Comments on: Smart citizens (3): crowdfunding platforms and the year of collaborative city-making https://blog.p2pfoundation.net/smart-citizens-3-crowdfunding-platforms-and-the-year-of-collaborative-city-making/2013/12/17 Researching, documenting and promoting peer to peer practices Tue, 17 Dec 2013 08:19:35 +0000 hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=5.5.15 By: Øyvind Holmstad https://blog.p2pfoundation.net/smart-citizens-3-crowdfunding-platforms-and-the-year-of-collaborative-city-making/2013/12/17/comment-page-1#comment-575951 Tue, 17 Dec 2013 08:19:35 +0000 http://blog.p2pfoundation.net/?p=34749#comment-575951 “But, by contrast, in the early phases of industrial society which we have experienced recently, the pattern languages die.
Instead of being widely shared, the pattern languages which determine how a town gets made become specialized and private. Roads are built by highway engineers; buildings by architects; parks by planners; hospitals by hospital consultants; schools by educational specialists; gardens by gardeners; tract housing by developers.

The people of the town themselves know hardly any of the languages which these specialists use. And if they want to find out what these languages contain, they can’t, because it is considered professional expertise. The professionals guard their language jealously to make themselves indispensable.

Even within any profession, professional jealousy keeps people from sharing their pattern languages. Architects, like chefs, jealously guard their recipes, so that they can maintain unique style to sell.

The languages start out to being specialized and hidden from the people; and then within the specialties, the languages become more private still, and hidden from another, and fragmented.” – The Timeless Way of Building by Christopher Alexander, page 231-232

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