City structure – II

Human activity: the things people do

Throughout time, people have sought to improve their lot—eat better, sleep better, feel better, live
longer, work more easily and effectively, relate to each other better

Even though people tend to respond comparably to different spatial settings, conscious
incorporation of evidence-based human behavior into urban design has started

An early advocate for actually studying how people behave in typical urban spaces, sociologist
William Whyte, pioneered such an effort in The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces in 1980.

Regrettably, however well-documented and compelling was his case, the design fields continue to
assert their opinions of how people should or do respond with little study or effort to verify their
impulses

The three major spheres – space, activities, and land use designations reflect on the “private” and
“public” character of the various open and enclosed forms of human habitation

Home – Workplace – Market place – Institutions – Leisure

Home

The Activities: living, eating, sleeping, procreating, nurturing, etc.

The Spaces: the home, the house, the apartment, the townhouse, the homeless encampment, the
hut, the mansion

The Land Use: residential, housing, single family at various densities, townhomes, multifamily at
various densities, mixed-use

For urban designers and community-minded people, beyond awareness of and commitment to the
values of improving the quality of shelter for all, it is the interface between the civic setting and the
private realm that commands attention.

Thus how the public realm transitions to the home becomes critical, taking into account that these
transitions are generally most focused in the early morning, after school, and after work.

Do people feel safe, comfortable, and pleased by the functionality and character of their approach to
their homes? Their neighborhoods? Are the transitions to other activities of life convenient and
clear?

Workplace

The Activities: making, working, earning, providing, investing, etc.

The Spaces: the workplace, office, shop, institution, factory, farm, construction site, the business
district, the strip, the mall, the industrial district, mixed-use districts

The Land Use: commercial, industrial, retail, hospitality, institutional, mixed-use, agricultural

The core of people’s survival (as individuals, families, communities, cities, nations, humanity)
depends on making a living.

The economic conditions and structures under which this goal is sought are widely divergent, from
slave, to feudal, to capitalist, to socialist models.
Workplaces as buildings and their settings are expressed by their owners as widely as is shelter,

purposefully and flagrantly excessive opulence to workaday factories, hole-in-the-wall shops, the
garage, the backyard.

For urban designers and community people, the locational and connectivity factors of how
individuals make a living along with the economic context and its trends are of great importance,
from the regional or macro scale to the individual workplace.

Workplace

Like for living places, the environs, the interface between more or less private work activity and the
public realm figures prominently.

Workplaces all have settings, transitions from the public setting and its connections to the work
itself.

All of them could be better than they are, particularly from the perspective of the great numbers
that characterize the workforce.

Here again, just as housing expresses class and cultural status, so does the workplace

The workplace expresses the owner’s values where for some hierarchy, control, or self-
aggrandizement is more important;

for others a productive, satisfied workforce; for others maybe a “who cares?” sentiment.

In any event, urban designers and community leaders have a stake in assuring that the public
environment respects both the people all around and the people working inside.

Marketplace

The Activities: buying, selling, exchanging, trading, marketing, shopping, vending, hanging out, etc.

The Spaces: the plaza, the shops, the street, the markets, main street, commercial strips, malls, flea
markets

The Land Use: commercial, retail, business, mixed-use

Among the first and most enduring activities people have undertaken, essential to their existence, is
commerce, the exchange of goods and information through barter, money, or social interaction.

The agora, the forum, the plaza, main street, the strip, the mall, the Wal-Mart have provided the
exchange meeting ground for the diversity of people in the local society.

Not just the exchange of goods for survival or enhancement, but the interactions of people, ideas,
and cultures have their locus in the marketplace.

Locating and creating places suitable for the fullest range of such activities is a fundamental and
ongoing mission of societies throughout time and across space—basic to the content of urban
design.

The marketplace of ideas has broadened infinitely with the Internet, in which the relative mix of
eBay or Facebook have shifted the market dynamics to an unknown and not reliably predictable
future.

Marketplace
For urban designers, involvement in the creation of these civic places and institutions is of primary
importance, almost definitional.

To design, build, occupy, maintain, modify, and sustain this most basic, ubiquitous, and timeless
activity in ways that elevate the functionality and experiential quality for all is a special challenge of
urban design and of civic leadership.

A special challenge in our time is tracking and understanding the interactions between physical
space and cyberspace.

How will Internet and cellular communications alter the character of and the needs for civic spaces?

As with most dualities in this field, both spheres will continue on, but how will they affect each
other, and what trends may emerge?

Project for Public Spaces (www.pps.org) has been studying the characteristics of public spaces and
marketplaces comprehensively for 30 years or so,

and its work and the accessibility of its work to the public, as a dedicated nonprofit, provides insight,
understanding, skills, and common sense to assist designers and community leaders to better shape
these most central places in the civic environment.

Institutions

The Activities: learning, teaching, tending to health, administration, worshiping, policing, army, etc.

The Spaces: the institution—schools and universities, hospitals and medical campuses, research
complexes, “city hall” or government (with all of the associated public service facilities), religious
buildings, outdoor institutions, police and fire training grounds, military bases, all with their
associated outdoor spaces

The Land Uses: institutional, office/institutional, public facilities, or as included in other land uses

The job for urban designers is to assure that the institution’s mission of service carries through in its
physical presence.

Well-conceived, planned, and designed institutions reinforce rather than detract from other nearby
activities; they support the public connective structure that ties them to their larger setting.

For urban designers, the choices facing institutions define how to reflect and respond to the public
spaces that they call for.

More and more of them are becoming more sophisticated in planning out their futures,
understanding the larger contexts in which they are operating – increasing the complexity in terms
of urban design

Leisure

The Activities: hanging out, playing sports, walking the pet, running, biking, fishing, hunting, having a
picnic, going to events, taking in a museum, shopping, etc.

The Spaces: parks, squares and plazas, sports fields and stadiums, civic centers, museums,
entertainment venues (including concert halls and amphitheaters), shopping venues, nature
preserves, rivers, lakes, waterfronts, fields, forests, hills, and mountains
The Land Uses: parks, public institutions, special designations for arenas, stadiums, commercial,
agricultural, permanent open space

The presence, make-up, and form of the spaces for leisure time activities are a marker for their
importance to a society in place and time.

They can range from completely informal, like the vacant lot on the corner, to highly organized
recreational complexes, from nature experiences to grand arenas.

They can be accessible for all, like public parks and waterfronts, or walled compounds reserved for
the privileged few, like country clubs and polo grounds.

The impetus toward improving the quality of leisure time activities, especially those that are passive
and nonprogrammed, has accounted for countless miles of walkable streetscapes and trails being
built.

Connections: The Infrastructure That Ties People and Places Together

From the perspective of designing our present and future world, it is in the area of infrastructure
problems, opportunities, and choices where the greatest changes are likely to occur.

From a design perspective, how all these systems and networks lay out is fundamental in shaping
the built world at all scales.

Urban designers’ focus is on the interaction between these systems and between the other
elements of the built and natural world, not so much on any particular piece of the system.

In spite of sharing the underground right-of-way, it is remarkable how little aware the various lines
and their different disciplines are of each other.

Ideas like shared duct ways still meet resistance from all concerned, and utilities continue to dig up
and put down lines more or less willy-nilly, occasionally severing someone else’s line in the process.

The integration of disciplines, the inclusion of all who can contribute, and the representation of all
affected by the major urban settlement problems coming our way is essential to guide technology
toward solving fully vetted problems.

One of those discipline sets, often missing, is urban design.

Its principles and methods at their best and fullest provide a crosslinking, three-dimensional, holistic
problem-understanding capability that should always be at the table when large, complicated,
unresolved infrastructure issues are taken up.

As defined by many, it does seek to integrate the overlapping aspects of architecture, city and
regional planning, and landscape architecture.

The irony, of course, is that wherever you look or travel, all of the disciplines are there—visible,
evident, often seemingly haphazardly thrown together.

Each item in the built world was put there intentionally, by someone, for some reason, following
decision protocols that each by itself was entirely rational.

The reason that the utility pole sits squarely in the middle of the wheelchair ramp is because it had
spacing, structural, and cost-efficiency criteria that required it to be placed right there.
Or the sewer grate inlets are aligned parallel to the curb instead of perpendicular— the better to
catch bicycle tires.

Or the spacing “norms” for trees, lights, parking meters, signs, and utility poles land them all in the
same spot. Think of your own examples.

Urban design as an approach to solving holistic spatial problems must join the fray and seek to
become a conscious point of integration for all the place-building disciplines.

For this integration to occur, step one is to begin to understand where each is coming from, its goals,
its purposes, and its internal cultures.