<cite>A Pattern Language</cite> by Christopher Alexander, Sara Ishikawa, Murray Silverstein, and others gives a rich analyisis of urban design patterns and best practices. Some manifest quite well in Ann Arbor. Others not so much.

72 Local Sports

Scatter places for team and individual sports through every work community and neighborhood ... and make the action visible to passers-by, as an invitation to participate.

We see this in action downtown, in the areas nearby: for example, the tennis courts attached to the Betsy Barbour residence hall. If you drive or walk or bike the B2B Trail on Fuller Road past the medical complex, you'll see a the Fuller Pool and several large sports fields.

73 Adventure Playground

Set up a playground for the children in each neighborhood. Not a highly finished playground, with asphalt and swings, but a place with raw materials of all kinds -- nets, boxes, barrels, trees, ropes, simple tools, frames, grass, and water -- where children can create and re-create playgrounds of their own.

We do have lots of traditional parks, but many of them double as Adventure Playgrounds. Black Pond Woods and Leslie Science Center, The Bluffs, Fuller Park, parts of The Arb ... all contain the natural tools you need.

84 Teenage Society

Replace the "high school" with an institution which is actually a model of adult society, on which the students take on most of the responsibility for learning and social life, with clearly defined roles and forms of discipline. Provide adult guidance, both for the learning, and the social structure of the society, but keep them as far as feasibly, in the hands of the students.

Community High School in particular and the AAPS in general reaches for this goal. Students at CHS learn without school bells or hall monitors on an open campus in Downtown Ann Arbor, with the opportunity to develop their own classes in the community.

86 Children's Home

In every neighborhood, build a children's home -- a second home for children -- a large rambling house or workplace -- where children can stay for an hour or two a week...

The Neutral Zone, Ann Arbor's Teen Center, doesn't meet all the suggestions, but it does offer a "home away from home". There are music and art and writing classes, concerts, and a space on Washington where teens can just drop in and hang out.

88 Street Cafe

Encourage local cafes to spring up in each neighborhood. Make them intimate places, where people can sit with coffee or a drink and watch the world go by. Build the front of the cafe so that a set of tables stretch out of the cafe, right into the street.

We see this quite a bit Downtown, on Main Street and State, and Caribou on Packard, but not so much inside neighborhoods, which is too bad. Washtenaw Dairy is one exception, on a quiet residential street. There's plenty of seating outside, and no reason not to linger.

89 Corner Grocery

Give every neighborhood at least one corner grocery, somewhere near its heart...

Mana Oriental serves the Broadway neighborhood. The Co-op is downtown. There's a place on Packard near Stadium that I can't remember (locally named "the little store"?). Big City Bakery is on the northwest side. You can walk to By the Pound from the Michigan Stadium neighborhood. Jefferson Market is in a residential neighborhood west of downtown, right across from an elementary school. Convenient!

90 Beer Hall

Somewhere in the community at least one big place where a few hundred people can gather, with beer and wine, music, and perhaps a half-dozen activities, so that the people are continuously criss-crossing from one to another.

The Corner Brewery in Ypsilanti does this year round. In the summer, the German Park Picnic is the site of three monthly outdoor beer events.

92 Bus Stops

Bus stops must be easy to recognize, and pleasant, with enough activity around them to make people comfortable and safe... Build bus stips so that they form tin centers of public life. Locate them so that they work together with several other activites, at least a newsstand, maps, outdoor shelter, seats, ... corner groceries, tree places, squares...

Ann Arbor does not use bus stops well. Yes, Blake and the neighborhood stops are generally safe and efficient, but not social. No shop is truly connected with Blake, and there is no official crossing to the Library across the way. Neighborhoods stops are usually only a sign on a stake or an unlit covered room.

The editor had to return the book to the library at this point.

• BrianKerr will loan Matt a copy next time they meet

Similar / Related Books

User:Murph recommends the following books for Pattern Language admirers:

• Jane Jacobs, Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961) - examines characteristics of successful urban neighborhoods, from street layout (high connectivity grid-based systems are good) to park size (too big is bad, bad, bad, unless you have the population density of Manhattan).
  • Doesn't Jacobs include a specific warning against applying her observations to small cities? -MattH
• David Sucher, City Comforts: How to Build an Urban Village (1994, or revised/expanded/color edition, 2003) - a developer and former King County (Seattle) Planning Commissioner looks at small ways to create human-scaled, pedestrian-friendly, lively streetscapes and neighborhoods, drawing explicitly from Jacobs and Alexander.