Urban Design (elective)

what is urban design

Urban design endeavors (relation between space and people) can be traced back to ancient times

Urban design involves coordinated and self-conscious actions in designing new cities and other
human settlements or redesigning existing ones and/or their precincts in response to the needs of
their inhabitants.

Above all it represents acts of will in creating positive changes to the world, physical and social (Lang
2005, pp. xix)

Of all the design fields, urban design has the greatest impact on the nature of cities and city life (Lang
2005, pp. xix)

The term 'urban' has a wide and inclusive meaning, embracing not only the city and town but also
the village and hamlet, while 'design', rather than having a narrowly aesthetic interpretation, is as
much about effective problem solving and/or the processes of delivering or organizing development
(Carmona et al., 2003, pp. 03)

More precisely and realistically, urban design is a process of making better places for people than
would otherwise be produced.

This definition asserts the importance of four themes –

• First, it stresses that urban design is for and about people.
• Second, it emphasizes the value and significance of 'place’.
• Third, it recognizes that urban design operates in the 'real' world, with its field of opportunity
constrained and bounded by economic (market) and political (regulatory) forces.
• Fourth, it asserts the importance of design as a process (Carmona et al., 2003, pp. 03)

Roots of urban design

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, rapid urbanization in the western world
stimulated dramatic responses in many disciplines, ranging from the social sciences to the design
professions (Birch 2011, pp. 09).

Architects in particular debated about the growing population and the need to address this problem
form architecture perspective - ideal settlement patterns, means to improve the internal
organization of cities through better open space, land use, housing and circulation (Birch 2011, pp.
09)

Among designers, these varied concerns led to the formation of a new field, variously labelled “civic
art,’’ “civic design,” “city design,” and “urban design.” (Birch 2011, pp. 09)

Modern urban design emerged in the late 1920s as a loose organization of European and American
architects and city planners, who thought they could solve ever-worsening urban problems (Birch
2011, pp. 09)

Their highly conceptual work, mainly took the form of writing and unrealized projects (Birch 2011, pp.
09)

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The idea of building a modern, rationally ordered city captured the imaginations of many designers,
mainly architects in the early twentieth century; Swiss architect Le Corbusier is one example; the
German born architect Walter Gropius is another (Birch 2011, pp. 12)

In the early stages of its modern professional identity, the field of urban design was defined by the
interstices of the more established fields of architecture, landscape architecture, and urban planning
with each claiming some proprietary rights and expecting their respective influence on practice.

Unlike much of architecture and allied arts where single designer with specific clients is the norm,
urban design experience is typically a collective, collaborative, and increasingly interactive effort.

While the roots of urban design emanated from responses to rapid urbanization in the nineteenth
and twentieth centuries, they developed in several directions (Birch 2011)

Standardized city-building schemes lost credibility when urban designers, assisted by scholars from
the social sciences as well as proponents of earlier traditions in urban morphology, began to look
more closely at how cities are organized (Birch 2011, pp. 26)

Many moved from designing whole cities to designing places – streets and sidewalks, plazas and
other elements of the public realm.

In addition to undertaking these efforts, the definition of professionalism was refashioned -

departing from elite, top-down processes to participatory models as they began to engage the
people for whom they were designing in conversations about their needs and desires, integrating
local knowledge into their plans (Birch 2011).

The architect’s ostrich-like fixation with imagery and aesthetics is challenged in the face of social
need and participatory democracy” (Palazzo, 2011, pp. 44)

The types of criticism received by architects involved in the Garden Cities movement and those using
the Rationalist approaches to urban design of Continental Europe (as applied throughout the world)
drove many city planners away from a concern with the physical character of cities and many
architects away from dealing with problems with a social nature.

Those architects who maintained their interest in social concerns and four-dimensional physical
design were inspired to do better by the criticism of Jane Jacobs (1961) (Lang 2005, pp. xxi)

Through the 1960s and 1970s decisionmakers and practitioner's refined urban design theory in
practice, Notable was New York’s Urban Design Group, established in 1967 (Birch 2011, pp. 21)

The Urban Design Group invented two important and powerful zoning devices: incentive zoning and
special districts to achieve desired design objectives. Incentive zoning simply meant giving additional
square footage on a designated site to a developer provided he gave a defined public benefit in
return. The special district permitted the redesign of multi-block areas (Birch 2011, pp. 21)

In the 1970s, William H. Whyte improved New York’s incentive zoning by filming and analyzing
individual behavior in the plazas, in order to perfect design details later incorporated into the
ordinance (Birch 2011, pp. 22)

Through trial and error, the developers determined how to manipulate building scale, sidewalk
widths, landscaping, land use functions and other features to make aesthetically pleasing,
economically successful places, ideas that inform today’s designers in many practical ways (Birch
2011, pp. 22)

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As these activities gathered steam in the United States, similar changes were occurring in Europe
where a new generation began to rethink CIAM-based urban design principles (Birch 2011, pp. 22)

For the upstarts “the CIAM’s four functions [housing, work, recreation and transportation] were
inadequate” and addressed issues “no longer deemed important”(Pedret 2001: 154).

What was needed were new ways of thinking, ones that were less mechanical, more tailored to
“human associations” and focused on designing for individual needs in the habitat (different
geographic scales) in which people lived (Birch 2011, pp. 22)

As architecture has been described as the art of fashioning internal spaces, so urban design might be
described as an art of creating external spaces (Taylor, 1999, pp. 205)

Art of urban design

A work of art can be defined as something fashioned with the intention of its being perceived and
experienced aesthetically, rather than for any specifically utilitarian or practical purpose (Taylor,
1999, pp. 195)

Urban design is not a 'pure' art like painting or imaginative writing.

Like architecture, urban design must satisfy practical requirements (the width of a street space must
be sufficient to permit passage)

Because urban design has to satisfy such utilitarian or 'functional’ requirements it is necessarily a
practical or an 'applied' art.

But it is an art nevertheless, and its artistic nature is shown by the fact that, in the design of urban
places, an urban designer can seek to achieve certain aesthetic effects in addition to, and distinct
from, meeting practical requirements (Taylor, 1999, pp. 195-196)

As with arts like painting and literature, simply having certain raw materials at one's disposal does
not make one an accomplished urban designer.

Skill, sensitivity, insight and imagination are needed for that (Taylor, 1999, pp. 196)

The first academic program was the University of Pennsylvania’s Civic Design Program, started in
1956, followed by Harvard’s Urban Design Program in 1960. Thereafter the term was imported into
the UK (Palazzo, 2011, pp. 42-43)

Lynch proposed a “two-year graduate professional program” with three central, elementary skills
that seemed to him indispensable.
1. A sharp and sympathetic eye for the interaction between people, places, place events, and
the institutions that manage them.
2. An understanding of the theory, technique, and values of city design.
3. Understand and use the four social languages: written words, spoken words, mathematics,
and graphic images
The practice of any art requires an understanding of its materials (Taylor, 1999, pp. 207)

To be sure, the urban designer as an artist does not operate in the same individualistic way that most
painters, sculptors or musicians do.

Those involved in designing the urban environment are themselves drawn from several design
professions, several different arts; some are architects, some landscape architects and others town
planners (Taylor, 1999, pp. 207)

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Urban design is arguably the richest of the arts, with a great range of aesthetic possibilities (Taylor,
1999, pp. 208)

The art of urban design is the art of making or shaping townscapes.

The elements that makeup the townscape are visual, auditory, tactile and olfactory (Taylor, 1999, pp.
196)

Scape means an extensive view or scenery

The elements of townscape

(the possible objects of sensation, and the possible objects of perception)
The site
Objects on site
• Buildings
• Other man-made structures (urban objects)
• Trees and plants
Spaces created by objects on site
Noises, smells, tactile surfaces
Moving bodies

The site
Unlike painters' canvases, sites on which towns are built are infinitely varied, and this variation itself
contributes to the character of a town (Taylor, 1999, pp. 200)

Objects on site
• Buildings - the architectural qualities of the buildings in any townscape are a key
determinant of its aesthetic character. buildings possess surfaces, and the surfaces of a
building possess the visual attributes of line, colour, tone and texture (Taylor, 1999, pp. 202)
• Other man-made structures - urban objects other than buildings
• Trees and plants - There are two other formal qualities about plants as objects of sensation
worthy of comment. First, their forms can change with the seasons. To be sure, the colours of
buildings and other man-made structures also alter as a result of changing light effects
through time. Secondly, plants can block off or border views, and in this way create spatial
effects in townscapes just as much as buildings or other man-made structures (Taylor, 1999,
pp. 204)
Spaces created by objects on site
• Space itself is not an object of sensation. What we perceive as spaces are in fact voids
created by objects bounding or in space, so it is with townscape (Taylor, 1999, pp. 204)
• Noises, smells, tactile surfaces
• as an object of sensation, the city is not just seen; it is also heard, smelt and touched. The
tactile quality of surfaces is therefore a further object of sensation in townscapes (Taylor,
1999, pp. 205)
• Moving bodies
• Townscapes are not static things (Taylor, 1999, pp. 207)
• The kinds of activities, their intensity and their variation through time (the day, the year and
so on)—are central to our sensuous experience of it.
• Our sensuous experience of a city full of moving people, such as Venice, is obviously quite
different from our experience of a city of moving automobiles, such as Los Angeles, or a city
in which we see and hear trams and bicycles, such as Amsterdam (Taylor, 1999, pp. 207)

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Scale of urban design

As an integrative profession and discipline “traditionally [...] allied with architecture and city
planning” (Lang 2007: 464), urban design remains uncertain as a field.

Apart from being a field that can be considered “an ambiguous amalgam of several disciplines”
(Inam 2002) or a “no man’s land” (Cuthbert 2001), urban design is also considered “largely
fragmented in its practices, theories and methodologies” (Palazzo, 2011, pp. 41)

Nevertheless, the value of urban design lies in its role as a social practice, and urban design
education needs to recognize that it is “an interdisciplinary approach to designing our built
environment” (Palazzo, 2011, pp. 41-42)

Evolving from aesthetic concerns of the distribution of buildings and the spaces between them, the
multiple scales of its application, engage with many aspects of contemporary public policy –
multiculturalism, healthy cities, environmental justice, economic development, climate change,
energy conservation, protection of natural environments, sustainable development, community
livability, and the like. (Banerjee and Loukaitou-Sideris 2011, pp. 01)

By seeding important urban design scholarship (by various organizations), the groundbreaking works
that shaped urban design are by Kevin Lynch, Jane Jacobs, Christopher Alexander, William Whyte,
etc. (Birch 2011, pp. 19)

In “A City is Not a Tree,” Alexander argued that cities are complex systems of overlapping elements
(or semilattices) that defy such simplification (Alexander 1965)

In A Theory of Good City Form (1981) Kevin Lynch offered more general “performance standards”
(vitality, sense, fit, access, control)

With these works the field began to focus on smaller scale urban design concerns, often labeled the
“public realm,” those spaces (streets, plazas, waterfronts, parks) available to citizens bounded by the
public and private buildings that surrounded them (Birch 2011, pp. 24)

The urban designer’s task is the shaping of human settlements’ physical features at scales larger
than a single building or a single plot of land.

He or she does so through manipulation of the concrete elements of distance, material, scale, view,
vegetation, land area, water features, road alignment, building style, and numerous other items that
make up the natural landscape and the built environment (Sternberg, 2000, pp. 265)

Urban design would therefore seem to be the profession that sets out to shape the spatial or physical
environment (Sternberg, 2000, pp. 266)

In a better definition of the scope of urban design, we should focus on those matters to which the
field brings a distinctive perspective (Sternberg, 2000, pp. 266)

Urban design comes into its own as the field that engages the human experience of the built
environment: the sense of understandability, congeniality, playfulness, security, mystery, or awe that
lands and built forms evoke (Sternberg, 2000, pp. 266)

Urban design still has to be distinguished from architecture.

Perhaps an urban designer, as compared to an architect, is concerned with objects of a larger scale.

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But scale is ambiguous in this context, since an urban designer might quite reasonably focus on a
small item, say a curb cut or a streetlamp, while an architect, even one unconcerned about urban
design, might well deal with a larger object, such as a building complex.

Urban design is better understood to have as its focus not large scale per se, but rather those
features of the built environment that—transcend the individual parcel or property or take place in
the public realm.

In brief, urban design inquires into the human experience that the built environment evokes across
private properties or in the public realm.

The urban designer confronts issues that are quite different from those of an architect working for a
single client; the urban designer engages a physical world driven by the dynamics of private
commerce and public affairs.

After all, the openings or closings of business establishments, occupation and abandonment of
houses, and juxtapositions of buildings are driven far more by the market process than by any
designer’s creative imagination (Sternberg, 2000, pp. 266)

The urban designer must contend with the multiple forces that generate the built environment,
primarily - private investors, landowners, community members, interest groups, legislators, and
funding agencies (Sternberg, 2000, pp. 266)

It is in creating, protecting, and restoring cohesive experiences of built form that urban design
acquires its distinctive social role (Sternberg, 2000, pp. 267)

Urban design has forged a distinctive identity with applications at many different scales – ranging
from the block or street scale to the scale of metropolitan and regional landscapes, with such
intermediate scales of applications as planned new communities, or conservation and design of
urban neighborhoods (Banerjee and Loukaitou-Sideris, 2011, pp. 01)

Urban design as the design and management of the 'public realm’ –

defined as the public face of buildings, the spaces between frontages, ·

the activities taking place in and between these spaces, and

the managing of these activities, all of which are affected by the use of the buildings themselves
(Carmona et al., 2003, pp. 07)

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