Urban Design

A Typology of Procedures and Products

Jon Lang

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781317282907
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Urban Planning & Landscaping

Urban Design: A Typology of Procedures and Products, 2nd Edition provides a comprehensive and accessible introduction to urban design, defining the field and addressing the controversies and goals of urban design.

Including over 50 updated international case studies, this new edition presents a three-dimensional model with which to categorize the processes and products involved: product type, paradigm type, and procedural type. The case studies not only illuminate the typology but provide information that designers can use as precedents in their own work. Uniquely, these case study projects are framed by the design paradigm employed, categorized by procedural type instead of instrumental or land use function. The categories used here are Total Urban Design, All-of-a-piece Urban Design, Plug-in Urban Design, and Piece-by-piece Urban Design.

Written for both professionals and those encountering urban design in their day-to-day life, Urban Design is an essential introduction to the field and practice, considering the future direction of the field and what can be learned from the past.

FIGURE 1.0
Place Goujon, Villeurbanne, Lyon.

PART 1 THE NATURE OF URBAN DESIGN AND URBAN DESIGNING

1 The Public Realm of Cities and Urban Design

Almost all definitions of urban design state that it is concerned with the public realm of cities and the elements that define it. One of the clearest definitions is:

Urban design should be taken to mean the relationship between different buildings; the relationship between buildings and streets, squares, parks and waterways and other spaces that make up the public domain … and the patterns of movement and activity that are thereby established.

DoE 1997, paragraph 14

Urban design consists of multi-building projects that vary in size from building complexes to precincts of cities to, occasionally, whole towns. Sometimes urban design includes the design of the buildings themselves, but often it impinges on the architecture of buildings only to the extent that their bulk, uses, particularly on the ground floor, and their façades define the public domain. But what then is the public domain?

What is considered private and what is considered public varies from culture to culture and within cultures over time (Madanipour 1996; Low and Smith 2006). For professionals involved in any of the environmental design fields, the public realm is comprised of two parts. The first deals with the components of the built, or artificial, environment in which behavior occurs, and the second specifies how communal decisions are made by governments and in the marketplace as defined by a country’s laws.

The Public Realm of the Built Environment

The built public realm of a city is not necessarily conterminous with publicly owned property. In a society where property rights are sacrosanct and where individuals have the right and freedom to build what they desire, the public realm and public open space—spaces to which the public has right of entry—may refer to the same thing. In an editorial (December 27, 2002), the French newspaper, Le Monde, stated that anything visible in situ should be part of the public realm in terms of photography work.

The position taken here is that the public realm consists of those places to which everybody has access, although this access may be controlled at times. It consists of both outdoor and indoor spaces. The outdoor spaces include streets, squares, and parks while the indoor may include arcades, the halls of railway stations and public buildings, and other spaces to which the public has general access such as the interior of shopping malls. This statement is controversial.

The problem is that the nature of many “public” places is ambiguous because although the public has relative freedom of access to them, they are under private ownership. As the common domain of cities is increasingly privatized (or rather, private interests are providing public spaces), this ambiguity is likely to continue. Paternoster Square in London is privately owned while Lexington Avenue in New York is public property. Both are open for people to enter at all hours, but in the former case the owners can bar entry.

FIGURE 1.1
The public realm of cities. (a) Paternoster Square, London; (b) Lexington Avenue at 35th Street, New York.

The Elements of the Built Public Realm

The elements that are deemed to constitute the public realm depend on a political stance and help to define that stance. A fruitful way of looking at the public realm is as a set of behavior settings—a term coined by ecological psychologists in the 1960s (Barker 1968) but one that is of increasing importance to designers (Lang and Moleski 2010; Lang and Marshall 2016).

A behavior setting consists of a standing (or recurring) activity pattern, a milieu (pattern of built form), and a time period. The milieu must possess the affordances for the behavior to occur, but because the affordances are there it does not mean that a specific behavior will take place in it. Affordance refers to the potential use of an object or environment by an individual or a species because of the object or environment’s form, structural qualities, and the materials of which it is constructed, given the competence of that individual or species (Gibson 1979). The activities that actually occur depend on the predispositions, motivations, knowledge, and competencies of the people involved. The same pattern of built form may thus afford different patterns of behavior for different people at different times of the day, week, or year. Some of the patterns may occur frequently while others may occur only on special occasions (for example, the celebration of national days).

The milieu consists of the floor of the ground, the surfaces of buildings, and other physical elements such as vegetation that both bound it and structure it. The variables are diverse and their attributes even more so. Of particular importance in urban design are such concerns as the sequential experiencing of the environment as one passes through it, the ground floor activities, or lack of them, that are housed in the adjacent buildings, and the attributes of the enclosing elements of spaces. In the urban scenes shown in Figures 1.1a and b, the physical public realm consists of the elements of the artificial environment around a person. In the former illustration, it consists of the surface of the square, the column, the façades of buildings, the ground floor uses, and the entrances on to the open spaces. On a typical street, the elements are essentially the same but take on a different form. If, however, urban design is concerned with the whole nature of human experience, it has to address the nature of the activities and the people who engage in the built environment as well. It is the set of behavior settings and how the milieu affords activities and, simultaneously, acts as an aesthetic display that is important.

As important as the layout of the public realm is the nature of the façades that frame these spaces. What are they made of and how are they fenestrated? What are the uses that face onto the open space? How frequent are entrances along the streets and squares? What is the nature of the pavement, or sidewalk? How tall are the buildings that enclose the spaces? How are the spaces illuminated? What are they like at night? What are the activity patterns that take place in the spaces? Who are the people engaging in them? These are the variables that distinguish one place from another—one city from another, and one of its precincts, or neighborhoods, from another.

The Functions of the Built Public Realm

Designers seldom consciously consider more than a limited set of the potential functions that the built environment can serve in their analyses and designs. The world is too complex for every function of built form to be considered simultaneously. The same patterns of the built form, either as surroundings or as objects, will, almost certainly, serve different functions for different people. One of the major functions of the components of the built environment is as a financial investment. All designers know this, but it is seldom clearly articulated as a function of buildings in architectural theory. Architectural critics seldom write about it.

Many urban development decisions are made on fiscal grounds. For their sponsors, such as banks and other lending institutions, and for their owners, buildings represent an investment on which they hope to make a profit. The public realm, in this case, is only important to property developers to the extent that it affects their investment decisions. They may, however, voluntarily or under public coercion use their own funds to improve those aspects of the public realm that their developments affect. Public agencies use tax income to improve the public realm created by buildings in order to increase the value of properties and thus the inflow of tax revenues. These revenues are then used to support other governmental activities. For architects, landscape architects, and artists their professional work is not only a means of income but also an advertisement of their tastes and skills that, they hope, will yield additional income in the future.

In addition to financial rewards, the milieu provides three basic amenities. It can afford activities, provide shelter, and act as a display that communicates meanings. The design concerns thus range from “(1) instrumental aspects which are the most manifest through (2) how activities are carried out, and (3) how they are associated into systems, to (4) their meanings, their most latent aspect” (Rapoport 1997, 462). These functions can best be understood within a model of human needs and motivations.

Human Purposes and the Functions of the Built Public Realm

There are a number of models of human needs. None is perfect but that developed by Abraham Maslow is held in the highest esteem because it seems to explain the most (Maslow 1987). Maslow suggested that there is a hierarchy of human needs from the most basic (survival) to the most abstract (aesthetic). These needs trigger motivations to behave in one way or another and inspire people (and communities) to own valued objects and to be in settings that display specific characteristics. These motivations are culturally shaped and often define a culture.

A model relating Maslow’s hierarchy of human needs to the functions of built form is presented in Figure 1.2. The model specifies that both needs and the mechanisms to fulfil them have to be perceived within a social order. In urban design, the polar extremes of social order are represented by autocratic and democratic societies. In the former, decisions are centralized in the hands of an individual or a coterie of people; in the latter, diverse people hold the power to make decisions and, ultimately they are subjected to the opinions of the population concerned.

The diagram shows that the patterns of built form required for achieving many needs are interrelated. The most basic needs, according to Maslow, are physiological. The fundamental need is for survival, which means that the environment has to afford us shelter. It must also protect us from life-threatening events. Some of these events, such as earthquakes, are natural phenomena, but we humans have created others. The perception of the potential occurrences of such events very much shapes what we demand of the public realm of cities. Hurricane Sandy has much affected thinking about the future in New York at both the political and individual level.

Once basic physiological needs are at least partially met, people are motivated to seek a sense of safety and security, physiologically and psychologically. The former motivation is highly related to the need for survival. How best to segregate pedestrian and moving vehicles is a recurrent issue in urban design. Dealing with crime and now terrorism has become a constraint on design. Providing for people’s psychological sense of security involves them having appropriate levels of privacy and their being in control of their social environments. People have an expectation of privacy for almost every activity pattern in which they engage as individuals or groups.

Figure 1.2 also shows that the socio-physical mechanisms used by people to attain a feeling of self-worth are closely related to the achievement of safety and security. The built environment is very much an indicator of people’s social status. One of the debates in current urban design is whether to create images that refer to specific locales or, alternatively, to the international, global images favored by the institutions of the global economy (compare, for instance, the design ideals of Battery Park City and Lujiazui as described in Chapter 10). Within some cultures, the layout of the built environment being in accordance with spiritual beliefs also meets these needs. What is important to recognize is that the built environment, the public as much as the private, is a symbol of who we are and/or whom we aspire to be.

The highest level in Maslow’s hierarchy of needs is that for self-actuali...