Christopher Alexander – It Must Be Us

This quote comes at the end of another significant section which I did not draw quotes from (as was the case with sequences). It describes life-creating sequences can be interlinked into process-networks … it struck me as a fascinating balance between something specifically mechanical and yet filled with life. Ready-made quotes did not jumpt out at me, I could probably describe it, but I don’t want to yet. These are the (almost) final words of this section:

“If we are to imagine a process which can allow all of us in society to create our communal life together, then this process must – to an extraordinary extent – allow these ordinary feelings, our ordinary thoughts and passions, to enter the world and therefore to enter the processes by which the world is made. No bureaucrat can handle this for us. No well-meaning master-architect, along, will do it for us, not if what matters in the end is the tone of the jukebox, the smile of the waitress, the slightly raucous atmosphere in which the locals lean on the bar and eye each other, swapping tales, stifling their loneliness.

For all that to be contained, captured, brought to life, it must be us, mustn’t it – we ourselves – who do the deciding and at least some of the building, so that it is ours when it is finished, and we can still feel what it means to be alive in that thing, built, unfinished, but nevertheless open to our ordinary stories and our ordinary human life.

Well, now we can see why a refined and politely worked-out process will not do, why something conceived in the planning department, or in the professional pages of legislation, or in a professional code of ethics, will not sufficiently catch the glint of that something that engages us, here, in our life on Earth.”

Christopher Alexander – The Nature of Order – Book 2: The Process of Creating Life