PATTERNS OF LIFE: How Traditional Urban Patterns Are a More Powerful (and More Necessary) Antidote than We Might Think to the Current "Age of Disruption"

A discussion post for the upcoming 63rd International Making Cities Livable conference, on "Regenerative Architecture and Urbanism: Recovery and Resilience After an Age of Disruption"

ABOVE: "Traditional" and "modern" environments in Jelgava and Riga, Latvia, exhibit very different forms of geometric order -- which, as new research is revealing, have profoundly different consequences for human well-being. Images: City of Jelgava, Wikimedia Commons.

JELGAVA, LATVIA - One of the greatest paradoxes of our time may be this: that we have never been more technically capable of shaping the human environment -- and yet never more disenchanted with so much of the result.

We can engineer structures of breathtaking complexity, model their environmental performance to extraordinary precision, and construct forms that would have been unimaginable to any previous generation. We can commission wildly imaginative architect-artists to produce buildings that twist, cantilever, dissolve, and surprise — structures that photograph alluringly as icons of architectural expression. By nearly every measure of technical and creative accomplishment, we are operating at a historical peak.

But we have proved considerably less capable of making places that people actually want to be in, or keep around.

A growing number of surveys show consistent public dissatisfaction with modern environments — findings that hold across lines of age, income, race, and political affiliation, suggesting something far deeper than varied stylistic preference. Research consistently reveals a yawning gap between what most people prefer in their own environments, and what specialists in planning and architecture are actually giving them.

One manifestation of that dissatisfaction is the Architectural Uprising, founded in Sweden and described by Bloomberg as "a significant platform and voice in the design of built environments." It has grown into an international protest movement, sweeping across Norway, Sweden, and beyond, with sister organizations in the UK, Estonia, Finland, Denmark, Germany, and the USA.

It would be tempting to dismiss these voices as reactionary philistines, unable to appreciate the subtle complexities of architectural art. But that would be a mistake, for several reasons. One, these people are speaking about the places where they themselves are forced to live, and we, as professionals in service to them, are surely obliged to take their needs and desires seriously.

ABOVE: A composite image made by the famous architect Rem Koolhaas, satirizing the cacophony of works of art-architecture (including his own) whose accumulation is "counter-productive".

And two, the criticism is not confined to those outside the rarified world of artist-architects, for some of the most trenchant critiques come from within. Rem Koolhaas, one of the most famous global "starchitects," put it this way:

"...For all of us today [there] is an invitation to simply be extravagant and spectacular. … The work we do is no longer mutually reinforcing, but I would say that any accumulation is counterproductive, to the point that each new addition reduces the sum’s value. … So there are many problems, first of all our work, which is not able to find its way out of this recurring dilemma, then there are the many reasons to question our sincerity and motives." (Quoted in La Giorgia, G., 2007. Market v. meaning. Architecture Week, 5 September [online]. Available from: http://www.architectureweek.com/2007/0905/design_3-1.html

Lastly, a growing body of scientific evidence is pointing to the deeper failures of these structures  — failures that are social, political, and in the deepest sense, civilizational. It seems these structures are failing to connect us deeply to our buildings, to each other, or to meaningful experiences in place. This capacity for connection is surely the first responsibility of any professional charged with shaping the world of others — reminding us of Thoreau's remark that “to affect the quality of the day, that is the highest of the arts.”

But evidence demonstrates that we are failing in that responsibility. New research is revealing the profound if unrecognized consequences of the built environment on human well-being and health, and even planetary health, across social, physical, mental, and ecological domains. There is a direct link to the current forces of disruption in human life: the erosion of social trust, the decline of informal civic life, the epidemic of loneliness in the most densely built environments in history, the rising anger at institutions and elites — and ultimately, the rise of geopolitical instability and disruption.

These are the pathologies of a world that has optimized for many things — while neglecting, with remarkable consistency, the question of what it actually feels like as a human being who must live within, connect within, and move through, these built landscapes.

The sustainability agenda, for all its moral urgency, has not escaped this trap. On the contrary, it has in many respects reproduced it — layering technical metrics over environments that too many find, at the level of daily human experience, hostile and unsatisfying.

The cynicism this produces is rational, and the political blowback is predictable (although we may justifiably question the proposed alternatives). People can sense greenwashing even when they cannot define it, amid a growing sense of frustration and cynicism.

The Geometries of Human Experience

Koolhaas and others seem to despair of a solution, apparently resigned (some would say cynically so) to continue on the current path. But there is indeed a better path forward, revealed to us by emerging evidence from many fields. The question is not of style per se, but rather, of geometry — that is, of the deeply intimate relationship between geometric properties and human experience, including the experiences of connection, interaction and vitality. This is not the mystery it might seem.

As many studies have shown, traditional buildings and places across cultures and centuries have a remarkable capacity to promote these experiences. It seems they have a kind of "embodied intelligence" - a collected treasury of still-useful information about how to live well by building well. They share structural properties that, for interesting and sometimes troubling reasons, we have come to abandon in a misguided quest to be "modern".

Most fundamental is symmetry — not only the familiar left-right or "mirror" symmetry, but also rotational, translational, scaling, and compound forms of them.

ABOVE: Symmetry in natural structures (top row) and in traditional buildings (bottom row), including (l-r) mirror, rotational, translational, and scaling or fractal.

It seems that symmetry has a greater impact on our health and well-being than we may realize. We are symmetry-seeking creatures, in large part because symmetries form the structural conditions for legibility: the quality that allows a human nervous system to orient, engage, and feel at home.

ABOVE: Examples of compound symmetries, in a kaleidoscope, a complex fractal pattern, and a natural scene. These compound symmetries form many of the beautiful patterns we seek out - including those of traditional buildings.

In particular, we now understand the importance of scaling symmetries, or what is more commonly known as fractal structure. Research has shown that traditional facades typically exhibit a rich fractal dimension — a measure of visual complexity across scales — that falls within the range humans find measurably pleasurable and restorative. The flat, featureless surfaces of most modern construction cluster near the minimum. The difference is not subtle: exposure to environments with appropriate fractal complexity produces measurable reductions in physiological stress. Exposure to environments without it produces the opposite.

The architect and theorist Christopher Alexander spent decades identifying and documenting these properties with rigorous precision. His fifteen fundamental properties of living structure — among them strong centers, boundaries, deep interlock, roughness, and contrast — are not aesthetic preferences. They are structural features of environments that support what he called wholeness: the coherent, life-supporting organization that distinguishes places people genuinely inhabit from spaces they merely pass through.

Work building on Alexander's foundations is now developing tools such as fractal analysis and composite deep symmetry measures that can quantify these properties and predict, with reasonable accuracy, the human responses they produce.

In addition, the concept of allostatic load — the cumulative biological cost of sustained environmental stress — gives us a framework for understanding what it means to spend a lifetime in surroundings that do not fit. The body keeps a running account — and over time, the bill will come due.

An "Unholy Alliance" Between Industry and Art?

How did we come to so totally abandon these properties, and end up with today's disordered, discontenting places? It did not happen, in the first instance, through aesthetic or ideological choice -- but rather, through the relentless logic of early industrial production, only later marketed and packaged by artist-architects.

Early industrial technologies (including financial technologies) tended to reward flatness and penalize complexity, resulting in what my colleague Nikos Salingaros and I have termed "geometrical fundamentalism". The geometric intelligence of traditional building — accumulated over centuries in the evolved skills of craftspeople and the emergent conventions of local practice — was expensive, slow, and resistant to industrialization. It was rationalized away, and then theorized away. Simplicity became virtue, and ornament became a "crime". An entire professional culture was trained to regard the abandonment of human-scaled complexity not as a loss, but as the triumph of a superior civilization — with disturbingly racial overtones.

Here is the Austrian architect and ideologue Adolf Loos, in his seminal 1910 essay "Ornament and Crime":

Are we no longer capable of doing what any Negro can do, or what people have been able to do before us?... Weep not! Behold! What makes our period as important is that it is incapable of producing new ornament. We have outgrown ornament... I preach to the aristocrats, I mean the individuals who stand at the pinnacle of humanity..."

Seen from today's vantage point, this is a shockingly supremacist sentiment. That ideology may have softened, but its structural logic persists, reinforced now by a culture of spectacle architecture that is engaged in the marketing and perpetuation of the same totalizing industrial regime. Now it is clad with the alluring packaging of the artist-architects, who are, in effect, suppliers of a brand and a theme.

At best, the goal is to create spectacular art-objects worthy of admiration, rather than to form healthy human habitats. The aim is not to ask how it might feel to walk past a building every day for twenty years, but rather, how we may regard it as an object of momentary contemplation. ("We" in this case are more often artist-architects and connoisseurs, and not the broader population.)

The result is a kind of unholy alliance: an industrial production system that rewards geometric fundamentalism, combined with a design culture that rewards visual spectacle — together producing environments that ignore the well-being of the people who must live among them, and offer little more than technocratic greenwashing for the ecological systems on which we all depend.

Recovery Without Reaction

The alternatives are sometimes portrayed as either an advancement into greater innovation and artistic adventure, or a reactionary retreat into forms that are identical to those of the past, with all its political and cultural baggage. That is a false duality.

To be sure, the revival of past styles has been a time-honored architectural practice, and by any empirical account, it has produced some of the most well-loved, successful and enduring places in human history. If we are serious about sustainability, perhaps we should look more seriously at the buildings that have already sustained.

And the notion that a particular form must convey a particular ideological content is belied by the vastly varied political systems that have incorporated the same stylistic languages — democracies, dictatorships, theocracies, liberal societies.

But there is a deeper point to be learned, and it can be seen in the lessons of biological evolution, and the workings of complex adaptive systems. Successful processes incorporate the best from their past, even as they adapt to new conditions with new innovations. We preserve and build upon the genetic material, and we extend it into new expressions and new adaptations.

ABOVE: The geometric properties of a "deep symmetry" — incorporating symmetries with our own biological experiences, and with the deeper qualities of place and space — are increasingly well recognized.

This is how the richest architectural traditions actually worked. The great urban fabrics we admire were never static. They incorporated new technologies, new programs, and new aesthetic vocabularies, working continuously across generations. The medieval builders of Riga and Jelgava worked with the materials and methods of their time. Their baroque and neoclassical successors did the same, in forms that were new but geometrically continuous with what came before. They embodied timeless geometric characteristics, borne of human universals of movement and experience.

Recapitulations and revivals have always been part of this process — not failures of imagination, but acts that sustained the treasuries of genetic memory. So have genuinely new additions in new forms, provided they were disciplined by the same underlying geometric intelligence.

That is the model for regeneration in our time. The tools are becoming available. The evidence is accumulating. An impatient and aggravated public awaits.

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The 63rd International Making Cities Livable (IMCL) conference will take place in Riga and Jelgava, Latvia, July 6-10, 2026. The IMCL is hosted by the Lennard Institute for Livable Cities, a nonprofit educational institution with a mission to advance the well-being of people and planet by making more livable, more ecological, and more prosperous cities, towns and suburbs. The IMCL was founded in 1985 by Henry Lennard, a Viennese medical sociologist, and Suzanne Lennard, a British architectural scholar, and conferences have been held across Europe and the USA, bringing together scholars, practitioners and city officials from across the globe.