Every design problem begins with an effort to achieve fitness between two entities: the form in question and its context. The form is the solution to the problem; the context defines the problem. We want to put the context and the form into effortless contact or frictionless coexistence, i.e., we want to find a good fit. For a good fit to occur in practice, one vital condition must be satisfied. It must have time to happen. In slow-changing, traditional, unselfconscious cultures, a form is adjusted soon after each slight misfit occurs. If there was good fit at some stage in the past, no matter how removed, it will have persisted, because there is an active stability at work. Tradition and taboo dampen and control the rate of change in an unselfconscious culture's designs. It is important to understand that the individual person in an unselfconscious culture needs no creative strength. He does not need to be able to improve the form, only to make some sort of change when he notices a failure. The changes may not always be for the better; but it is not necessary that they should be, since the operation of the process allows only the improvements to persist. Unselfconscious design is a process of slow adaptation and error reduction. In the unselfconscious process there is no possibility of misconstruing the situation. Nobody makes a picture of the context, so the picture cannot be wrong. But the modern, selfconscious designer works entirely from a picture in his mind - a conceptualization of the forces at work and their interrelationships - and this picture is almost always wrong. To achieve in a few hours at the drawing board what once took centuries of adaptation and development, to invent a form suddenly which clearly fits its context - the extent of invention necessary is beyond the individual designer. A designer who sets out to achieve an adaptive good fit in a single leap is not unlike the child who shakes his glass-topped puzzle fretfully, expecting at one shake to arrange the bits inside correctly. The designer's attempt is hardly as random as the child's is; but the difficulties are the same. His chances of success are small because the number of factors which must fall simultaneously into place is so enormous. The process of design, even when it has become selfconscious, remains a process of error-reduction. No complex system will succeed in adapting in a reasonable amount of time or effort unless the adaptation can proceed component by component, each component relatively independent of the others. The search for the right components, and the right way to build the form up from these components, is the greatest challenge faced by the modern, selfconscious designer. The culmination of the modern designer's task is to make every unit of design both a component and a system. As a component it will fit into the hierarchy of larger components that are above it; as a system it will specify the hierarchy of smaller components of which it itself is made.

Notes on the Synthesis of Form. By Christopher Alexander. Pp. 191. 54s. 1964. (Harvard University Press.)

A review of land use, visibility and public perception of renewable energy in the context of landscape impact

Environmental heterogeneity as a bridge between ecosystem service and visual quality objectives in management, planning and design

Dynamics of development of the largest cities - Evidence from Poland

Can computer game landscapes target new audiences for landscape quality assessment

Measurement of visual parameters of landscape using projections of photographs in GIS

Open Source (OS) philosophy can cause important effects both in the design processes and in the professional role of designers. It started as a computer science phenomenon and has rapidly spread to other fields, such as architecture and urban planning. However, there are few studies reflecting about its impact, and there are not guidelines for managing its possible consequences. This article offers some insights considering three main sources: (1) current OS experiences in architecture and urban planning, (2) past traditional and participatory design strategies, and (3) works in computer science about OS. These three topics are conceptually linked using as an index some OS attributes expressed in the OS initiative definition. With that background, guidelines are finally proposed. The article demonstrates that current OS initiatives in architecture and urbanism have many similarities with past design processes and recent computer science experiences. Both subjects can be used as precedents in order to adequately incorporate and adapt OS thinking, a revolution that, depending on the managing skills, could improve the quality of the design and the designer's profession, or provoke a crisis in the current professional model.

Open source in urban planning and architecture: experiences and guidelines from traditional cultures, participatory processes and computer science

Physical location factors of metropolitan and rural sprawl: Geostatistical analysis of three Mediterranean areas in Southern Spain

Favourable geographical conditions and firm governmental support have resulted in a strong growth of photovoltaic energy in Spain in the last decade, especially in the period 2007–2008. This has led to an important economic development of this industrial sector and the appearance of many effects in both rural and urban landscapes. Nevertheless, in the last years, the situation of the photovoltaic sector has changed noticeably, as the exponential growth of installations and the arrival of economic crisis have provoked the adoption of more restrictive laws, which have opened a period of stagnation and uncertainty. In contrast with other countries, in Spain, ground-mounted solar PV plants have predominated, transforming many rural environments. Some studies which address the impact of these systems and the social perception about them have appeared recently. They also suggest criteria in order to improve their integration in buildings and landscapes. In this chapter, an overview about the deployment of Spanish photovoltaic sector is offered, as well as about the factors which have caused its rise and fall and the consequences of these processes in the landscape.

Santiago Pardo-García

Papers

Measurement of visual parameters of landscape using projections of photographs in GIS

Open source in urban planning and architecture: experiences and guidelines from traditional cultures, participatory processes and computer science

Physical location factors of metropolitan and rural sprawl: Geostatistical analysis of three Mediterranean areas in Southern Spain

Solar Photovoltaic Power in Spain