new basis of doing architecture for creating more beautiful and more sustainable buildings, gardens, streets and cities.

The editors invited submissions on Alexander’s work and its potential applications and development, with a focus on The Nature of Order but also addressing other aspects of his contributions related to urban science including both understanding and making of better built environments. The purpose of this Special Issue is not only to debate Alexander’s legacy, but also to try to assess previously-unrecognized potential applications of this later work. The papers were then peer reviewed.

The issue has six published papers that can be found here.