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11 Gathering the pieces Contents ix
Fancy being the cook with an unlimited budget preparing for an evening extrav-
aganza. For days ahead you have visions of your visual and gustatorial creations,
and begin gathering the pieces. Some fruit is not yet ripe, the fish not fresh,
and your special chocolate unavailable. Yet unexpected surprises also appear --
durands, anonas, sea cucumbers, and a glorious French wine. So, continually
dropping and adding and sorting, you accumulate the ingredients to combine
into magical culinary masterpieces.
The time has arrived in this book to begin gathering the pieces for promising
urban-region land mosaics. The countless and infinitely diverse patterns appear
from all of the preceding chapters and elsewhere. This chapter only begins the
gathering process, as the reader, like the cook, will accumulate many other
useful components, before fitting them together into masterpieces.
The lead-off section (Settings and forms of urban regions) uses a big-picture
lens to identify useful patterns and processes. Then the section (Ability to extrap-
olate the Barcelona solutions) evaluates which of the many patterns provided for
Barcelona (Chapter 10 )apply widely to urban regions. The third section (Local
communities, ecology) and planning, highlights the importance of the finer-
scale building blocks in understanding and creating an urban region. The final
section begins to explicitly evaluate the diverse pieces of the puzzle, placing
them in three piles (The good, the bad, and the interesting).Settings and forms of urban regions
Identifying major urban-region types is useful, both to get past the infi-
nite variations evident around thousands of cities, and to identify some common
threads or themes of wide applicability. Four broad categories of urban-region