The words we use affect the way we think. In California like much of the US we call the legal entity that is responsible for local government a ‘city’. We ascribe to it a level of agency, talking, for example, about what a city requires or wants – meaning what the local regulations specify.

But we don’t talk about ‘towns’ or ‘villages’ in this way. What is the effect of this distinction on how we think about smaller settlements? If we ever mention towns at all, they are usually referred to with the political phrase ‘small towns’ implying an existence in opposition to cities.

There is, or should be, a reciprocal relationship between towns and cities that we’ve ignored and largely lost. Christopher Alexander explores what makes that connection in his book A Pattern Language. Developments of small and large scale exist in symbiosis. Towns provide places that are outside the city, local services, and access to the countryside. The city provides businesses and other resources not available in smaller places. Rural places and developed places should be intertwined and interconnected. People need both.

Instead of a city surrounded by a network of market towns we have cities surrounded by swathes of undistinguished residential suburbs – places that can only be reached by car and which require massive networks of asphalt, but which provide few local services and no places to go by foot or by bike.

We have failed to build ‘places’ outside of city centers, in part because we don’t think about them as places. We’ve forgotten what towns are and what they are for.