Architecture and city planning
One thought I’m having is that software architecture has a lot in common with city planning, in that it “guides” the design of the software. Today’s Dagens Nyheter has an installment in a series of articles about the expansion of Stockholm (in Swedish) which was very interesting.
Whereas city planning is largely concerned with infrastructure, such as roads and streets, heat, electricity, etc, it can also enforce “non-segregation” (Is there a word for this?). As for software architecture, it can be about infrastructure as well as enforcing some desired property of the system built. For example, by having an architecture where different services are fairly autonomous units, that can be deployed all on one server, as well as on different servers, this can enforce scalability of the system.
The article referred to Rem Koolhaas, the Dutch architect, which has written an essay in the book I just book on the theory of architecture. I will definitely get back to this topic again.