Bridging the gap between Architecture and Town planning: An emergence of

Urban Design

Dr. Bijaya K. SHRESTHA

Department of Architecture
Nepal Engineering College, Bhaktapur

Historical background
Since the earliest days of human settlements, people have learned the art and technique to build their
shelters and arrange them in a way that suits them best. Early settlements were characterised by compact
buildings of informal and vernacular characters with a close mesh of lanes and alleys, often
complementing each other to form an organic built form. With the improvement of movement system such
as arrival of carriage, the new settlement pattern required more formal layout plan with straight and wide
roads. Still, the relation between the footprint of buildings and circulation space (street network) was well
established.
Architectural history too slowly evolved on incremental basis - from the formal to romantic and then to
classical styles – each phase having strong roots in the previous era. It was only after the industrial revolution
with the development of advanced technology and with the changing economy, a new way of building
designing and city planning – modern architecture and town planning – appeared in the early twentieth
century, which discarded the cultural continuity and evolutionary process of the earlier development trend.

Modern architecture and town planning

The new ideology of modern architecture and planning adopted the functionalist view of the city and
treated the city as a machine for living. Rigid master plans characterised by land use separation (living,
working and recreational activities) and isolation of buildings from the streets and open spaces through
zoning regulation, centralised ownership of land and design and massive public support for plan
implementation became the salient features of the modern town planning. Such ideal planning was
justified for the monolithic mass society with widely shared aspirations and tastes, produced by industrial
mode of production. The built environment was required to be made fit for the machine age. A good
example is Le Corbusier’s ‘Ville Contemporians for three million people,’ in which he applied his idea of
‘futuristic city’ – layout plan based on pure geometry (axes, diagonal, points, etc.) and functional
distribution of land use with symbolic representation – by proposing two major highways running through the
centre beyond the city limits with office skyscrapers mainly on the north south axis and the villas mostly on
the east-west.
Particularly after the World War II, builders earlier engaged in housing construction on individual lot
located within the social fabric of the city have been replaced by developers who were not only involved
in developments of office complex and commercial and community facilities in addition to the housing but
were also responsible for increasing the scale of such isolated developments beyond the city limit over a
short period of time. In many cases, they also replaced the traditional city fabrics by new forms which were
based on modern, rational and humanistic thinking.
Modern architecture with faith on technology encouraged architects to design an architectural object
(a building) for an ideal man rather than for real people and to seek for a universal solution. Internal
function and structural requirement dictates the building form, ignoring the role of the building in defining
streetscape. New buildings often lifted from the ground with ribbon typed continuous windows and plain
elevation with flat roof do not respect the surrounding older buildings but isolate themselves in terms of
styles, construction technique and other detailing as they have been constructed irrespective of culture,
climate or geographical locations.
Numerous negative consequences of modern town planning became visible by the 1960s. First,
destruction of traditional city fabrics means not only loss of cultural value and hence the deterioration of
sense of place but also decline of city economy in the long run. As all the functional units such as housing,
working, recreation or shopping are located not only far away from each other but also in auto-dependent
landscape, there has been wastage of time and energy in commuting even for daily activities.
Second, streets and squares, traditionally used for public life celebration, socialisation and community
participation have been replaced by high speed vehicular roads in new developments. The atmosphere of
neighbourhood is lacking as houses are often designed with activities toward the rear but garages and

1
blank wall except a front door on the street front. Due to lack of people’s activity and commercial viability,
many parts of the modern cities converted into ‘dead city’ and streets and open spaces became the
venue for drug adductors, thefts and other social crimes. In nutshell, the overall impact is the formation of
‘anti-urbanism and anti-humanism’ city.
Finally, radical shift in building form and style, entryway location and building decoration and detailing
in new buildings makes the sense of unity, cultural continuity, order and harmony in cityscape extremely
difficult. Though some of the individual buildings are attractive and exciting, the overall cumulating effect in
the city is disappointing. Thus, modern cities became ‘architectural zoo’ with many distinct buildings but
without coherent, visual and functional relations.

An emergence of Urban Design

The rigid master planning and long term capital budgeting prevailed in the modern town planning has
shifted to new technique of real estate development involving market analysis, request for proposal,
extensive negotiation and project specific capital programming to fit in information and service oriented
society. Against the universalism of modern movement which was based on industrial mode of production
and machine imagery, a number of city design trends, mainly developed by architects under the
inspirations of historical styles, vernacular architecture and pluralism culture emerged from the 1960s.
However, architects are interested in the product of their design and not in the urban development process
through which designs are implemented whereas planners are concerned with resource allocation based
on projection of future need and land use division. Individual buildings how well constructed do not add to
a worthwhile whole. No one is clearly responsible in designing the spaces between the buildings and in
planning the relationships between different land use activities and city fabrics. To bridge this gap between
architecture and town planning, urban design has emerged as a distinct discipline within urban
development particularly from the 1960s. As urban design relates to the paradigm of both architecture and
town planning, its scope overlaps them and sometimes reduces the clarity of its scope. There are various
opinions among both professionals and academics not only about its relationship to town planning and
architecture but also on its acceptable definition.
Numerous definitions of urban design are available given by different urbanists focusing on their own
field of specialisation - Sittee (1889), Cullen (1961) and Le Corbusier focused on the visual, spatial and
aesthetic; Lynch (1960), Bacon (1975), Norberg Schulz (1980) and Rossi (1966, 1982) on memory and
perceptual; Jacobs (1961), Bentley et. al. (1985), Christopher (1977), Appleyard (1987), on cultural,
behaviour and social; Ian McHarg on ecological and sustainable; Lynch (1980), Hough (1990) on spatial;
Krier (1979) on typology and morphological; and Worskett (1969), Venturi (1966), Rowe (1978) and Rossi
(1966, 1982) on contextual and collage. 1
Moreover, others focus on policies, programs and design guidelines rather than on the blue print with
specific shape and location in details – designing cities without designing buildings (Barnett 1982) 2; involves
‘enabling but not authorising the built environment’ (Shilbley 1982) 3; and ‘second order design’ (George
1997) 4.
The relationship of urban design with architecture and city planning can be better analysed if one
focuses on ‘means’ rather than ‘ends,’ on ‘process’ rather than ‘product’ and on ‘procedure’ rather than
‘substance.’

Urban design – as a function of architecture

Architecture has two aspects: the private realm which is confined within the building structures and the
public realm, the outer part of the building which defines the physical and social settings of the surrounding
areas. The overlapping of urban design with architecture lies on the second aspect of public realm.
This overlapping is clearer on ‘micro-scale’ urban design projects such as designing small urban places,
architectural detailing, streetscape design, and so on, as in such cases urban design becomes close to the
aesthetic and spatial concerns of art and architecture. In such cases, site plan along with infrastructure
development is prepared and implemented by a single agency and does not require to formulate design
guidelines and public scrutiny. In other cases, a design competition is held to seek the specified image as

1 Carmona, M. in his article ‘Controlling Urban Design – Part 1: A Possible Renaissance? Published at Journal of Urban Design, Vol. 1, No.1,
1996 explains the conceptualisation of urban design thoughts by various writers.
2 Barnett, J (1982), An introduction to urban design, New York: Harper and Row.
3 Shibley, R (1982) illustrated in George, R. Varkki (1997), A procedural explanation for contemporary urban design, Journal of urban design,

vol.2, No. 2, 1997

4 George, R. Varkki (1997), A procedural explanation for contemporary urban design, Journal of urban design, vol.2, No. 2, 1997

2
the end product. Like architect, urban designer also while manipulating spaces and their qualities should
know about users’ behaviour and relationship between people and the built environment.

Urban design – an integral part of town planning

As an integral part of town planning, urban design projects such as new town development, urban renewal
or conservation of city fabrics in order to enhance the built environment need to deal with socio-economic
context and statutory and administrative processes in addition to spatial and physical elements. The urban
designer’s task is to translate, through the prism of the policy instrument, the surveys, the research, the
procedures and so forth, into concrete reality. Many cities have used urban design as a ‘planning tool’ for
economic revitalisation or heritage conservation. In such cases, vision of the future of the proposed
development is envisioned by influencing decision making process by various individuals and organisations,
which can be achieved through many ways such as fixing maximum and minimum limits, defining the view
corridor or building shape together with providing incentives for developers or owners.
In some cases, urban design is limited to a certain area aiming to attract huge number of people to
create jobs and thereby enhance taxes bases, all by making the site attractive and other beautification
programs. In other cases such as San Francisco city, urban design has been treated as a part of an overall
program of the city and the design mechanisms are largely based on two legal premises: all new projects
be made ‘compatible’ to the existing environment and all new projects maintain or enhance the existing
level of pedestrian ‘comfort,’ both for the public interest. From the two concerns, compatibility and
comfort, have led to more particular aspirations for the future design of the city.

Urban design – still lacking a clear definition

Though urban design can be traced back from camp to village as part of the art of settlement design such
as the ancient Greece and Rome, the Medieval times and the Renaissance and has emerged as a distinct
discipline in the 1960s, the scope of urban design including its clear definition is still confusing, as it is used
differently by different groups in different circumstances. Urban design in the 1960s emphasised on self-
contained cities as a counter of city-sprawl whereas this emphasis was shifted to the regeneration of
existing cities and restoration of human activities in the 1980s. Moreover, many cites of fast developing
economies particularly in the south east Asian countries have been implementing large scale urban
development projects since the 1990s with construction of new urban spaces equipped with modern
telecommunication facilities and intelligent buildings of office, housing, commercial and communities
facilities not only to do business at international level in the information age but also to enhance the city
image and quality of life of the city dwellers as well as to attract the global private investments.
This different emphasis over time and place has made urban design practice into different scale, raging
from preservation of building facades in the historical district to a new town settlement in the virgin land. To
overcome numerous confusions over urban design regarding macro or micro scales, visual aesthetic or
social setting, public realm or private profit and so on, urban design can be defined on a broader
perspective as a ‘means to shape and manage urban environment and to guide individual public and
private projects through multidisciplinary activities so that they can contribute to enhance built
environment.’ Being both process as well as product, it engages in all scales of the urban socio-spatial
levels. Though concerns and focus differ in urban design at micro and macro levels, nonetheless, the two
scales have so much in common and they belong to the same process of urban space design and built
environment formation. Moreover, urban design is a tool of visual and spatial management and can be
practice by both private and public sectors, which can be used to maximise the investment return and at
the same time to serve all the citizens rather than some sections of the urban society. As the desirable urban
environment and its growth management are defined based on social values of a particular place, city or
region, and community, urban design mechanism must be separately defined for each city.
Urban design process includes preparation of master plan, formulation of design guidelines and
development control mechanism and implementation of the proposed site plan. An urban designer (or his
multidisciplinary team or an agency) prepares the master plan which comprises of multiple buildings and
infrastructure provision and establishes a defined framework, within which a number of developers and their
own architects detail out on the individual part of the project.
Urban design guidelines provide a base for the design of different parts of the project carried out by
different individuals. Development control is necessary to control those individual parts so that the
objectives of the whole project remain unchanged. A guideline is a statement which specifies how to meet
a design objective and acts as an operational definition of an objective. Design guidelines can be either
prescriptive or performance: in the former the basic characteristics of the end product are specified
whereas in the latter the performance required for the end product. Performance guidelines may be

3
accomplished by advice on how to achieve the end product. Design guidelines are checked either
through a ‘design review’ process or through a ‘planning and building permit’ system. The quality of any
urban design depends on the quality of the design objectives set and on the quality of the design principles
and design guidelines used to achieve them.
Preparing master plan and formulating design guidelines do not complete urban design process unless
the plan is implemented under certain administrative and institutional frameworks. As large scale urban
design projects often take a longer time to complete, the design process should be able to mange the
changing socio-economic and political and property cycles during implementation.
One of the best examples of successful urban design project is the Battery Park City of New York which
was initiated in the 1960s and is still under implementation phase. Rigid master plan comprising
megastructure and huge central circulation spine which is impossible to construct on phase-wise basis
thereby reducing the participation of developers, need to get approval from dozens of agencies (many of
them outside the city authorities with little incentive for timely action) and rigid zoning control system even
for minor modification thereby creating uncertainty and risky for developers, political controversy between
the city and the state authorities together with the fiscal crisis of the 1970s all have combined to cause the
failure of the ‘1969 master development plan’ implementation over a decade. On the other hand, the 1979
master plan of the same site with same requirements characterised by small parcels which can be
developed by many developers on incremental basis, easy approval system and flexible design guidelines
which significantly reduces the time and risk for developers, massive public investment on public realm
(construction of high quality streets, parks and promenades including community facilities) increasing the
real estate value of the plots combined with the consensus among the city and state authorities have not
only helped successful implementation of the revised master plan during the 1980s but have also
demonstrated the Batter Park City as one of the best examples of urban design project of the twentieth
century.