The Helicopter View

If you’ve ever driven into a big city such as New York (or seen Manhattan from the Staten Island ferry like in this image) what you see is a collection of structures of different heights, shapes, and sizes. This is a 2-dimensional view of a very complex entity (part of NYC) that does not give any idea of what’s behind the front buildings and how everything in the city is connected.

This is how students often see mechanism; a bunch of unrelated structures and pathways that they have to memorize in order to pass the Organic sequence. This task is made more manageable with a little organization of the ideas that are picked up in the Organic 1 course. We want to see the aerial “helicopter view” of the city/subject (below) and see how streets connect blocks and individual neighbourhoods in surprisingly simple ways.