Urban Design Presentation Techniques

Book review of ‘Culture, Architecture and design’ by Amos Rapoport

By, Shashank P S
M. Arch, Sem 1
SPA- M, UOM

The main premise of the book is to showcase that architecture is not a free artistic activity
but a science based profession that is concerned with problem solving and that these
problems need to be discovered and identified, not defined by designers. The role of
designers is to create environments that they might hate, as long it fits the needs of the users
concerned, and the most analytical and objective way of defining design is through research
on environment-behaviour relations (EBR).

What is successful design?

The author stipulates that in order for a design to be successful, one has to first understand
the duties of the design in order to solve problems, and ascertaining its efficacy in doing so
through ‘post occupancy evaluation’. Secondly, that in order for us know what the design
has to do to solve the problems, there has to be a clear and detailed understanding of the
problem, which can only be done through understanding EBR.

The author also gives examples for how important it is for a designer to define better and the
implications it might have when the better provided by the designer is not the better needed
by the users, and ultimately how an understanding of the user’s needs along with culture
might help in achieving the better required by the users.

Environment-Behaviour studies
Culture in design is discussed by the author within the framework of the field of
environment-behaviour studies, and starts off by explaining EBS through the three basic
questions.

1. What bio-social, psychological and cultural characteristics of human beings influence

which characteristics of the built environment?
2. What effects do which aspects of which environment have on which groups of people,
under what circumstances and when, how and why?

3. Given these two way interaction between people and environment, there must be
mechanisms that link them. What are these mechanisms?

Understanding the relationship between people and environment and the mechanisms through
these two elements react with each other is the crux of EBS, and this relationship to the fields
of behaviour and environment makes EBS interdisciplinary. The resultant aspects of design
(research, analysis, programming, design and evaluation) are more often than nought
drawing on these disciplines.

The nature and types of environment

an explanatory theory is of the utmost importance for proving a hypothesis and one which
EBS has yet to develop. The author has explained the steps involved in creating such a theory
and the first one is to develop generalisations. Generalisations and identification of patterns
and regularities involve the collection of the largest and most diverse body of evidence. The
four main steps of evidence are as follows,

1. Include full range of environments

2. Include full range of cultures

3. Include full range of that Past

4. Dealing with the whole Environment, not just isolated buildings

The next step is to conceptualize Environment, but before one does so, it is important to
begin by considering g a specific type of environment- Housing. The author has shown
immense interest in housing as a setting because all cultures and groups possess dwellings of
some sort, making it necessary to compare and generalize from them, since dwellings are the
primary setting for most people, since they comprise the bulk of the built environment and as
they are the primordial product of vernacular design, most influenced by culture

The author further generalizes into four conceptualizations of the environment, which are,

1. Organization of space, time, meaning and communication

2. A system of settings
3. The cultural landscape
 4. Consisting of fixed, semi-fixed, and non-fixed elements

Where the abstraction of concept decreases and simplicity goes up as one goes down the
order.

The importance of culture

Even though the importance of culture is an established notion, in reality it cannot be
assumed or asserted, but has to be tested empirically. Before one begins to test, it is
important to fully comprehend the ways through which behaviour and environment influence
each other. These ways or mechanisms themselves are cultural in nature and can be used to
test the importance of culture. The other important question has to do with understanding the
variability in these activities, and the affecting parameters. The author has tried to dismantle
the activities into four components, which are,

1. The activity itself

2. How it is carried out
3. How it is associated with other activities to form systems of activities
4. The meaning of the activity

These activities then assume a variability based on user group, time and setting all hinging
on the understanding of culture. Another aspect that affects variability is the latent aspects of
activities and settings, of which Meaning is the most important. The two element model of
stress is then shown as a three element one where the third element influencing situation and
individual is culture. All of these aspects of activities help in creating an empirical method
for studying their importance.

Preference, Choice and design

we know that housing, neighbourhoods and other environments are different or are used
differently by different groups. If that is the case then what is the criteria based on which
people chose to exercise their choice and is there a role played by culture in this exercise.
This is the main question answered in this chapter, and is done so by understanding the fact
that landscapes express shared preferences. The author stipulates that landscapes are not
usually designed but are the outcome of many individual decisions of numerous people over
long periods of time. These people having similar choice preferences have come to been
classified into generational user groups and their choices studied through a model of
evaluation consisting of filters which deal with perceived environments.
The other aspect of trying to understand choice is by understanding how people rate
environmental quality and parameters that affect the quality of a given environment in
either a positive or negative manner. The author also showcases various methods of mapping
environmental quality profiles and tries to correlate between user profiles and choices
exercised in order to create a link between choice and culture. In the end arriving at a method
to visualize choice termed as Choice model of design, the others being Selectionist model
and Instructionist process. The most important take away from the exercise is that different
cultures use different criteria and that different criteria leads to different results.

The nature of culture

The next step is to try and gauge the nature of culture, by which the author means the
different definitions that there are of culture. After reviewing the different definitions or take
on culture, the important take away are,

1. The definitions of culture are complimentary

2. There is no complete relativism
3. Constancy and change in idea of culture

With the idea of privacy being used as an example of how cultural notions change with time
and user preference.

The scale of culture

The overriding question at the heart of using culture is the scale at which culture operates,
i.e, the size of relevant groups. Are these groups large or small, and what the optimum size
of a group is in order to study their cultural preferences? The author concludes that the scale
is contextual and varies from civilization to civilization, thereby making the question of
optimum size irrelevant. The other points, that he mentions are that society is increasingly
becoming heterogeneous, and making it difficult for designers to help meet the needs of
these various groups, paving the way for open ended design solutions. He showcases this
conundrum through examples involving user groups making unusual choices, which are
against common logic but guided by cultural aspects. The other solution is to encourage
homogeneity and adaptability, which might be counterproductive in certain contexts.

Making culture usable

The most observed view of culture is that it is not usable, either in research or design. The
author is of the opinion that to have to design for culture is impossible. The only or the first
step towards making it usable is by dismantling the components of culture in order to reduce
its abstractive nature. It begins by identifying the ways in which culture is expressed such as
world views, values, images, norms, lifestyles, and activity systems. The other aspect is to
understand that culture in environment is at the confluence of these expressions and
structures where culture is expressed, and at the heart are the environmental
conceptualizations where culture is observed.

In summary, the author has tried to create an analytical framework to view something as
abstract or intangible as culture. Though it is known that culture affects design, and it is
important that one has to heed to its influence while designing, the authors attempts at trying
to observe these influences through an objective and empirical lens has made the
incorporation of cultural aspects of the problem into its solution all the more easier. The book
also makes a case for culture to be preserved in a world from where it is fast disappearing
due to homogeneity and loss of traditional beliefs. The author states time and again that it
is the vernacular that is the purest representation of culture and is not something that is
created, but has to evolve with time due to choices made by people. All in all, culture which
had mostly been seen as an outlier element in design has been brought to the centre stage,
thanks to the efforts of Amos Rapoport and the users most benefitted by this understanding
of the cultural aspect of architectural issues are the people of developing countries like
India.