Abstract

When first introduced in the late 1970s, pattern language was described by its author, Christopher Alexander, as “a way to take design out of architects' hands”. The main purpose of pattern language was to extract the design solution out of people’s real “life patterns” and then have both people and professional designers use these solutions. Pattern language had been developed and adopted by number of theorists, architects and urban designer, as well as software designers throughout the last 30 years to create what is called “generative patterns", an end product that depends on sharing design knowledge and responsibilities between users and designers, a practice that may be considered as an “open source” process. The term open source describes a practice in the field of production and development that promotes the availability of end products to users for reviewing and enhancement. This approach has been widely adopted in the field of software design, yet not fully interpreted in architecture and urban design fields. This paper discusses patterns theory contributions to the field of user participation in urban design practices, and steps to be made to develop an open source model for urban design using pattern theory.