On Pat Helland’s “Metropolis” and Explaining Enterprise Architecture By Analogies To Cities

I expected more of Pat Helland’s article “Metropolis” in Microsoft Architect Journal. While it is interesting to see big players such as Gartner¹ and now Microsoft to point to analogies between software and enterprise architecture and city planning, it has so far been done in a superficial way. It is not as interesting and meaningful as it could be, and I can’t help but feel that these analogies are based on a naïve understanding of the city. Or perhaps inspiration has to be drawn from the naïve image of whatever the inspiration is, to be more in parity with the general understanding of the thing. In this case, people in general haven’t studied how cities work.

Helland tells a little of the history of the emergence of cities, interleaved with comparisons to IT. For instance, he compares “IT shops” to cities, once isolated but brought together with new technology; factories and buildings in a city to applications, and transportation to the communication between applications and IT shops. But I feel that he uses the history of cities more as a device for explaining enterprise architecture rather than actually learning from it. Which is perfectly okay, and it is probably an effective way of communicating this message, but I feel that there are many ways in which the understanding of cities could contribute, such as imageability (see my posts “Kevin Lynch’s The Image of the City and Software Architecture,” and “The Semiotics of Imageability“) and zoning (see “Software Use Zoning“). Lots of interesting things to explore.

¹ See my posts “Gartner’s View of Enterprise Architecture” and “Gartner’s View of Enterprise Architecture, Part 2.”