Alexander’s pattern language has a number of formal characteristics . .
- A pattern is a written description of *a design challenge* and its resolution, derived from many previous, manifestly succeeding, 'living' instances of organised space, cast within a formal, standardised frame or proforma.
- A pattern (pattern-description) is set in an explicit context of other, *related patterns* (on both a larger and smaller scale within the pattern hierarchy), constituting a weave or an ecology or an architecture of patterns.
- Mobilised together - invoked together, instantiated together, 'danced' together as a choreography of making, 'sung' together back into the flow of live action by living participants - in the organising of built environment, collections of related patterns can constitute an elegantly liveable and workable setting (a landscape, invoked in a formulation-in-language) which bears *an evolutionary, continuing, considered relationship* to many previous recognisable responses to that same kind of challenge of lived-in space.
The equivalents of these characteristics need to be given to a pattern language for making a living economy; that is, for enacting an *activist life* of intentional transformation, event-by-event, formation-by-formation.
A foprop pattern language - the basis of the curriculum of a college of formaciòn - needs: - a formal frame centred on a **recurring challenge** and its self-consciously radical practical resolution; - an ecology of patterns on different **degrees of granularity or scope**; and - an evolutionary practical basis, in which patterns are recognised, refined and self-consciously choreographed and mobilised, across **generations of practice** and across **multiple locations** in the course of the uneven historical development of the hegemonic system and its radical transformative responses.