Hello friends. Today's story is the fourth & final piece of our Stronger Town series, written by Amanda Patchin. In this series, we explored Christopher Alexander's book A Pattern Language, which outlines 243 patterns of successful cities. Our series took four of those patterns & characteristics and applied them to Boise. We considered elements that make Boise a vibrant & beautiful city and mused about how those patterns might be expanded, improved, or changed. Today's story takes a look at the where and why of housing. Also here's the previous three stories if you missed them. Enjoy!

💌 A stronger town part I: patterns & promenades​

💌 A stronger town part II: the countryside​

💌 A stronger town part III: higher places​

(PS - today's podcast is different than the newsletter.)

By Amanda Patchin

This last entry in my Stronger Towns series is a little bit harder to be quite positive about. Certainly, I think it is a pattern well worth cultivating in Boise, however, it is not one that any modern city has done particularly well and Boise is no exception. “Housing in Between” is the pattern that there should not be a “sharp separation between residential and nonresidential parts of town.”

There are, I think, many reasons for wanting a good mix of housing and non-housing developments. Short commutes are certainly desirable. The fantasy of a genuinely walkable community inspires everyone to imagine the pleasures of a casual stroll to the local pub or sending a child to run to the corner grocery for milk. We can all easily imagine and desire the vibrancy of people out and about for a variety of reasons in a variety of places. However, Christopher Alexander’s A Pattern Language bases the pattern of “Housing in Between” on the ethic of care more than the vibrancy of intermixture.

Care is central to Alexander’s philosophy which permeates all the patterns of this work. The vibrancy that we might associate with movement - people walking or biking from one place to the next - he associates just as much with personal care. When people live in a space they “extend themselves to make it personal and comfortable.” We can easily see this in the gestures of decoration that adorn suburban doorways, care-home hallways, and office cubicles, which almost inevitably sprout with little tokens of personality, like rubber duck collections, seasonal wreaths, and family photographs.

Often, this kind of personal care is a little off-putting. One person’s personal touch looks like clutter or chaos to another. But Alexander trusts, if not personally at least philosophically, the human desire to live wholly and comfortably. With homes intermixed, industrial, business, and retail districts will be alive, cleaner, and healthier than they would be if segregated.

This philosophy of care is a dramatically different approach to urban design. Arguments for suburban vs. urban development are generally couched in terms of what people want. Families want yards and quiet streets. Young professionals want vibrant cultural life. The eco-conscious want the option to bike and avoid car emissions. Artists want live-work spaces. Retail businesses want good parking for customers or, perhaps, lots of pedestrian traffic to shop their aisles. Alexander shifts the conversation to address not our desires but our obligations.

“Housing in Between” prompts us to consider what our spaces need from us, and not just what we need or want from our spaces. Living in a particular location ought to awaken a desire to care for it, but it certainly creates an obligation to do so. The land holds us, houses us, feeds us, what are we supposed to be giving back to it?

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In both A Pattern Language and The Timeless Way of Building Christopher Alexander writes about the “quality without a name” that makes a house, a town, a room, feel “alive.” This living quality is what he was aiming for in all of his design work and writing. In “Housing in Between” he points out the opposite: the dead feeling that arises in a space that is not lived in. Where industry is the exclusive occupant of a space, it feels dead and has “the arid quality of not being cared for personally.” I think we have all felt this in large and small ways in various places that may be landscaped and groomed, but still feel dead.

Drive behind any strip mall in Boise, venture out to the gigantic parking lot that surrounds the gigantic Micron building, drive around the industrial park that borders the airport and feel the stale deadness of hard surfaces, forlorn weeds, and brown drifts of last autumn’s leaves. Where strips of grass are maintained weekly by landscaping companies there are bits of green, but those scraps of lawn are effectively as dead as the asphalt because organic life is not self-sustaining in sterile places and must be kept artificially vibrant with extreme quantities of fertilizer and herbicides.

By contrast, while Boise does not have a comprehensive plan for “Housing in Between” the places where this pattern exists have the living quality Alexander is aiming for. “It is only where houses are mixed in between the other functions, in twos and threes, in rows and tiny clusters that the personal quality of the households…gives energy to the workshops and offices and services.” Venture along the Chinden corridor between Veterans Parkway and the connector and notice that while it is often messy, and some lots are weedy or dusty, there is that sense of energy about the area that can be felt most any time of day. Trailers and small older houses mix with warehouses, tap rooms, pawn shops, and offices. The Waterfront development and the Greenbelt are loci of vibrant community life, while the various restaurants offer further context for gathering and sharing life.

One does not have to live there to enjoy the feeling that “Housing in Between” gives to the place. The fact that people do live there provides the context for that quality to sprout and grow. Of course, the people who do live there must care for the space in the way Alexander describes. Fortunately, this kind of care is at least somewhat natural to human beings and so the time and attention flows naturally out of presence. Walking from home to the coffee shop every day, I will notice a scrap of plastic on the ground and probably pick it up in order to make tomorrow’s walk more pleasant. Biking to and from work each weekday will prompt my neighbor to spend his Saturday morning grubbing out the goatheads that are rooting along the roadway. Living near his business will make the local cabinet maker even more sensitive to the appearance of his shop and its effect on the neighborhood.

In order to cultivate “Housing in Between” Boise city planners and Boise citizens have to recognize together the communal good that comes from people living in a place. Segregating industrial from retail from residential might seem to make sense. Suburban neighborhoods are quieter (no big trucks or machines), exclusively industrial areas don’t have to worry about sidewalks or bike paths, simplifying construction and design, a retail district can maximize the rental value of every building. However, the separation of these varying purposes deprives the city of life in several ways. The physical space is less cared for, less nurtured, and therefore much more sterile and “arid” than it needs to be. These divisions also make it much harder for generative and vibrant interaction. Going shopping then has to be a deliberate car trip, getting coffee a scheduled stop, and going to work a time-consuming commute.

It is, I think, hard to quantify the benefits of small clusters of houses throughout the city, but striving for the living quality that Alexander describes requires attentiveness, adaptability, and a willingness to reconsider the norms of modern culture.

Housing in Between, High Places, The Countryside, and Promenade are only four of the 243 patterns in A Pattern Language. Considering them allows us both to appreciate what makes Boise the place we want to live and to consider how to make it better, happier, and more satisfying.

Further, we could and should consider larger patterns like “Web of Public Transportation” or “Nine-Percent Parking” or “Four Story Limit” as the Boise grows and changes. Social patterns like “Old People Everywhere” and “Children in the City” and “Teenage Society” will focus our planning on the human relationships that inform our personal and public lives. Smaller patterns like “Site Repair” or “Positive Outdoor Space” or “Intimacy Gradient” can help individual homes and neighborhoods be more lively, more refreshing, more alive. Consider picking up a copy of the book and sharing it with your friends, family, and community to prompt conversations about what changes – small or large – we can implement in our beautiful little city.

Thanks for reading!

With love from Boise,

Marissa & Amanda

This story was written by Amanda Patchin. Amanda has a monthly-ish newsletter where she shares her booklist, selections from her fiction, and updates on what books she has for sale in the Zed Bookshop.

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