| A City Is Not a Tree | |
| Author: | Christopher Alexander |
| Series: | Center for Environmental Structure |
| Subject: | Architecture |
| Publisher: | Sustasis Foundation |
| Pub Date: | 2015 |
| Pages: | 241 |
| Isbn: | 978-0-98-934697-9 |
| Preceded By: | The Battle for the Life and Beauty of the Earth |
A City Is Not a Tree is a widely cited [1] 1965 essay (later published as a book) by the architect and design theorist Christopher Alexander, first published in the journal Architectural Forum, and re-published many times since.[2] In 2015 the essay was published as a book including new exegesis commentaries on the original essay from other architects, engineers and physicists.[3] A City is Not a Tree has been widely described as a landmark text, and the Resource for Urban Design Information calls it "one of the classic references in the literature of the built environment and related fields".[4] In 2016 a 50th Anniversary edition was published by Sustasis Press/Off the Common Books.[5]
Its core contention is that urban planners tend to design cities as tree diagrams (with each node only having a relationship with a parent node), while successful unplanned cities have a semi-lattice structure (where each node has relationships with many nodes).