Journal of Urban Design

ISSN: 1357-4809 (Print) 1469-9664 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/cjud20

To truly ‘live’, urban design needs accessible

interdisciplinary research

Matthew Carmona

To cite this article: Matthew Carmona (2020) To truly ‘live’, urban design needs
accessible interdisciplinary research, Journal of Urban Design, 25:1, 5-9, DOI:
10.1080/13574809.2019.1706319

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/13574809.2019.1706319

Published online: 23 Dec 2019.

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 JOURNAL OF URBAN DESIGN 5

A warming climate will also produce longer and more severe periods of drought. Water-
saving measures in buildings and in agriculture should be put in place to prepare for drought.
Some coastal areas may require desalination plants, although disposition of the brine that
results from the purification process needs to be solved in better ways than are in use today.
Re-use of wastewater and impoundment of rivers, as in Singapore, can be ways to increase the
supply of available fresh water.
Cleared zones should be designed and implemented around wildland where needed to
protect nearby development from wildfire, and buildings constructed near wildland areas
should be designed to be as fire-resistant as possible. Building and occupation should not
continue within wildland locations subject to fire.
Greenhouses, both urban and rural, should enhance food production and help guard
against food shortages. Urban greenhouses can be built on existing rooftops of buildings
which have the necessary support structure, such as factories and warehouses. More green-
houses in agricultural areas could enhance productivity and diversify crops.

Changes in regulations
The measures described in this article need to be incorporated in existing development
regulations and, where necessary, new regulations need to be written. Urban design education
and practice will also need to evolve to meet these new situations.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Jonathan Barnett
University of Pennsylvania Weitzman School of Design, Philadelphia, PA, USA
jonathanxbarnett@gmail.com
© 2020 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
https://doi.org/10.1080/13574809.2019.1706321

To truly ‘live’, urban design needs accessible interdisciplinary

research

I was honoured to feature in the first issue of the Journal of Urban Design some 25 years ago,
and it has remained my journal of choice ever since. Today it is one of the foundations of urban
design scholarship.
But why is research in urban design important? If research in a subject does not seem
important, then either we already know (or think we know) all there is to know about it, or we
believe it to be so unimportant that it doesn’t justify the time and effort required to find out
more. Such subjects are ‘dead’ or at least moribund as they have stopped developing. By
contrast, for a discipline to live and prosper it needs a viable, indeed thriving, research base.
The Journal of Urban Design is a key part of the infrastructure that makes this possible. Without
it, the subject – theoretically, practically, methodologically and in its influence, would be
immeasurably the poorer.
6 COMMENTARIES

The challenges of urban design research

As we know, the built environment is a notoriously siloed field of professional and academic
endeavour. Yet it is in the realm of urban design where many remits meet: the land use mixes
determined by planning, the space defining nature of architecture, the social impact of
infrastructure engineering, the ecological concern of landscape design, and so forth. As an
arena for research, urban design should be both multidisciplinary, in the sense that it is
practiced (and researched) by professionals from different backgrounds; and interdisciplinary,
in the sense that through engagement with complex urban problems from contrasting
disciplinary perspectives, new knowledge can be generated and then shared. This involves
reaching beyond lone disciplines to address the sorts of ‘wicked’ problems that characterize
urban design, and reaching outside our comfort zones as researchers to select and combine
the best methodological approaches for each urban problem. Combining social science
methods with ‘designerly ways of knowing’ and science-based analytics
Unfortunately, not every subject amongst the many hundreds of academic disciplines listed
in Wikipedia1 offers the same research opportunities. In the UK, for example, the five research
councils dealing with science and medical research together have roughly ten times as much
budget as the two that deal with arts, humanities and social sciences (within which funded
research on urban design often fits).
In part this reflects how society (and the market) values knowledge in different areas, but it
also reflects the nature of the problems being investigated, how established a discipline is, and
perceptions of the potential impact of research in that arena. Of course medical and scientific
research is comparatively expensive to conduct, requiring long time frames and expensive
equipment, but there is also an element of the unknown with much non-science research:

● First, the questions being asked are often not straightforward, they are difficult to identify
and frame, let alone address. As Marshall (2012, 268) puts it: ‘Cities are not rocket science –
they are more complex than that’.
● Second, the processes being examined typically focus on the vagaries of human actions and
are therefore subject to continual change and varied interpretation as, in essence, they are
unpredictable and poorly understood (unlike the laws of physical science).
● Finally, even when answers are secured to such research problems, they simply represent
a snapshot of experience that continues to vary from place to place and over time. Even
when the research is done, there is not always a clear line to a product, policy or practice
and therefore to impact, making funding harder to justify.

Urban design is of this nature, despite its sphere of interest – the public and private built
environment – impacting profoundly, for better or for worse, on the estimated 4 billion people
that live in cities. Moreover, as this number relentlessly rises, processes of urban growth and
change also continue relentlessly, often on the basis of flawed and outmoded knowledge
about the local and global influence of such change, and about the potential to do better:
socially, economically and environmentally. Yet this potential value of urban design is poorly
understood by politicians, the public and industry, in part because of the rather intangible
nature of many of its impacts.
By way of an example, investing in an anti-obesity pill would seem to deliver a tangible and
direct benefit from a single clearly defined product, with clear knock-on commercial benefits.
By contrast, designing the built environment to encourage us to do more exercise and not to
get over-weight in the first place, seems infinitely more complex, involving numerous inter-
connecting elements, diffused responsibilities, and difficult to trace impacts. It is difficult to
 JOURNAL OF URBAN DESIGN 7

make the case for research in such fields, let alone to get action once the research has been
done.
Yet the benefits from a better designed built environment are potentially huge, as is the
power of urban design research to understand it, and this, in part, explains why the discipline
has continued to grow and prosper over the last 60 years, and most particularly over the last
25. Despite the challenges, this has been a period of rapid growth of the discipline in
universities, in academic journals – spearheaded by the Journal of Urban Design – as a focus
or sub-focus of learned groups and societies, and, as a subject for academic research, from
Masters’ dissertations, through PhDs, to funded research programmes and research-based
practice.
All these things are necessary to give credibility to a discipline, and their development will
be gradual rather than rapid. In this respect, urban design has been in an evolutionary phase,
emerging slowly into a mature discipline, with all the birthing pains (should it/should it not be
a discrete discipline?; should we/should we not define it?; etc., etc.) that contemporary debates
between commentators still reveal. But perhaps this is inevitable for what elsewhere I have
termed a ‘mongrel’ discipline that, to truly live, has had to emerge from in and amongst the
traditional territories of the far larger and longer established disciplines – professional and
academic – that surround it (Carmona 2014).

Making urban design research relevant?

Because ultimately research is of little value unless it advances our knowledge of a particular
discipline, by its very nature research should be ‘cutting edge’ in the sense that it is generating
new knowledge or information about a subject. This, however, does not imply that every piece
of research will be paradigm changing, or even immediately useful in practice. Instead, much
research in urban design will reflect on particular dimensions of professional practice, policy or
design, with a view to incrementally improving, although not totally recasting, them. Other
research will be more purely academic in nature, perhaps adding to larger critiques of the
urban situation, reconceptualizing urban design in whole or part, or applying blue skies design
thinking to a particular place or problematic.
Potential audiences for urban design research will hail from four key groups:

(1) Other researchers, both in urban design and in cognate and non-cognate fields
(2) Practitioners, ranging across the design and other built environment professions, and
including those involved in financing, delivering and managing the urban environment
(3) Policy makers, both professional and political, and the interest groups who influence
them
(4) The users of the urban environment, who ultimately are the recipients of any changes to
the built environment, whether or not informed by research.

Research in urban design will be equally valid whether intended to directly inform practice
or influence academic debates. Neither form of research is intellectually superior, although in
all cases it is vital to think about what the potential impact of the work is likely to be. In this
regard theoretical work will be most powerful if, perhaps over time, it also informs practice.
Equally, practice-related research will be more rigorous and incisive if it draws from, and feeds
back into wider academic debates.
Amongst other issues, how researchers express themselves is important. Urban design con-
cerns real world issues of great relevance to society, so tying up arguments in jargon and opaque
language will rarely help to get key messages across. To offer just two examples (neither from the
8 COMMENTARIES

Journal of Urban Design!), the first, arguing the case for a city of intense sensory stimulation, from
the architectural end of the urban scholarship spectrum:

“Everything must communicate with everything. . . . This is made possible by the smooth para-
metric differentiation of all urban and architectural/urban subsystems and by infusing further
order via the employment of associative logics that correlate the different sub-systems in ways
that make them representations of each other, facilitating inferences from the visible to the
invisible or not yet visible. The urban dweller should be able to read and navigate the
Parametric Metropolis just like the natives of the Amazon read and navigate their jungle”.

The second, from the urban geographical end, critiques the impact of a contemporary street
design trend on those with disabilities:

Shared space can be characterised as ‘disembodied urban design’ that fails to capture the
complexity of corporeal form and the manifold interactions of bodies-in-space. The disem-
bodied understanding of the interactions between bodies, space, and movement, propa-
gated by shared space design, (re)produces both existential insecurity and ontological
uncertainty amongst certain categories of users.

The danger is that such language (and the equivalent illegible graphic/computational repre-
sentations used by some on the architectural wing of urban design scholarship) limits the
impact of important research to a small body of those who are already ‘in the know’, whilst
throwing up barriers to the vast majority who are not.
Rather than a barrier that is rarely crossed, the boundary between theory and application
should be permeable and diffuse, allowing researchers and practitioners to cross one way and
back again with relative ease. Ideally, so should the boundary between research and practice,
with researchers thinking carefully about how to frame and disseminate their work in order that
it informs key academic debates whilst also informing policy and practice. Language will be a key
part of this, as will the vehicle chosen for dissemination. Publishing in high quality international
refereed journals is vital to test the rigour and efficacy of research, but in the past such articles
have not always been widely read by practitioners and policy makers, hence limiting the journey
from ideas and evidence to impact. The increasing use of Open Access articles in refereed
journals will go a long way to address this, but the further dissemination of work via professional
and social media outlets will also be vital.

The future
Just as the practice of urban design is endlessly diverse and fascinating, so too is the subject as
a research field. In a subject with design at its heart, it will be important to bear in mind that there
is no single truth in urban design, i.e., no set of principles and prescriptions that will apply
everywhere. Equally, there will be no single right answers (or right methodologies) in urban
design research, even in the most purely scientific of its pursuits. Baxter, Hughes, and Tight (2010,
14) have written that research ‘is a social activity, that can be powerfully affected by the
researcher’s own motivations, and values. It also takes place within a broader social context,
within which politics and power relations influence what research is undertaken, how it is carried
out, and whether it is reported and acted upon’.
As researchers we can never entirely escape from the baggage that each of us brings to our
research, or from the baggage that others bring when reading it. That said, I often feel that the
best research begins (at least) from a neutral rather than overtly political, disciplinary or
methodological stance. In the future I would hope that our efforts would be a little less siloed
and a little more inter-disciplinary; a little less obscured by jargon and a little more accessible
 JOURNAL OF URBAN DESIGN 9

to potential users; a little better understood and valued by society, and, as a consequence,
a little better resourced. The Journal of Urban Design will remain central to delivering all of this.
To Taner, what a wonderful achievement this journal is, to the journal, here’s to the next
25 years!

Note
1. In the Wikipedia list of academic disciplines urban design is not listed as a standalone
discipline, but is instead tacked on to ‘Urban Planning’ under the larger category of
‘Architecture’, within the meta-category of ‘Applied arts’ (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_
of_academic_disciplines).

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

References
Baxter, L., C. Hughes, and M. Tight. 2010. How to Research. 4th ed. Maidenhead: Open University Press.
Carmona, M. 2014. “The Place-shaping Continuum: A Theory of Urban Design Process.” Journal of Urban Design
19 (1): 2–36. doi:10.1080/13574809.2013.854695.
Marshall, S. 2012. “Science, Pseudo-science and Urban Design.” Urban Design International 17 (4): 257–271.
doi:10.1057/udi.2012.22.

Matthew Carmona
The Bartlett School of Planning, UCL, UK
m.carmona@ucl.ac.uk
© 2019 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
https://doi.org/10.1080/13574809.2019.1706319

Urban design foresight

The future of urban design should include more robust tools to envisage potential futures.
Delineating futures has always been a core role of urban design. We propose compo-
sitions for future places. Moreover, understanding how places are composed over multi-
ple separate design iterations is a longstanding, if underdeveloped, focus of urban
design. Sitte, for example, wrote ‘[The Acropolis of Athens] is no longer a simple square
in the ordinary sense of the term, but the work of several centuries grown to the maturity
of pure art’ (1980[1889], 7). And a layered sense of the unfolding of time, change and
continuity, novelty and repair, and decay and adaptability is one of the joys of a great
city.
Urban designers use science-based means of prediction such as structural and energy
analysis to compose our cities when we can. Yet the full political-economic-technological-
poetic world is beyond our ability to reliably predict. To navigate the dramatically turbulent
future we appear to be embarking upon, we need to expand and improve our tools for
anticipating and providing means to adapt to multiple potential futures. There is an emerging
body of literature on planning/design and foresight (e.g., Batty 2018; Goddard and Tewdwr-