What needs to be done to fix inhuman urban form? Urban/architectural theorist and professor of mathematics Nikos Salingaros' essay explores and critiques both Christopher Alexander's A City is Not a Tree (1965) as well as the uniformly inorganic "tree" patterened city design so popular among urban planners, instead suggesting a more modular node > module > city model. Essentially, Salingaros argues that we need to get away from architectural modes of thought and see a city not as a single organism but rather as a community or organisms, using the mathematical models usually reserved for modeling complex systems to break down a city into small, organic and interactive pieces. This "parcellation" of the city allows Salingaros to test some theoretical complex-system analysis models, and his results are quite interesting, although written in a dense academic language that was, unfortunately, somewhat impenetrable to me: "the connections responsible for a city's 'life' themselves define alternative decompositions of city form. A clear picture emerges, of a city whose complexity is based on many short-range connections (rather) than long-range connections. Cities need to re-establish a vast number of nearest-neighbor couplings..."