A reason why Pattern Language (the book) is ignored

I think one reason Pattern Language (the book) is ignored is that it is predicated on the continued domination of the car. It assumes we will be driving forever. Thus when Alexander dismisses the suburb, he does not take the step of going back and admitting that Frank Lloyd Wright was wrong in assuming suburbanites would all have their own veggie gardens, responsibly turning the suburbs into a sort of nuclear family utopia, while at the same time drawing lovely interchanges and inadvertently, perhaps, suggesting the coming invasion of the cars. Alexander and Wright fell to the blandishments of the car. The sort of erroneous distortion of reality that surfaces in the noxious Ram ads now invading TV.  The beauteous countryside has an able partner -- Ram! Think the worst.

If you believe, as I have for fifty years, that the car is not a necessity but a choice, and that it became a necessity only because that was the easy route for capitalism, and that the car and suburb (sprawl) are  now revealed for what they are, then you will find it hard to accept Alexander's notions about country roads enclosing mile square areas and towns of up to 10,000 springing up de novo presently rural areas.

Had Alexander taken the bull by the horns and assumed the crying need for car-free communities, and anticipated the technology that would make the rebuilding of the world not only possible but a good idea,
he might have taken a simple page from Doxiadis and accepted the natural tendency of people to gather at intersections.

Gathering at intersections is why my front yard (the intersection of Broadway, Sizth Avenue and 34th Street is at times the most crowded in NYC. And why we have metropolises. The cyber-community, the car free zoned for everything evolution of the human settlement, is the natural result of putting together the impossibility of sprawl and the inevitability of concentrations of population.
Charles Sanders Peirce - Thinking in Threes