Preface

An exposition of the different, but intimately related,dimensions of urban design, this book is an updated andrevised version of a book originally published in 2003.Focusing neither on a limited checklist of urban designqualities nor, it is hoped, excluding important areas, it takesa holistic approach to urban design and place-making andthus provides a comprehensive overview of the subject bothfor those new to the subject and for those requiringa general guide. To facilitate this, it has an easily accessiblestructure, with self-contained and cross-referenced sectionsand chapters, enabling readers to dip in for specific infor-mation. The incremental layering of concepts aids thosereading the book cover to cover.

Urban design is seen here as a design process, in which,as in any design process, there are no ‘right’ or ‘wrong’answers, only ‘better’ and ‘worse’ answers, the quality ofwhich may only be known in time. It is, thus, necessary tohave a continually questioning and inquisitive approach tourban design rather than a dogmatic view. The book doesnot seek to produce a ‘new’ theory of urban design in aprescriptive fashion. Instead it expounds a broad belief ineand attitude to e urban design and place-making asimportant parts of urban development, renewal, manage-ment, planning and conservation processes.

Synthesising and integrating ideas and theories froma wide range of sources, the book derives from a compre-hensive review and reading of existing literature andresearch. It also draws on the authors’ experience teaching,researching and writing about urban design in schools ofplanning, urban studies, architecture and surveying.

Motivation

This book comes from two distinct sources. First, froma period during the 1990s when the authors workedtogether at the University of Nottingham on an innovativeundergraduate urban planning programme. Its primarymotivation was a belief that teaching urban design at thecore of an interdisciplinary, creative, problem-solvingdiscipline, planning (and other) professionals would havea more valuable learning experience and a better foundationfor their future careers. Although in many schools ofplanning urban design is still figuratively put into a ‘box’and taught by the school’s single urban design ‘specialist’,

our contention was that an urban design awareness andsensibility should inform all parts of the curriculum. Thesame is true of schools of architecture, property, real estateand landscape.

Second, from a need to prepare undergraduate lecturemodules presenting ideas, principles and concepts of urbandesign to support the programme’s design studio teaching.Althoughmany excellent urban design books existed, it soonbecame apparent that none drew from the full range of urbandesign thought. The writing of these modules generated theidea for the book and provided its overall structure.

The Book’s Structure

The book is in three main parts. It begins with a broadexposition of what is meant by ‘urban design’. In Chapter 1,the challenge for ‘urban design’ and for the ‘urbandesigner’ is made explicit.

The chapter deliberately adopts a broad understandingof urban design, which sees urban design as more thansimply the physical or visual appearance of development,and an integrative (i.e. joined-up) and integrating activity.While urban design’s scope may be broad and its bound-aries often fuzzy, the heart of its concern is about makingplaces for people e this idea forms the kernel of this book.

More precisely, it is about making better places thanwould otherwise be produced. This is e unashamedly andunapologetically e a normative contention about what webelieve urban design should be about rather than neces-sarily what at any point in time it is about. We thereforeregard urban design as an ethical activity e first, in anaxiological sense (because it is intimately concerned withissues of values) and, second, because it is, or should be,concerned with particular values such as social justice,equity and environmental sustainability.

Chapter 2 outlines and discusses issues of change in thecontemporary urban context. Chapter 3 presents a numberof overarching contexts that provide the background forurban design action e the local, global, market and regu-latory. These contexts underpin and inform the discussionsof the individual dimensions of urban design principles andpractice in Part II.

Part II consists of Chapters 4e9, each of which reviewsa substantive dimension of urban designe ‘morphological’,

vii

‘perceptual’, ‘social’, ‘visual’, ‘functional’ and ‘temporal’.As urban design is a joined-up activity, this separation is forthe purpose of clarity in exposition and analysis only. Thesesix overlapping dimensions of urban design are the everydaysubstance of urban design, while the cross-cutting contextsoutlined inChapter 3 relate to and inform all the dimensions.The six dimensions and four contexts are linked and relatedby the conception of design as a process of problem solving.The chapters are not intended to delimit boundaries aroundparticular areas of urban design and, instead, highlight thebreadth of the subject area, with the connections between thedifferent broad areas being made explicit. Urban design isonly holistic if all areas of action e morphological,perceptual, social, visual, functional and temporal e areconsidered together.

In Part III e Chapters 10e12 e implementation anddelivery mechanisms for urban design are explored e thatis, how urban design is procured, controlled and commu-nicated, thereby stressing the nature of urban design asa process moving from theory to action. Aspiring urbandesigners, especially those still in education, can oftenproduce exciting visions and design proposals for thedevelopment of urban areas and the creation of (seemingly)

wonderful public places. The qualities of such visions mayseem entirely self-evident and the case for their immediateimplementation overwhelming. But this is a romantic,perhaps naı̈ve, view of urban design and place-making. Welive in the ‘real world’ and what appears entirely rational onpaper is much more difficult to achieve on the ground.Furthermore, the reality is that implementation often failsin some way. Policies and proposals drift off course. Seendifferently, however, they also evolve and develop throughthe implementation process. Stressing that places mattermost, the final chapter brings together the various dimen-sions of the subject to emphasise the holistic and sustain-able nature of urban design.

It is important to appreciate how urban designers(primarily those in or working for the public sector, but alsoothers) can encourage, enable and sometimes compel betterquality urban design in the form of higher quality devel-opment and/or better places for people. Rather than whaturban design is or should be, the focus is how decisionsbecome outcomes (‘ends’), and the processes (‘means’) bywhich this happens.

An Emerging and Evolving Activity

It is only recently in the UK that urban design has beenrecognised as an important area of practice by the existingbuilt environment professions, and even more recently thatit has been recognised by central and local governments.This has been marked by central government through urbandesign and place-making becoming more central elementsof the planning remit.

In the USA e in certain states at least e urban designhas often been more fully conceptualised and better inte-grated into the activities of the established built environ-ment professionals. Examining the planning history ofcities such as San Francisco and Portland clearly demon-strates this. More generally, as in the UK, recent initiativesat both public and professional levels have combined togive urban design a new prominence e in the publicsector, through the spread of design review as a means topromote better design through planning action andthrough the professions with the emergence of, forexample, the Congress for the New Urbanism. In addition,urban design is the focus of well-developed grassrootsactivity, with local communities participating in thedesign, management and reshaping of their own localenvironments.

Urban design is a growing discipline. There isincreasing demand for urban design practitioners e or,more simply, for those with urban design expertise andplace-making sensibilities e from the public and privatesectors around the world. This growth has been matched bya range of new urban design courses at both graduate andundergraduate levels; by greater recognition in planning,

viii Preface

architectural and surveying (real estate) education; bya number of new urban design journals; and by a newdemand from both private and public practitioners wantingto develop appropriate skills and knowledge.

All urban designers, whether ‘knowing’ or ‘unknowing’(see Chapter 1), need a clear understanding of how theirvarious actions and interventions in the built environmentcombine to create high quality, people-friendly, vital andviable environments or, conversely, poor quality, alien-ating, or simply monotonous environments. As a field ofactivity, urban design has been the subject of much recentattention and has secured its place among established builtenvironment professions as a key means to address inter-disciplinary concerns. In this position, it is a policy andpractice-based subject, which, like architecture andplanning, benefits from an extensive and legitimising

theoretical underpinning. This book draws on that nowextensive conceptual underpinning to present many of thekey contributions aimed at beneficially influencing theoverall quality and liveability of urban environments.

Urban design has developed quickly and continues toevolve, even in the seven or so years since the first editionof this book was written. It is hoped that the structureadopted by this book will continue to stand the test of timeand that, over time, it will be able to incorporate otheradvances in thinking on the practice and process of urbandesign, and any omissions that e through our ignorance orlack of appreciation e we have not included. Hence, bycontributing to the better understanding of good urbandesign, it is intended that this book will enable the design,development, enhancement and preservation of successful,sustainable and cherished places.

ixPreface

This page intentionally left blank

Part I

Defining Urban Design

This page intentionally left blank

Chapter 1

Urban Design Today

This book adopts a broad understanding of urban design asthe process of making better places for people than wouldotherwise be produced (Figures 1.1e1.3). Four themes areemphasised in this definition: first, that urban design is forpeople; second, the significance of ‘place’; third, that urbandesign operates in the ‘real’ world, with its field ofopportunity constrained by economic (market) and political(regulatory) forces; and fourth, the importance of design asa process. That urban design is about making better placesthan would otherwise be produced is, of course, a norma-tive contention about what urban design should be ratherthan what it is at any point in time.

Introducing and defining urban design, this chapter isorganised into three main parts. The first part develops anunderstanding of the subject. The second part discusses thecontemporary need for urban design. The third partdiscusses urban designers and urban design practice.

UNDERSTANDING URBAN DESIGN

From the early 1960s, a clutch of writers and designers enotably Jane Jacobs, Kevin Lynch, Gordon Cullen,Christopher Alexander, Aldo Rossi, Ian McHarg, Jan Gehland others e became influential in shaping what wouldincreasingly become known as urban design. The termitself had been coined in North America in the late 1950sand is often associated with Jose Luis Sert, Dean of Har-vard’s Graduate School of Design, convening an ‘urban

design’ conference at Harvard in 1956 and subsequentlysetting up the first American urban design programme atthat university (see Krieger & Saunders 2009).

As a term for the activity, it replaced the more tradi-tional and narrower term ‘civic design’. Typified by theCity Beautiful Movement, civic design focused on thesiting and design of major civic buildings e city halls,opera houses and museumse and their relationship to openspaces. Evolving from an initial, predominantly aesthetic,concern with the distribution of building masses and thespace between buildings, contemporary urban designdenotes a more expansive approach and, reflecting the titleof this book, has become primarily concerned with shapingurban space as a means to make, or re-make, the ‘public’places that people can use and enjoy.

Defining Urban Design

Containing two problematical words, urban design can bean ambiguous term. Taken separately, ‘urban’ and ‘design’have clear meanings: urban describes the characteristics oftowns or cities, while design refers to such activities assketching, planning, arranging, colouring and pattern-making. As used generally within the field, ‘urban’ hasa wide and inclusive meaning, embracing not only the cityand town but also the village and hamlet, while ‘design’, isas much about effective problem solving and/or theprocesses of delivering or organising development, as aboutnarrow aesthetics or particular physical outcomes.

FIGURE 1.1 Gammel Strand, Copenhagen (Image: Steve Tiesdell) FIGURE 1.2 St Andrews Square, Edinburgh (Image: Steve Tiesdell)

Public Places – Urban Spaces. DOI: 10.1016/B978-1-85617-827-3.10001-X

Copyright ! 2010, 2003, Matthew Carmona, Steve Tiesdell, Tim Heath & Taner Oc. Published By Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

3

Discussing definitions of urban design, Madanipour(1996: 93e117) identified seven areas of ambiguity:

l Should it be focused at particular scales or levels?l Should it focus only on the visual qualities of the urban

environment or, more broadly, address the organisationand management of urban space?

l Should it simply be about transforming spatialarrangements or should it be about more deeply seatedsocial and cultural relations between spaces andsociety?

l Should its focus be its product (the urban environment)or the process by which it is produced?

l Should it be the province of architects, planners orlandscape architects?

l Should it be a public or private sector activity?l Should it be an objectiveerational process (a science) or

an expressiveesubjective process (an art)?

The first three are concerned with the ‘product’ of urbandesign, the last three concern urban design as a ‘process’,while the fourth concerns the producteprocess dilemma.Although Mandanipour’s ambiguities are deliberatelypresented as oppositional and mutually exclusive, it isoften a matter of and/both rather than either/or. As we‘consciously shape and manage our built environments’(Madanipour 1996: 117), urban designers are interested inand engaged with both process and its products. While, inpractice, urban design is used to refer to all the products andprocesses of development, in a more restricted sense itmeans adding quality to both product and process.

Another distinction that can be confusing is that betweenits use in a descriptive manner and its use in a normativemanner. In the former, all urban development is ipso factourban design; in the latter, only urban development ofsufficient merit or quality is urban design. Thus, seenanalytically, urban design is the process by which the urban

environment comes about; seen normatively, it ise or shouldbe e the process by which better urban environments comeabout. Confusion comes because those ‘in-the-know’(designers) will often skip between these forms of use, butothers (often social scientists) fail to make this distinction.

Urban design’s scope is broad. Indicating the potentialscope and diversity of urban design, and attempting to sumup the remit of urban design in simple terms, Tibbalds(1988a) suggested it was ‘Everything you can see out of thewindow.’ While this statement has a basic truth and logic, if‘everything’ can be considered to be urban design, thenequally perhaps ‘nothing’ is urban design (see Dagenhart &Sawicki 1994). There is, however, little value in puttingboundaries around the subject. The real need is for defini-tions encapsulating its heart or core rather than prescribingits edge or boundary e that is, for the identification,clarification and debate of its central beliefs and activities.

To explore the source of some of this confusion, urbandesign can be considered in terms of discipline andgeographical scale.

(i) DisciplineIn terms of discipline, it is frequently easier to saywhat urban design is not than precisely what it is. It isnot, for example, big architecture, small-scale plan-ning, civic beautification, urban engineering,a pattern-book subject, just visual/aesthetic in itsscope, only a public sector concern, nor a narrow self-contained discipline. Despite this, relational defini-tions e those defining something in relation tosomething elsee can help us to get closer to what it is.Urban design, for example, is typically defined interms of architecture and town planning e Gosling &Maitland (1984) described it as the ‘common ground’between these disciplines, while the UK’s formerSocial Science Research Council located it at

‘. the interface between architecture, landscape architec-

ture and town planning, drawing on the design tradition of

architecture and landscape architecture, and the environ-

mental management and social science tradition of

contemporary planning.’

(Bentley & Butina 1991)

Urban design, however, is not simply an interface. Itencompasses and sometimes subsumes a number ofdisciplines and activities: architecture, town planning,landscape architecture, surveying, property develop-ment, environmental management and protection, etc.As Cuthbert (2007: 185) observes, professions arealways territorial, and, furthermore, frequently at thebehest of professions, academic institutions offeringeducation in professional areas inevitably also becometerritorial (see Table 1.1). Urban design is not, or shouldnot be, a particular professional territory (see below).

FIGURE 1.3 Chicago (Image: Matthew Carmona)

4 PART | I Defining Urban Design

Despite some professions periodically makingimperialist claims on the field, urban design is typi-cally collaborative and inter-disciplinary, involving anintegrated approach and the skills and expertise ofa wide range of actors. Some urban design practi-tioners argue that ‘place’ is not e or should not be ea professional territory and that, rather than imbuingthe creative task of designing urban places in thehands of a single ‘all-knowing’ designer, it should beshared among many actors. Cowan (2001a: 9), forexample, has asked:

‘. which profession is best at interpreting policy; assessing

the local economy and property market; appraising a site or

area in terms of land use, ecology, landscape, ground

conditions, social factors, history, archaeology, urban form

and transport; managing and facilitating a participative

process; drafting and illustrating design principles; and

programming the development process?’

He contends that, while all these skills are likely to beneeded in, say, producing an urban design frameworkor masterplan, they are rarely all embodied by a singleprofessional. The best frameworks and masterplansare drawn up by a number of people with differentskills working in collaboration. Urban designerstypically work within a context of multiple clients,often with conflicting interests and objectives,

developing as a consequence of multiple solutions toa problem, rather than a single solution.

Indeed, many consider that the very term ‘urbandesign’ places it too much within the purview ofprofessional design experts engaging in self-conscious,knowing design, and prefer the more inclusive term‘place-making’ and, at a larger scale, city-making:terms suggesting it is more than just (professional)‘designers’ who create places and cities. Described asurban design many non-professionals struggle to seetheir role; described as place-making they can moreeasily envision their role and contribution. Urbandesign can thus be considered the self-consciouspractice of knowing urban designers; place-making isthe self-conscious and unself-conscious practice ofeveryone.

An important distinction is between urban design(or place-making) as direct design (place-design) andurban design as indirect design or, more grandly, aspolitical economy. In the latter, actors are involved inshaping the nature of place (place-shaping), throughestablishing policy, making investment decisions,managing space, etc., but may not themselves beinvolved in any conscious design process. Urbandesign encompasses both. George (1997) makesa similar distinction between first-order design andsecond-order design. First-order design involves direct

TABLE 1.1 A Systems View of Professional Boundaries

Architecture Urban Design Urban Planning

Definition The design of individual buildings,which are conceived primarily interms of the design parameters ofartificially controlled environments.

An open system that usesindividual architecturalelements and ambient space asits basic vocabulary, and that isfocused on social interactionand communication in thepublic realm.

The agent of the state in controlling theproduction of land for the purposes ofcapital accumulation and socialreproduction; in allocating sites for thecollective consumption of social goodssuch as hospitals, schools and religiousbuildings; and in providing space for theproduction, circulation and eventualconsumption of commodities.

Element

(i) Structure Static! human activity Morphology of space and form(history! human activity)

Government bureaucracy

(ii) Environment Three-dimensional (closed system) Four-dimensional (open system) The political economy of the state

(iii) Resources Materials! energy! design theory Architecture! ambient space!social theory

Systems of legitimation andcommunication

(iv) Objectives Social closure/physical protection Social communication andinteraction

To implement the prevailing ideology ofpower

(v) Behaviour Design parameters: artificiallycontrolled environments

Dynamics of urban land markets Dynamics of advanced capitalistsocieties

Source: Adapted from Cuthbert 2007: 189e90.

5Chapter | 1 Urban Design Today