Introducing Urban Design

Interventions and Responses

Clara Greed,Marion Roberts

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317888918
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architettura
• Subtopic: Pianificazione urbana e paesaggistica

Introducing Urban Design: Interventions and Responses is a new departure in the town planning series under the editorship of Clara Greed. The dynamic new subject and profession of urban design straddles the fields of town planning, architecture, landscape architecture and transport planning. This book recognises that a key feature of modern urban design practice is the ability to integrate a concern with the visual and aesthetic aspects of urban form, with a strong social awareness of the need of user groups, plus a sensitivity to wider environmental and sustainability issues. In this it continues the themes already introduced in earlier volumes, such as the changing nature of the profession, social problems and the means of implementing policy. Written by a team of eminent urban designers, architects and planners under the joint editorship of Clara Greed and Marion Roberts, the book introduces the reader to the subject through a discussion of current issues, approaches and user responses. Introducing Urban Design: Interventions and Responses is an ideal resource for undergraduate courses in town planning, architecture, landscape architecture, estate management and housing studies. It is also suitable as an introductory text for first year diploma and masters programmes in urban design and suitable for RTPI, RICS, CIOH, CIOB, ASI, ISVA and RIBA courses and will be of interest to professional practioners in the urban design field.

I SETTING THE SCENE

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1 Definitions and perceptions of urban design

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Clara Greed

Expectations

How to take the book

The purpose of this book, as its title suggests, is not to provide a prescriptive design guide, but to introduce key aspects of the urban design agenda, from among an ever-expanding range of other equally eligible topics. A further volume on urban design is under preparation which will be more prescriptive, relatively speaking, and will constitute more of a primer on urban design. But one cannot provide detailed standards, codes and guidelines until one has discussed and established the criteria, policy considerations, objectives and ‘visions’ upon which these factors should be based. That is the function of this present volume. The intention is to present a selective range of contributions, comprising discussions, accounts and some case studies, which are indicative of the current agenda. Although urban design as a subject has experienced a renaissance in recent years, in terms of college courses, and in numbers of practitioners undertaking urban design work within both public and private sector contexts, it is still an evolving area which is difficult to define and delimit. Many people equate urban design variously (and inaccurately) with townscape, urban conservation, architecture, town planning, and, inevitably, Prince Charles! As will be explained, however, there is a great deal more to urban design than these popular impressions and associations might imply.

In this book, one will not generally find dedicated chapters on topics or types of development such as retail, commercial, leisure and recreation, and residential development, although one will find information on these aspects – particularly the latter which, after all, represents 70 per cent of all development (Greed, 1996a, Chapter 1) – within the various chapters. The book will first identify current issues in the development of the professional urban design agenda, and then look at user demands and response within the community to this evolving agenda. The aim is to take a more holistic approach, based on understanding urban design as a philosophy and way of seeing entire cities, and thus as a basis for developing policies concerned with the design, management and planning of urban form and space.

Because of the evolving nature of the field and the debates which rage around the question of ‘What exactly is urban design?’ and ‘Who are the urban designers?’ the first half of this chapter is devoted to discussing what urban design is and what it is not. Definitions are provided to give the reader a clearer idea of how to approach the subject and what to expect from it. This introduction will also provide an opportunity to provoke some discussion as to the relative contribution of the ‘designer’ (the professional, the providers) as against the ‘designed’ (the community, the users) in the design process. Trends towards participatory, bottom-up, as against top-down, approaches to decision-making are often assumed to be ‘better’ than more traditional approaches, but, taken to their logical conclusion, may make the role of the professional urban designer redundant. These debates need airing in Part I to provide context to the two main sections of the book, Part II which is written, relatively speaking from the ‘top-down’, provider perspective, as against Part III which incorporates ‘bottom-up’ user perspectives.

Conceptualising urban design

This book investigates urban design as the fourth volume in the series, Exploring Town Planning, which with each volume seeks to move to a new, and relatively more advanced, level of understanding of current conceptual and policy issues. This begs the question of whether urban design is, in fact, part of town planning. As will be seen from subsequent chapters, there are several different viewpoints as to what urban design actually is, particularly among the built environment professions. For example, town planners may imagine that urban design is a component, or function, of modern town planning. Architects may believe it is simply ‘architecture writ large’ across the whole urban fabric. But some urban designers may believe that urban design is not necessarily about architecture (the internal and external design of individual buildings) but about strategic, city-wide urban policy issues. Many would argue that urban design exists as a subject and profession in its own right, which is located somewhere between planning, architecture, landscape architecture, and transport planning. Linked to this, environmental ‘green’ issues, especially in relation to ‘sustainable cities’ have, nowadays, become part of the agenda of urban design and landscape architecture and this will be reflected in various chapters.

On the other hand, if urban design is more than ‘big architecture’ is it also bound to be something less than full-blown town planning? Interestingly, some urban designers may see town planning as a mere subset of urban design, and a fairly recent twentieth-century development at that. Although the agenda of urban design may appear new and different relative to other more established aspects of late-twentieth-century town planning, in fact, urban design is an ancient profession which has shaped towns and cities over the centuries in many different cultures and continents. Arguably, in the past urban design was the chief form of town planning, in which architectural and aesthetic issues predominated. Of course, a range of wider, practical issues were taken into account, as defined by the needs of the affluent classes who effectively commissioned town planning, but many of the design principles utilised are timeless in relevance. Curiously, this heritage appears to be unknown among some planning graduates, so to them ancient principles of urban design may appear as modern revelations. As will be seen from the various approaches of the contributors, urban design can be as broad or narrow, as traditional or modern in its ambit as the designer wants it to be.

Equally, there is much confusion about how urban design relates to the overarching areas of ‘Art and Design’, three-dimensional design, and, more broadly, urban culture itself. Likewise, there are links to be explored between landscape architecture and urban design. The latter has been traditionally concerned with the physical form of cities, buildings and the space between them, whereas the former concerns itself both with the ‘soft’ landscape, that is greenery, vegetation and water and also with the ‘hard’, that is the design and treatment of open spaces using hard surfaces such as granite setts, paving and elements such as street furniture. The history of landscape architecture is a rich one and there has been much interchange with the structure of urban form, and thus with urban design, and these relationships will be explored within the book.

Urban designers clearly do not exist in a vacuum, but are players in the decision-making processes which shape the built environment, they are also interacting with those concerned with property development, investment finance, town centre management, community politics, environmental sustainability and urban governance. All of these other groups bring with them a diversity of other agendas, representing a range of professional bodies, community groups and political interests involved in the development process, some of whom, at worst, may never have heard of urban design, or, at best, may hold overoptimistic or muddled views as what urban design is for and what urban designers can do.

It is important, therefore, at the start of the book to give a definition of what urban design is, and to alert readers to the fact that urban designers, architects and town planners may not entirely agree as to what should be included in, or excluded from, its scope. The following introductory section discusses both what urban design is and does and considers who the urban designers are, and what issues are of concern to them. This introductory section grew from a dialogue between the two editors Marion Roberts (urban designer and architect) and Clara Greed (town planner), as to definitions of urban design, and also reflects the diversity found among the contributors. The introduction concludes with an explanation of the purpose, scope and content of the book with reference to a summary of each chapter.

Definitions and perceptions of urban design

What is urban design?

Controversy exists over definitions of urban design. To characterise the most extreme positions, some urban designers think that planners imagine urban design consists of prettifying the detailed aspects of planning – pedestrianisation, bollards, townscape schemes, or that planners have a remote and rather vague idea that any matter concerned with aesthetics and architecture is somehow ‘urban design’. Conversely, architects may see urban design as a larger extension of architecture; rather as they might argue that an architect should be able to design everything from the door knobs upwards, designing a city is rather like designing a door knob, only a bit larger – ‘Big Architecture’. Traffic engineers have a very precise view of urban design – to them it is traffic calming. Landscape architects, on the other hand, are convinced that landscape architecture is urban design – landscape in the city. To non-professionals it is baffling, but the ‘urban’ is explicable, even if design is not.

Each of these views contains a grain of truth. The definition of urban design used by the Urban Design Unit at the University of Westminster in the context of ‘teaching’ urban design is as follows:

Urban design is concerned with the physical form of cities, buildings and the space between them. The study of urban design deals with the relationships between the physical form of the city and the social forces which produce it. It focuses, in particular, on the physical character of the public realm but is also concerned with the interaction between public and private development and the resulting impact on urban form. (Source: Current University of Westminster MA Urban Design Course Documentation)

As can be seen, this definition does incorporate city design, pedestrianisation and traffic schemes, hard landscaping and a mysterious process called ‘design’. It also implies the concepts of management and stewardship and calls for an understanding of the processes of land assembly and building procurement. The problem with the definition of urban design is that it lies both outside and inside conventionally-defined professional boundaries. Thus, it cannot be tidily defined as the ‘left over’ parts of these professions, although it might indeed deal with some of the problems that are thrown up by the ‘gaps’ between professional spheres of interest – such as the spatial problems produced by building an urban motorway.

Rob Cowan, who has written a chapter later in this volume about the process of urban design, has previously defined urban design as: ‘everything to do with planning that is not covered by the Town and Country Planning Acts.’ Whilst this definition is useful for those who are familiar with the Acts, it is still rather baffling to those who are not. But reading between the lines, this statement appears to allude to the fact that town planning has become so obsessed with narrow, physical, land use control, that there is need for another, freer perspective, to be furnished by the urban design movement, that allows for a more holistic, integrated approach to the understanding and planning of urban form. Another way to express the idea might be to say that each planning decision has a design implication and it is in this implication that the urban designer’s sphere of influence lies.

To give an example to illustrate the role of the urban designer: the siting of any major new development is of great importance to town planners, transport planners and urban designers. The town planner might be concerned about the environmental and economic impacts – will the activities on the site affect residents? How many jobs will it provide? Will it destroy natural countryside and agricultural land? What services can it provide? How will it blight or regenerate a region? The transport planner will consider the development’s relationship to surrounding large developments and existing highway provision, as to the traffic congestion it might cause, and the impact of increased volume on existing road capacity. The urban designer would be thinking about the design of the scheme itself, its layout, the relationships between buildings and space within the scheme and related access and circulation patterns, how it ‘works’ as a scheme, and the design implication of its potential for growth and its future impact on the structure and layout of neighbouring areas – as well as its visual appearance – which, incidentally, is often erroneously typified as the only thing that interests urban designers.

To give another example at a different scale: the layout of a smaller regeneration area, perhaps an inner-city site, would also be of interest to planners and urban designers. Whereas a planner would consider questions of land-use, job creation and equity in a two-dimensional sense, the urban designer would also be thinking about how to make the area work as a place which is memorable and pleasant in a three-dimensional sense. An urban design brief would not only consider the uses which are appropriate to a site, but would prescribe how they should be arranged, the overall massing or building envelope, the fronts and backs of buildings, the arrangement and positioning of routes and linkages, landmarks and open spaces. In this example, far from urban design being seen as a subset of planning, planning might be viewed as subordinate to urban design. However, some town planners might argue that the above has described what they were doing already, or what used to be thought of as ‘good town planning’ in years gone by, and that urban designers are really only reclaiming a currently undervalued dimension of ‘real town planning’ …

This exploration of definition is beginning to suggest that there may be a clash between professions over their ‘ownership’ of problems and solutions. This is a sub-current which underlies much urban design thought. Two examples bring out these areas of conflict: mixed development and design guides. Mixed development has had a distinguished history in the urban design thinking of the last three decades. Its most famous advocate was Jane Jacobs (1961), whose Death and Life of the Great American Cities should be on every urban design student’s reading list; more recently it was promoted by Alcock et al. (1985) in their influential primer Responsive Environments and Peter Calthorpe (1993) has been raising the torch in the US with his concept of transport-oriented development in The Next American Metropolis. The mainstream of town planning has made only rather tentative steps towards accommodating mixed use however and the General Development Orders classification of uses remains an essential part of the town planners’ battery of controls.

From the point of view of architecture, the adoption of design brie...