Fancy being the cook with an unlimited budget preparing for an evening extravaganza. For days ahead you have visions of your visual and gustatorial creations, and begin gathering the pieces. Some fruit is not yet ripe, the fish not fresh, and your special chocolate unavailable. Yet unexpected surprises also appear – durands, anonas, sea cucumbers, and a glorious French wine. So, continually dropping and adding and sorting, you accumulate the ingredients to combine into magical culinary masterpieces.

The time has arrived in this book to begin gathering the pieces for promising urban-region land mosaics. The countless and infinitely diverse patterns appear from all of the preceding chapters and elsewhere. This chapter only begins the gathering process, as the reader, like the cook, will accumulate many other useful components, before fitting them together into masterpieces.

The lead-off section (Settings and forms of urban regions) uses a big-picture lens to identify useful patterns and processes. Then the section (Ability to extrapolate the Barcelona solutions) evaluates which of the many patterns provided for Barcelona (Chapter 10) apply widely to urban regions. The third section (Local communities, ecology) and planning, highlights the importance of the finer-scale building blocks in understanding and creating an urban region. The final section begins to explicitly evaluate the diverse pieces of the puzzle, placing them in three piles (The good, the bad, and the interesting).