Some pattern languages

Here are some examples of pattern languages - their contents and their contexts . .

A pattern language - Chris Alexander’s original is a language of evolving both the spatial organisation of *built environment*, and the aesthetic experience of *inhabiting it*.

>It ranges from the order of a region, and relationships of an urban area to surrounding countryside, through to the order of a neighbourhood, street, dwelling or room; and to the hands-on, in situ construction of a building organised on these lines.

In their New pattern language - Growing regions - a hybrid of Alexander’s - architect Michael Mehaffy and colleagues switch focus to economic- and community-development practice on a municipal level.

>They adopt Alexander’s larger-scale patterns of built environment and region (‘patterns of scale’), then focus on the network-structures involved in urban development practice (‘patterns of multiple scale’), and the kinds of organising and practice (‘patterns of process’) that constitute generative practice and community ‘weight’ in processes at municipal level.

Out of a substantial programme of post-Ostrom anthropological research on commons, Silke Helfrich and David Bollier have derived A pattern language of commoning.

>Patterns are organised in three constitutive dimensions which their research reveals to be present in commoning practices of diverse kinds: the *social life* of commoning, *peer governance* through commoning and *provisioning* through commons.

Over five years, involving around 50 people, the Groupworks collective developed A pattern language of helping groups function well. This is published as a card deck. Later, Tree Bressen worked with Ward Cunningham to translate these group facilitation patterns into a wiki.

For comparison, this proposal . . A college

# See also - Pattern language(ing) - Pattern language features