Module 2, Urban Design

Module 2
Socio cultural Approach

Study of social and cultural layer that influence urban design and architecture .
Sub Module: Theories / approach by Jane Jacob, Kevin Lynch
Ar. Kusumanjali S & Ar. Vaishali Kapoor

Asst. Professor
ANRVSA, Bengaluru
URBAN DESIGN 18ARC75

SOCIAL CULTURE SYSTEM
A society is a A culture is the learned A system is a collection

number of behaviors that are shared by of parts which interact
interdependent the members of a society, with each other to
organisms of the together with the material function as a whole
same species products of such behaviors

A THEORY OF GOOD CITY FORM
BY KEVIN LYNCH

Lynch explained three NORMATIVE THEORIES for good city planning
Defines how thought process of Humans design a city.
• City as a SUPERNATURAL/ MODEL OF

THE COSMOS
• City as a MACHINE
• City as a LIVING ORGANISM

CITY AS A MODEL OF THE COSMOS
(Two best developed branches of the cosmic theory is :

Chinese model &
Indian model )

The City as Supernatural
• The assertion is that the form of a permanent settlement should be a magical

model of the universe and its gods.
• Such a crystalline city has all of its parts fused into a perfectly ordered whole and
change is allowed to happen only in a rhythmically controlled manner.
• To achieve such form, specific phenomena are included, such as:

returning, natural items, celestial measurement, fixing location, centeredness,
boundary definition, earth images, land geometry, directionality, place
consciousness, and numerology.
• These are acknowledged in creating the city's form by devising methods for finding
a good site, making boundaries, subdividing land, determining a center, connecting
to celestial forms, fixing coordinates, controlling change, determining social
structure, codifying rules, coordinating physics and metaphysics, and reinforcing
form through ritual.

ELEMENTS: COMPONENTS OF A THEORY:
1) Returning 1) Method For Finding A Good Site
2) Natural Phenomena 2) Marking Boundaries
3) Celestial Measurement 3) Subdividing Land
4) Fixing Location 4) Determining Center
5) Centeredness 5) Connecting To Celestial Forms
6) Boundary Definition 6) Fixing Coordinates
7) Earth Images 7) Controlling Change
8) Land Geometry 8) Determing Social Structure

PHENOMENA
9) Directionality CITY’s FORM 9) Codifying Explicit Rules
10) Place Consciousness 10) Coordinating Physics And Meta
11) Numerology 11) Reinforcing Form Through Ritual

Ancient Chinese Urban planning theory
Their Belief system comprises

of:
In the cosmological landscape,

it is an industrial machine designed
to capture and redistribute Qi, the
divine breath, the power that
animates human affairs and carries
with it the mandate of heaven. It is
embodied in the magic
square, Feng.
Book : The Kaogongji (Kao Gong Ji) Plan of Chengzhou (supergrid in red)
URBAN DESIGN Prominence of the number nine 18ARC75

• Precisely orienting the site to the cardinal directions
• The carpenters construct the capital city, which is a square
of nine li on each side.
• On each side there are three gates.
• Within the city there are nine north-south and nine east-
west roads; the north-south roads are as wide as nine
carriages side by side.
• The ancestral temple of the ruling house is to the left of the
palace, the temple to god of the soil is to the right.
• The palace faces the court in front and the market is behind
it. The court and the market are both one fu in area.

EXAMPLE: Ancient Kyoto/ heiankyo city Japan
• Plan of the new Imperial capital of Kyoto,

Japan.
• An arc of mountains to the north protect

the site.
• Water flows on the east-west and south.
• The city is regularly divided.
• The emperor looks south from his palace.
• The city is divide into east and west.
• Though city grew subsequently towards

the east.
Figure 1 - uploaded by Simge Özdal Oktay

Ancient Indian Urban planning theory
Vastu shastra is an ancient, Indian

discipline of making the architecture of
buildings as per the laws of nature and its
elements.
Vastu Purush Mandala

In the diagram we see Vastu Purusha pinned
down facing earth with his head in the
North-East direction and leg towards
South-West direction.
Vastu Purusha Mandala is divided in to
9×9= 81 parts
https://www.occultspeak.com/who-is-vastu-purush/

EXAMPLE: Madurai Old City
Madurai is built around the Meenakshi Amman Temple, which

acted as the geographic and ritual centre of the ancient city of
Madurai. The city is divided into a number of concentric
quadrangular streets around the temple. The
temple prakarams (outer precincts of a temple) and streets
Madurai City Plan, based on the Vāstu Purusha Mandala (Lynch, 1989: 77) accommodate an elaborate festival calendar for processions.

CITY AS A MACHINE
(City is temporary,
or build in haste,
or with a practical aim)

• The model of city as analogous to a machine emerges often when there is no
long-term goal in mind but the settlement must be created hurriedly, with its
future growth determined by unforeseen forces.
• Its form requires a few simple rules in order to continue with urbanization, and
the outcome is factual, functional, and without any attachment to the
mystery of the universe.
• Among its attributes are: convenience, speed, flexibility, legibility, equality, and
speculation.

Plan of Egyptian town of kahun, to house
Colonial cities workman and supervisors for the construction
of the Illahun pyramid.
It Was build rapidly
• The typical aim was to allocate land
and resources quickly and to provide
well distributed access to them.
• For defence purpose also;
• Grid-pattern towns
• Clear differentiated functions and
movement.
https://thinkafrica.net/construction-of-kahun-1895bc/

Timgad, Roman City
• The city was founded as a
military colony by the emperor Trajan
around 100 CE.
• Timgad was inscribed as a World Heritage

Site by UNESCO in 1982.
• Located at the intersection of six roads,

the city was walled but not fortified.
• The original Roman grid plan is

magnificently visible in the orthogonal
design, highlighted by the decumanus
maximus (east–west-oriented street);
• and the cardo (north–south-oriented
street) lined by a partially
restored Corinthian colonnade.

Look for some modern day cities/ideas !!!!!
• Le Corbusier radiant city

• Soleris babeldiga

CITY AS A LIVING ORGANISM
(City is temporary,
or build in haste,
or with practical aim)

City is an ORGANISM
• Among these is the assertion that an organism is an autonomous individual, and that it
has a definite boundary and is of a specific size;
• It does not change merely by adding parts but through reorganization as it reaches
limits or thresholds.
• It contains differentiated parts but form and function are always linked.
• The whole organism is homeostatic, self-repairing and regulating toward a

dynamic balance.
• Cycles of life and death are normal to organisms as is rhythmic passage from one
state to another. From this flows the notion of the form of the organic city.
• Like organisms, settlements are born, grow, and mature, and if

further growth is necessary, a new entity has to be formed.

SETTLEMENT:
1) Separate spatial & social unit
ORGANISM: 2) Balanced community
1) Autonomy 3) Neighborhood unit
2) Definite boundary 4) Natural growth
3) Definite size 5) Optimum size
4) Limits 6) Greenbelt
PHENOMENA
CITY’s FORM
5) Differentiated parts 7) Regionalism
6) Homeostasis 8) Physical forms
7) Cyclical rhythm 9) Socio-economics

ASSIGNMENT:
Refer this for more: https://cityfiedgeek.wordpress.com/2019/06/04/urban-form-of-madurai/

The death and life of Great
American cities
- Jane Jacob

“This book is an attack on current city planning and rebuilding.
It is an attack on orthodox city planning.”
• Jane Jacobs (1916-2006) was an urbanist and activist whose writings

championed a fresh, community-based approach to city building.
• She had no formal training as a planner, and yet her 1961 treatise, The Death and
Life of Great American Cities, introduced ground-breaking ideas about how
cities function, evolve and fail.
• The impact of Jane Jacobs's observation, activism, and writing has led to a
'planning blueprint' for generations of architects, planners, politicians and
activists to practice.

Streets in cities serve many purposes besides carrying vehicles, and city
sidewalks—the pedestrian parts of the streets—serve many purposes besides
carrying pedestrians.
The uses of sidewalks:
• Safety (against street barbarism and protecting strangers)
• The uses of sidewalks: contact
• The uses of sidewalks: assimilating children

Safety (against street barbarism and protecting strangers)
Factors depend upon:
1. First, there must be a clear

demarcation between what is
Public space and what is
Private space
2. Eyes upon the street, eyes
belonging to those we might call the
natural proprietors of the street.
3. The sidewalk must have users on it
fairly continuously, both to add to
the number of effective eyes on the
street and to induce the people in
buildings along the street to watch
the sidewalks in sufficient numbers
https://bardcityblog.wordpress.com/2012/02/23/eyes-on-the-street-steven-reiman/

AVENUE STREET
COMMERCIAL STREET
https://www.thenewsminute.com/article/bengaluru-s-chickpet-market-opens-shops-witness-less-25-business-129540

A STORY TO READ…….
The incident that attracted my attention was a suppressed struggle going on between a man and a
little girl of eight or nine years old. The man seemed to be trying to get the girl to go with him. By
turns he Was directing a cajoling attention to her, and then assuming an air of nonchalance.
The girl was making herself rigid, as children do when they resist, against the wall of one of the
tenements across the street. As I watched from our second-floor window, making up my mind how to
intervene if it seemed advisable, I saw it was not going to be necessary.
From the butcher shop beneath the tenement had emerged the woman who, with her husband, runs
the shop; she was standing within earshot of the man, her arms folded and a look of determination on
her face.
Joe Cornacchia, who with his sons-in-law keeps the delicatessen, emerged about the same moment and
stood solidly to the other side. Several heads poked out of the tenement windows above, one was
withdrawn quickly and its owner reappeared a moment later in the doorway behind the man. Two men
from the bar next to the butcher shop came to the doorway and waited.
On my side of the street, I saw that the locksmith, the fruit man and the laundry proprietor had all come
out of their shops and that the scene was also being surveyed from a number of windows besides ours.
That man did not know it, but he was surrounded. Nobody was going to allow a little girl to be
dragged off, even if nobody knew who she was. I am sorry—sorry purely for dramatic purposes—to
have to report that the little girl turned out to be the man's daughter. Throughout the duration of
the little drama, perhaps five minutes in all, no eyes appeared in the windows of the high-rent, small-
apartment building. It was the only building of which this was true.
A well-used city street is apt to be a safe street.
A deserted city street is apt to be unsafe
The streets of the North End of Boston Elm Hill Avenue section of Roxbury, a part of
inner Boston that is suburban in superficial character, street assaults and the ever
present possibility of more street assaults with no kibitzers to protect the victims,
induce prudent people to stay off the sidewalks at night.

The uses of sidewalks: Contact
Forming a Public space on the sidewalks through Contacts-A tool for Socialization.
Social life of city sidewalks is precisely that they are public. They bring together
people who do not know each other in an intimate, private social fashion.
It depends upon Trust: formed over time, little public sidewalk contacts.
https://www.bdclass.com/write-a-paragraph-about-tea-stall/

Types of Public Life on the Sidewalks
• Informal/casual public Life: not designed for this Purpose, any corner
under a tree
• Formal public life: Specially Planned and designed for such acivities, Parks,
Sitting areas, OATs
What services do the public sidewalk and its enterprises fulfil that the planned
gathering places do not? And why?
How does an informal public sidewalk life bolster a more formal, organizational
public life??
Answer
A good city street neighbourhood should have a balance of Privacy and Contact

If a city lacks a natural and casual public life, two situations can happen
Togetherness Nothingness
"togetherness," in which more is shared • In city areas that lack a natural and
with one another than in the life of the casual public life, it is common for
sidewalks residents to isolate themselves
• Works destructively in cities. from each other to a fantastic degree.
• In the case of the first outcome, • If mere contact with your
where people do share much, they neighbours threatens to entangle
become exceedingly choosy as to you in their private lives, or
who their neighbours are, or with entangle them in yours, and if you
whom they associate at all. cannot be so careful who your
neighbours are as self-selected
• Examples: Malls, Community Spaces upper-middle-class people can be,
the logical solution is absolutely to
avoid friendliness or casual offers
of help. Better to stay thoroughly
distant.
Social Stratification Social Isolation

The uses of sidewalks: assimilating children
• Children are much safer while playing on the sidewalks than they are while
playing in a park or playground. She explains the reason for this is that sidewalks on
lively streets are always being watched by everyone else on the street.
• Sidewalk interaction is vital to rearing a child.

• So my mixing residential and commercial and allowing the children to play in the
sidewalks, they get exposure to men
and women of all ages from
whom they will learn valuable life lessons.

The mobile/pop-up playground project for Children in Response to
COVID-19,
Hanoi, Vietnam
Study this project….
Collaboration of Healthbridge Vietnam and UN-Habitat's proposal focused on increasing the safety and inclusiveness of
community playgrounds by promoting physical activities and social connections.

KINDS OF DIVERSITY THAT CAN BE GENERATED
The first, primary uses, are those which, in

PRIMARY themselves, bring people to a specific place
because they are anchorages: RESIDENTIAL,
USES OFFICE FACTORIES, MUSEUMS, EXHIBIHITIONS
SECONDARY
USES Secondary Uses is a name for the enterprises
that grow in response to the presence of
primary uses, to serve the people the primary
uses draw
What if MIXED USE is the primary use here?????

To generate exuberant diversity in a city's streets and
districts, four conditions are indispensable:
1. The district, and indeed as many of its internal parts as possible, must serve more
than one primary function; preferably more than two; and must go outdoors
for the same.
2. Most blocks must be short; that is, streets and opportunities to turn corners must
be frequent.
3. The district must mingle buildings that vary in age and condition,
including a good proportion of old ones so that they varying the economic yield they
must produce. This mingling must be fairly close-grained.
4. There must be a sufficiently dense concentration of people, for whatever

purposes they may be there. This includes dense concentration in the case of people who
are there because of residence.

1. If a city area has only new buildings, the enterprises that can exist there are automatically limited to those that can support the high costs of new
construction. These high costs of occupying new buildings may be levied in the form of rent, or they may be levied in the form of an owner's interest and
amortization payments on the capital costs of the construction.
Pic of street where old and new building are together
Home under construction in Shibuya, Tokyo © Jérémie Souteyrat

ASSIGNMENT: A3 Sheet
1. Form a Group and do an Analysis of the Fountain area in the college premises.
It should be based on Jane Jacob’s and Kevin Lynch’s theories.
2. Later, Give some Urban Design Proposals for the same with respect to the
theories.

Module 2, Urban Design

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Module 2

Socio cultural Approach

Sub Module: Theories / approach by Jane Jacob, Kevin Lynch

Ar. Kusumanjali S & Ar. Vaishali Kapoor

URBAN DESIGN 18ARC75

A society is a A culture is the learned A system is a collection

URBAN DESIGN 18ARC75

URBAN DESIGN 18ARC75

• City as a SUPERNATURAL/ MODEL OF

• City as a LIVING ORGANISM

URBAN DESIGN 18ARC75

(Two best developed branches of the cosmic theory is :

URBAN DESIGN 18ARC75

• The assertion is that the form of a permanent settlement should be a magical

• To achieve such form, specific phenomena are included, such as:

URBAN DESIGN 18ARC75

2) Natural Phenomena 2) Marking Boundaries

3) Celestial Measurement 3) Subdividing Land

4) Fixing Location 4) Determining Center

5) Centeredness 5) Connecting To Celestial Forms

6) Boundary Definition 6) Fixing Coordinates

7) Earth Images 7) Controlling Change

8) Land Geometry 8) Determing Social Structure

9) Directionality CITY’s FORM 9) Codifying Explicit Rules

10) Place Consciousness 10) Coordinating Physics And Meta

11) Numerology 11) Reinforcing Form Through Ritual

URBAN DESIGN 18ARC75

Their Belief system comprises

In the cosmological landscape,

URBAN DESIGN Prominence of the number nine 18ARC75

URBAN DESIGN 18ARC75

• Plan of the new Imperial capital of Kyoto,

• An arc of mountains to the north protect

• Water flows on the east-west and south.

• The city is regularly divided.

• The emperor looks south from his palace.

• The city is divide into east and west.

• Though city grew subsequently towards

Figure 1 - uploaded by Simge Özdal Oktay

URBAN DESIGN 18ARC75

Vastu shastra is an ancient, Indian

Vastu Purush Mandala

URBAN DESIGN 18ARC75

Madurai is built around the Meenakshi Amman Temple, which

URBAN DESIGN 18ARC75

URBAN DESIGN 18ARC75

URBAN DESIGN 18ARC75

URBAN DESIGN 18ARC75

• Timgad was inscribed as a World Heritage

• Located at the intersection of six roads,

• The original Roman grid plan is

URBAN DESIGN 18ARC75

• Le Corbusier radiant city

URBAN DESIGN 18ARC75

URBAN DESIGN 18ARC75

• The whole organism is homeostatic, self-repairing and regulating toward a

• Like organisms, settlements are born, grow, and mature, and if

URBAN DESIGN 18ARC75

ORGANISM: 2) Balanced community

1) Autonomy 3) Neighborhood unit

2) Definite boundary 4) Natural growth

3) Definite size 5) Optimum size

6) Homeostasis 8) Physical forms

7) Cyclical rhythm 9) Socio-economics