Problem
Each subculture needs a center for its public life: a place where you can go to see people, and to be seen.
Solution
Encourage the gradual formation of a promenade at the heart of every community, linking the main activity nodes, and placed centrally, so that each point in the community is within 10 minutes’ walk of it. Put main points of attraction at the two ends, to keep a constant movement up and down.
Related Patterns
… assume now that there is an urban area, subdivided into subcultures and communities each with its boundaries. Each subculture in the Mosaic of Subcultures (8), and each Community of 7000 (12) has a promenade as its backbone. And each promenade helps to form Activity Nodes (30) along its length, by generating the flow of people which the activity nodes need in order to survive.
No matter how large the promenade is, there must be enough people coming to it to make it dense with action, and this can be precisely calculated by the formula of Pedestrian Density (123). The promenade is mainly marked by concentrations of activity along its length — Activity Nodes (30); naturally, some of these will be open at night — Night Life (33); and somewhere on the promenade there will be a concentration of shops — Shopping Street (32). It might also be appropriate to include Carnival (58) and Dancing in the Street (63) in very large promenades. The detailed physical character of the promenade is given by Pedestrian Street (100) and Path Shape (121) …
Alexander, Christopher. A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction. Oxford University Press, 1977, p. 168.