Urban Planning
9 patterns in this domain
“Fail small to survive big”
3/7 frontierCascading Failure Containment
In the 14th century, shipbuilders began dividing hulls into watertight compartments.
“Let it break down — something better emerges”
3/7 frontierControlled Decomposition
About 9,000 years ago, someone left a jar of grape juice too long in the Caucasus heat.
“Different melodies, one harmony”
3/7 frontierCounterpoint
Johann Sebastian Bach's fugues are the most celebrated demonstration of counterpoint in Western music.
“Reclaim what's no longer needed”
3/7 frontierGarbage Collection
In 1959, John McCarthy was working on Lisp, one of the first programming languages, and hit a fundamental problem: programs allocated memory to store data, but programmers were terrible at freeing it when they were done.
“Test small before you go big”
3/7 frontierGraduated Rollout
In 1747, Scottish naval surgeon James Lind conducted what is often called the first clinical trial.
“Build the structure, and life will come”
3/7 frontierPlatform Ecosystem
A coral polyp is a simple organism — a tiny soft-bodied animal smaller than a pencil eraser.
“Leave a mark, shape the swarm”
3/7 frontierStigmergy
In 1959, French biologist Pierre-Paul Grasse watched termites build cathedral-like mounds — structures millions of times larger than any individual termite — and realized something astonishing: no termite knew the blueprint.
“Compare, reconcile, converge”
4/8 frontierStructural Diffing and Merging
In 2005, Linus Torvalds had a problem.
“Touch one thread, the whole web moves”
3/7 frontierTrophic Cascade
The term comes from ecology.