Urban Design

The modern concept of urban design grew out of major mid-twentieth century concerns, which were urban sprawl and declining inner-city areas. Pioneer urban designers in the 1950s struggled to find common ground among the design disciplines, i.e. architecture, landscape architecture and urban planning, for dealing with those problems that were far beyond the mastery of any single discipline. This book brings the story back, and also celebrates the more than 50 years since the influential 1956 Conference on Urban Design held at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design. The volume also offers a perspective on the intellectual distances travelled since then. The 18 essays in this book were written by urban designers, planners and other urban-related researchers, and first published in two consecutive issues of Harvard Design Magazine in 2006 and 2007.

Part 1 explores the circumstances that led to the conceptualization of urban design. It offers extracts from the transcripts of the 1956 conference by participants such as José Luis Sert, Lewis Mumford, Jane Jacobs and Richard Neutra. It also discusses the development of the discipline, including the splintering of the CIAM and the emergence of the so-called post-modern urban designers during the 1960s. Part 2 presents the views of three architects/planners (D Scott Brown, Fumihiko Maki and Jonathan Barnett) whose careers span much of the half century since 1956. These authors claim that key elements such as social complexity, inter-disciplinary interaction, environmental stewardship, an enhanced public realm and a facilitating sociability should be at the centre of the current stage of urban design.

Part 3 lays out roles and categories of engagement for the practitioners of urban design, emphasizing distinct fields of action and defining the “territory” of the discipline. These authors also demand more attention to urban theories in contemporary practice and ask for more rigorous theoretical underpinning for current and future practitioners. Part 4 presents a debate about the nature of the discipline. Some authors criticize what they call the banal strategies catering to low common denominators, false evocations of bygone eras of good urbanism, and the predominance of market-driven rather than civically inspired objectives (e.g. “new urbanism”). But this debate engages with urban design’s own Achilles heel, which is its eternal self-defeating sideline of history and context.

Variations of a “third way” between lifeless conformity and unnecessary innovation are presented in Part 5. While some authors demand practice based on a three-legged stool of environmentalism, promoting creative urban economies and “shared” leadership (i.e. more involvement of civic society in designing processes), others ask for an urban design more engaged with both landscape architecture and a constant spirit of self-criticism – far from the uncritical mimicking of successful past cases. Finally, essayists in Part 6 wonder if urban designers can acquire a more global outlook. This means attending to the demands of the unprecedented rate of urbanization in the vast world outside of Europe and North America and focusing on the emerging urbanisms outside traditional, nucleated urban models. This also means proposing ideas for patterns of urbanization congruent with globally networked economies, digital communication, modernizing infrastructures and services, and changing cultural contexts.