Anti-Pattern: Best Practices and Mistakes in the Landscape

I just happened on the term Anti-Pattern on the Wikipedia. This was after another venture into the whole department of Future Studies (which I find extremely interesting). On the link above you'll find a whole bevy of named anti-patterns in computer programming, organizations, and social trends. Here are a few of my favorites:

• Gas factory: An unnecessarily complex design
• Reinventing the square wheel: Creating a poor solution when a good one exists
• Big ball of mud: A system with no recognisable structure
• Creeping featurism: Adding new features to the detriment of the quality of a system
• Design by committee: The result of having many contributors to a design, but no unifying vision
• Escalation of commitment: Failing to revoke a decision when it proves wrong
• Mushroom management: Keeping employees uninformed and abused

While most people who know about anti-patterns know them through the lens of computer programming - it is really a universal concept that can be applied to any rational task. Architecture, Planning, and Design can experience anti-patterns.

One such anti-pattern can be found in the modernist visions for public housing. The not-so-bizzare twist to this is that it happened on both sides of the Cold War. Both failed. Cabrini Green in Chicago is one notorious example of a housing project - while in East Berlin "100,000 apartments were produced using one particular model, the apartment construction series 70." Now, both are undergoing massive reformatting. The concrete slabs of Berlin are now used like lego bricks for new construction, and Cabrini Green was torn down to make way for "mixed income" neighborhoods.

Oftentimes it seems like the design/planning community likes to point out the "best practices" that are ongoing as trends to follow. And I think that's a good practice to keep. For instance, AIA just released the eight winners of the "Regional and Urban Design Honor" award. However, sometimes it feels as though the projects that collapse are too quickly forgotten about. There are exceptions where people have stopped to analyze what went wrong and find out how a good idea with some support fizzled out. One example is the Seattle Monorail. More dramatically, some landscape features are the direct result of an intention to be aggressive or defensive. Such is the case with Ariel Sharon's legacy in Isreal and Palestine. (I plan to write on this more later.) Other landscapes are the result of neglect and catastrophe, another kind of anti-pattern.

Perhaps it would be a good task to identify and classify development and design anti-patterns in the landscape. Some have attempted to classify the landscapes that are on the ground, but has anybody dared to examine the organizational patterns that lead to them?