He sees the building as an interface between an intense small group inside, and the larger, slower, more powerful community outside. Code embodies what the community has learned. He was present, helping to save a man and to watch the man's wife die, at a building in the San Francisco earthquake whose bottom story had not met earthquake code. On the other hand, he sees many excesses, especially among homeowners associations in suburbia where covenants, conditions, and restrictions stifle change. A major influence of the larger community is in lot size.
Small lots lead to fine grain adaptation, smaller changes, and fewer changes that are mistakes.
He quotes Jane Jacobs to the effect that aged buildings allow people to add money to them incrementally, while new buildings need a huge amount of money at once. She identified the smaller amounts of money as leading to fewer mistakes. There are always mistakes, and when things are tried on a big scale they result in big mistakes. There is no attractive approach to maintenance so it is not often done well. The two basic approaches are solid construction and preventive maintenance.