The main thrust of Nature Of Order is that these 15 elements of wholeness are itself a quantifiable measure of life, of literally how alive a system is. Christopher believed you didn't design and build a structure and then fill it with life/humans, rather he believed the process of architecture was itself about literally increasing the life of a space. An architect's job was to recognize life-creating patterns and imbue structures with them.

He believed that a meadow with a river bend, an old willow tree and a rock to sit on below it was not a scene composed of living and non-living entities, but rather the arrangement of these entities (both internally alive and not) gave rise to a wholistic quantity of life in that space. Depending on where the rock was placed the space itself was more or less alive.

It sounds like a far out, "new agey" idea but I think he argued quite rationally that this framing of life makes far more sense than a binary determination based upon near arbitrary delineations such as sex, reproduction and consumption of resources.

I think he really was onto something personally.