Matthew Carmona - Urban Design Reader

UrbanDesign Reader

Edited by

Matthew Carmona and Steve Tiesdell

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First edition 2007

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Urban design reader 1. City planning

I. Carmona, Matthew II. Tiesdell, Steven 711.4

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ISBN-13: 978-0-7506-6531-5 ISBN-10: 0-7506-6531-9

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Introduction

An activity withancient roots, but also one that has been rediscovered and reinvigorated inrecent years, urban design has become a serious and significant area ofacademic endeavour, of public policy and of professional practice. This isreflected by the increasingly widespread recognition of its value across publicand private sectors around the world. This change has been matched byincreasing demand for urban design practitioners and, more generally, for urbandesign skills throughout the built environment and land and propertyprofessions, and by an increasing demand for urban design education atuniversities and in the workplace.

The new interestin urban design is as a form of -and contribution to - place-making. Carmonaet al. (2003), for example, defined urban design as the making of placesfor people. More precisely and realistically, they saw it as the processof making better places for people than would otherwise be produced. Adefinition that asserted the importance of four themes - that urban design isfor and about people; the significance of 'place'; that the field ofopportunity for urban designers is typically constrained and bounded byeconomic (market) and political (regulatory) forces; and the importance ofdesign as a process.

It is useful toacknowledge the difference between an understanding of urban design foranalytical purposes (i.e. what is urban design?), by which all urbandevelopment may be considered to contribute to urban design, and a morenormative understanding of urban design (i.e. what is 'good' urban design?), bywhich only some urban development might be considered to be urban design. Seenanalytically, urban design is the process by which the urban environment comesabout; seen normatively, it is - or should be - the process by which betterurban environments come about. We must also be aware of the possibility andexistence of implementation gaps between what urban design seeks to do and whatit actually does do.

Urban designalso refers to products or outcomes and to various processes. It is, forexample, variously a product (the design of the created environment),interventions into a process (e.g. a land and property - or real estate -development process) and a process itself (i.e. the design process).

The notion ofurban design as a process is a reoc-curring theme in this book. Design is acreative, analytical and problem-solving activity through which objectives andconstraints are weighed and balanced, the problem and possible solutionsexplored and optimal resolutions derived. The process of design should also addvalue to the individual component parts, so that the resulting whole is greaterthan the sum of the parts. In the final analysis the quality of the whole iswhat matters because it is this that we experience.

There are (very)few 'hard-and-fast' rules or absolutes in urban design - substantially becausethe process of design involves relating general (and generally desirable)principles to site and programme requirements, where the context and creativevision will always vary. Indeed there is a danger of generally desirable designprinciples being treated as inflexible dogma or of design being reduced to thesimplistic application of a formula - practices that negate the active processof design. Design principles must always be used with the flexibility derivedfrom a deeper understanding and appreciation of their basis, justifications andinterrelations and the context to which they are to be applied. In any designprocess there are no perfect 'right' answers - there are only better and worseanswers, the quality of which may, in turn, only be known over time.

Who then are theurban designers? A good answer is that urban designers are those who makedecisions that affect the quality of the urban environment - only a (small)proportion of whom might actively claim to be urban designers. There is acontinuum from 'knowing' to 'unknowing' urban designers (see Carmona et al.,2003: 15-16). 'Knowing' urban designers are typically the professionals employedor retained on account of their urban design expertise (i.e. urban designpractitioners). At the other end of the continuum are the 'unknowing' urbandesigners: those who make urban design decisions without appreciating that thisis what they are doing. This is not a distinction that necessarily reflects onthe quality of outcomes (i.e. the product) - the outcome of each can be 'good'or 'bad'. As Jonathan Barnett (1982: 9) has argued:

Today's cityis not an accident. Its form is usually unintentional, but it is notaccidental. It is the product of decisions made for single, separate purposes,whose interrelationships and side effects have not been fully considered. Thedesign of cities has been determined by engineers, surveyors, lawyers, and investors,each making individual, rational decisions for rational reasons.

But, withoutconscious recognition of the qualities and additional value of good urbandesign, the creation and production of urban environments often occurs byomission rather than explicit commission.

Urban design'scurrent status is based on a large and growing body of theoretical writingsthat have their roots in critiques of post-1945 modernism and in the urbandevelopment of the past fifty years, and, in particular, in a set of classictexts dating from the very early 1960s from writers such as Kevin Lynch (1960),Jane Jacobs (1961) and Gordon Cullen (1961), and in another larger set datingfrom the late 1960s and 1970s including Ed Bacon (1967), Ian McHarg (1969),Christian Norberg-Schulz (1971), Robert Venturi