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HomeShop at BookSurgeCookingMethodsSidi Bou Sa'id, Tunisia: Structure and Form of a Mediterranean Village |
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An Essential Case Study of "Emergent Sustainability" Aug 11, 2009
This important book is a richly detailed description of the structure and form of a beautiful village in Tunisia - likely to be of great interest to architects, urban planners, historians, anthropologists, travel lovers, and just about anyone else who loves beautiful places and buildings. But it's also an important case study of the way such villages grew and endured over centuries. And as author and professor Besim S. Hakim makes clear, it turns out that there are important lessons for us today.
In the 2009 edition preface, Hakim writes that this example, Sidi Bou Sa'id, in Tunisia, illustrates "a built environment that came into being due to a generative system" - one that produced an "emergent" pattern that was not planned by any single designer. Instead, it grew from the actions of many people working within "a sustainable framework of decision-making characterized by a bottom-up approach and guided by over-arching proscriptive generative codes." This dynamic approach, he notes, allowed the continuous emergence of urban forms that were in balance with their immediate surroundings, and that maintained the integrity and quality of the village as a whole.
The subject of urban codes is now much-discussed in the fields of urban planning and architecture. But most codes are relatively static, specifying an end state to be achieved at one point in time. What Hakim describes here is a much more dynamic, rule-based process of shaping growth - more in line with the latest insights of complexity science about the growth of natural systems. It leads to the phenomenon of "emergence" - the appearance of unplanned and often unpredictable characteristics, that nonetheless have the characteristic of reinforcing and enriching what came before.
Hakim makes a comparison to the work of Christopher Alexander, who has focused on the way that settlements grow over time. Hakim notes a number of "patterns" that correspond to Alexander's "pattern language" -- a compendium of recurrent design solutions, together with the rules that govern how they go together, like the rules of grammar. Alexander argues that such patterned growth over time has produced the beautiful and complex places all around us, in contrast to our more "mechanical" methods today.
For Hakim, such places have achieved a form of sustainability that is well worth our study, since so many of them have, after all, "sustained" for centuries. The subject of urban sustainability is of course a much-discussed one, since buildings and urban environments are responsible for over one-third of the greenhouse gases that cause climate change, to say nothing of other ecological damage. But as many critics point out, sustainability is not just a bolt-on affair: it goes to the way people interact socially and economically, and the way, as Hakim points out, that small acts contribute (or don't) to the quality and durability of their surroundings, and the built environment as a whole.
After this book's first publication, Hakim went on to study these kinds of "generative codes" and their related processes in more detail, documenting the fascinating cities they have produced over the centuries. (See for example his 1986 book, .) He wants to see what we can learn today for our modern challenges. As we increasingly recognize that sustainability requires a deeper and more emergent kind of structure than "bolt-on" technology can provide, this is surely an important project.
But first, to understand any such place and how it grows and sustains, we must understand its "DNA." This wonderful book shows us, in beautifully detailed drawings and photographs, a fine example of that DNA and its workings.
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