Journal of Urban Design

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

Eliot’s insight – the future of urban design

Alexander Cuthbert

To cite this article: Alexander Cuthbert (2020) Eliot’s insight – the future of urban design, Journal
of Urban Design, 25:1, 11-14, DOI: 10.1080/13574809.2019.1706877

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/13574809.2019.1706877

Published online: 16 Jan 2020.

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 JOURNAL OF URBAN DESIGN 11

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

References
Arup Foresight. 2019. “Drivers of Change.” Accessed 3 March 2019. www.driversofchange.com/tools/doc/
Batty, M. 2018. Inventing Future Cities. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Childs, M. 2015. “Learning from New Millennium Science Fiction Cities.” Journal of Urbanism 8 (1): 97–109.
Childs, M. 2016. “Composing Speculative Cities.” Analog Science Fiction & Fact 136 (4) April: 30–6. 9.
Goddard, J., and M. Tewdwr-Jones. 2014. “A Future for Cities? Building New Methodologies and Systems for
Urban Foresight.” Town Planning Review 85 (6): 773–794.
Hines, A., and P. Bishop. 2015. Thinking about the Future. Houston: Hinesight.
Institute for the Future. 2019. “Scenarios.” Accessed 23 April 2019. http://www.iftf.org/what-we-do/foresight-
tools/scenarios/
Ramírez, R., and A. Wilkinson. 2016. Strategic Reframing: The Oxford Scenario Planning Approach. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Ratcliffe, J., and E. Krawczyk. 2011. “Imagineering City Futures: The Use of Prospective through Scenarios in
Urban Planning.” Futures 43 (January): 642–653. doi:10.1016/j.futures.2011.05.005.
Redondo, Leticia, and Jos. 2012. “Linking Territorial Foresight and Urban Planning.” Foresight 14 (4): 316–335.
doi:10.1108/14636681211256107.
Rossi, A., and P. Eisenman. 1982. The Architecture of the City. Oppositions Books. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Schwartz, P. 1996. The Art of the Long View: Paths to Strategic Insight for Yourself and Your Company. New York:
Currency Doubleday.
Sitte, C. 1980 [1889]. The Art of Building Cities. New York: Reinhold Pub. Corp.
Taleb, N. 2007. The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable. New York: Random House.
Winsor, G. (1926) “Station X.” Amazing Stories, July.

Mark C. Childs
School of Architecture and Planning, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, NM, USA
mchilds@unm.edu
© 2019 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
https://doi.org/10.1080/13574809.2019.1706309

Eliot’s insight – the future of urban design

Taner’s mandate was ‘to reflect on the past and look to the future – where will urban design
research and scholarship be in 2030?’ Here we are primarily challenged to examine one thing- the
theoretical basis for our response. Only theory constitutes the difference between professional and
lay opinion. It is also the sole means of prediction that deals with reality. This does not assume that
experience, practice and professional conduct are insignificant. But they are all manipulable by
a diversity of interests and are collectively unable to formulate a coherent praxis of society and
space- the foundation for urban design. The only remaining doors to the future are those of
speculation, crystal ball gazing and a nonsensical belief in utopian futures. Nonetheless, we can
safely predict that the past will dictate the future, perhaps most eloquently stated by T. S. Eliot in his
‘Four Quartets’. He notes that physics has been unable to prove that time moves forward or that
there is any demonstrable ‘future’, and that there is always ‘the door we never opened’. I remain
convinced that for too long, we have refused to open doors that are critical to our understanding in
all but a few outstanding papers. The seminal question remains- ‘how can we understand space-
time from an urban design perspective?’ The answer is we can’t. I maintain that what we call ‘urban
12 COMMENTARIES

design theory’ is not up to the task. The consequence is that it is somewhat impossible for
associated research to extend beyond first base since it must subsist somewhat within
a theoretical vacuum. Which urban design theories do we have that challenge this idea? Nor
have any of the respected theorists (Cullen, Lynch, Rowley, Gehl, Hillier, Rapoport, Alexander etc.)
moved far out of the box. As in architecture, there is a tendency to concentrate on personalities
rather than processes. I have said elsewhere, ‘the overarching focus is to view urban design projects
as somehow immunised from the rest of urban space – urban design projects connect to it but are
not of it’- a bit like having a theory of ‘self’ without society. So overall, mainstream urban design
does not appear to possess any meaningful conceptual system that is coherent. It also abjures risk
and has been constrained by the planning and architectural professions alike. I suggest we begin
reconstruction with the famous phrase ‘’All space is political’ (Lefebvre 1991).
But the tendency of academic scholarship starting with Jose Luis Sert in 1953 has been to treat
urban design as project design- a necessary intervention but seriously constrained in its scope.
Sert ignored the fact that the foremost designer of urban space is capital, not architects. So the
debate is not so much over how we have progressed, but what we have ignored in the process.
We do not live in a sanitized, benevolent, Kleenex environment where design is the dominant
aesthetic. Instead, we inhabit a globalized capitalist environment driven by a digital economy
and informational monopolies that creates the rules they live by. The built environment is
increasingly controlled by multinational interests, algorithms and unconstrained avarice
(Greenfield 2018). The so-called ‘Smart City’ is the most recent example of this process where
urban design can be seen first and foremost as a platform for profit by major international
companies in selling technology (Siemens, Microsoft, IBM, Huawei, Ericsson, etc.). But already ‘the
smart city’ is morphing into what is termed ‘the Hyperconnected City,’ apparently released
last year as part of a ‘Sustainable business and Financing Plan’ (Connor 2019). What does
urban design theory have to say about this? But don’t worry. The message is that ‘we have
your interests at heart.’
Not only are space and time inseparable within capitalism, they are the medium through
which exploitation occurs. Economies are defined by spatial flows of energy, raw materials,
commodities, transport functions, etc. The speed of these flows is directly related to the
concept of space-time compression and therefore the accelerated accumulation of capital,
hence Marx’s famous phrase, ‘the annihilation of space by time’ in his Grundrisse of 1857. The
faster commodities can be created and sold, the greater the accumulation and compression of
wealth into fewer and fewer hands. Necessarily, all space and time have been commodified in
the interests of productive forces. They have been measured, valued, hierarchized, fractured,
packaged and priced like any other commodity. Hence, ‘powerful class interests colonise and
commodify space, use and abuse the built environment and public spaces, ideologically
brandish monuments, conquer whole neighbourhoods and urban infrastructure’ Merrifield
(2002, 8). Within this system, capital accumulation occurs in three main ways – rent on land,
profit on investment, and surplus value from labour. Urban design projects merely manifest as
rather large commodities where constellations of spaces of different sizes and locations
serving different economic functions are organized, constructed, sold and exchanged like
any other good. Exploitation occurs since the economic surplus is collectively created but
privately appropriated. Since surplus value is dependent on the time spent by living labour,
the appropriation of the surplus is at its core a monopoly over time – ‘the class which organises
the social labour and appropriates surplus value, simultaneously appropriates the temporal
surplus-value of its organisation of social time: it possesses for itself the irreversible time of the
living’ (Debord 1967, n. 128).
In this context, the built environment and the strategies that lead to urban design
interventions can be seen as part of the overall system of space–time compression. In
 JOURNAL OF URBAN DESIGN 13

many cases, this generates ‘vulgarised pseudo festivals’ and the processes whereby the city
endlessly consumes itself in accelerating surplus value extraction. Here the built environ-
ment constitutes both fixed capital and a quantum of dead labour time. New capital flows
unevenly through various circuits, first into industrial investment where overproduction and
over accumulation take place, prompting capital displacement into the secondary circuit –
the built environment (fixed capital assets represented in urban design projects), third into
research and development. Overall, the construction of commodified spaces represent
determinate social relations and spatial hierarchies. We may refer to each as a spatial fix –
the chameleon like quality that allows capital to change its camouflage without changing its
structure – crisis evasion at its best.
So far my response to Taner’s question has been somewhat oblique, but it may be inferred
from all of the above. To be more explicit, the answer as to future research and scholarship may
have to be constituted in an intellectual collision and ultimate fusion of commodified produc-
tion qua urban design (practice) and political economy (substantial theory) in the form of
urban geography, sociology and economics. Such integration is necessary so that urban
designers cannot ignore the meaning and morality of what they do as agents of the state
and capital. Therefore, the dominant intellectual engagement for urban designers over the
next 10 years must be the establishment of credible urban design theory that escapes the
confinement of projects. This will necessarily involve material aspects of the production of
urban space as a whole, (not just urban design), and the production of symbolism, representa-
tion and image to avoid our environments being overwhelmed by the spectacle of commodity
production and its monopolies. The battle is between community and privacy and the neo-
corporate state as to whose culture is represented, between the symbolic expression of social
relations in appropriate urban forms, or the reification of the commodity and spectacular
consumption. It also implies an understanding of social process that has been ritually ignored
in the urban design literature, and I have already suggested how this could be corrected,
(Cuthbert 2003, 2007, 2011). While the above might suggest to some readers that I think there
is no hope for the discipline, the reality is quite the opposite. I have already declared that
I consider urban design to have the greatest potential to be foremost in the environmental
disciplines. It has both a theoretical object (The public realm) and a real object (public space)
(Cuthbert 2007, 211). But the key word is potential, and a huge space opens up for both
scholarship and practice if this is accepted. It will require serious thought and resolution in the
decade to come if urban design projects are not to descend into a rupture with historical time,
or what has been referred to as ‘the official amnesia of historical practice’ (Debord 1967,
n. 196).

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

References
Alexander, C. 1987. A New Theory of Urban Design. New York: Oxford University Press.
Connor, S. 2019. “The Hyperconnected City.” Forbes Journal, November 19.
Cuthbert, A. R. 2003. Designing Cities. Oxford: Blackwell.
Cuthbert, A. R. 2007. “Urban Design: Requiem for an Era – Review and Critique of the Last 50 Years.” Urban Design
International 12: 177–223. (Whole issue). doi:10.1057/palgrave.udi.9000200.
Cuthbert, A. R. 2011. Understanding Cities: Method in Urban Design. Oxford: Routledge.
Debord, G. 1967. The Society of the Spectacle. London: Practical Paradise Publications.
Greenfield, A. 2018. Radical Technologies- the Design of Everyday Life. London: Verso.
Lefebvre, H. 1991. The Production of Space. Oxford, UK: Basil Blackwell.
14 COMMENTARIES

Merrifield, A. 2002. Metromarxism: A Marxist Tale of the City, 8. London: Routledge.

Alexander Cuthbert
Planning and Urban Development Department, University of New South Wales, Kensington,
Australia
a.cuthbert@unsw.edu.au
© 2020 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
https://doi.org/10.1080/13574809.2019.1706877

Urban design as a contested field

Any discussion of urban design research needs to begin with a definition of the field of urban
design – mine is the ‘shaping of public space’ but almost any definition might be fruitfully
contested. In what follows I want to briefly reflect on this field of research – as a field of
intersecting disciplines, on its epistemology and relations with practice, and on some key
challenges of spatial justice, informal urbanism and concepts of place.
Urban design research has long been situated between the much larger parent disciplines
of architecture and urban planning, where urban planning is largely seen as process and
architecture as form. From the perspective of the urban planning field, urban design can seem
like planning regulation writ small; from the field of architecture, it can seem like formal design
writ large – like divorced parents bickering over custody. Yet urban design is in many ways the
more consequential of these fields – while plans can be changed and buildings can be
demolished, urban design decisions (street width, density, functional mix) are highly resilient
to change and tend to persist for centuries.
With the exception of its long traditions in architectural history, architectural research
remains relatively focused on aesthetic critique with low-impact refereed journals, lots of
self-publishing and low citation rates. Urban planning, on the other hand, has a plethora
of high-impact journals, but it has become somewhat disconnected from research on
urban form. While the refereeing process builds greater rigour into research, I wonder if it
also takes the edge off more contentious ideas. Would Jacobs’ observations of sidewalk
life – originally published in an architecture magazine – have survived a peer review
process?
Urban design connects a range of increasingly disparate fields and one of the key contribu-
tions of the Journal of Urban Design has been in enabling and encouraging debate between
different points of view rather than adjudicating which of them is superior. When it is no longer
possible to keep up with the literature in all the fields that are relevant to urban design, there is
pressure to retreat into silos with their own journals (i.e., urban morphology, space syntax) where
one can be at the forefront. But major shifts in urban design thinking are much more likely to
come from those who can connect the dots between different approaches. In my view it is this
contestation of ideas, reflecting the idea of public space as contested space, that makes urban
design distinctive as a field of research – it is not a discipline but a field of intersections between
disciplines.
Urban design research embodies forms of knowledge that do not fit easily into traditions of
the sciences or humanities. While both such critiques are useful there is also a sense in which
urban design knowledge occupies its own ground with interrelations between numbers,
words, maps and diagrams as forms of knowledge. There is a particular tension between