No Comments Written by Anders on May 20, 2008 – 8:32 pm

In its most generic definition, urban design is the act of shaping human settlements. Historically, urban design has involved a more or less direct translation of contemporary belief systems into the physical layout of buildings and temples in relation to the natural and manmade environments.

Belief systems have evolved over centuries from superstition and philosophy to religion, to ideology, and science.

The longest-lasting imprints on cities and people from ancient Mesopotamia to modernist new towns have been made by whoever controlled the urban design decisions, whether a pharaoh, priest, king, politician, architect, or even abstract planning system.

In that generic sense then, urban design actions have included the construction of gigantic pyramids, of city-wide street grids, of cathedrals and temples and defense walls, as well as the destruction of historic settlements and their replacement with more “planned” ones in the name of civilization and utopia (the colonization of the Indian Territories in America, Hausmann’s boulevards in Paris, garden cities, modernist villes radieuses, the Regeneration projects of the mid-twentieth century, the Zionist settlement movement in Palestine, and so on).

Beyond the generic sense, urban design has been formalized as an academic field and a profession since the actual term began to circulate in the mid-1950s. Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design organized the first urban design conference (1956) and university course (1960). The instigator, JosØ Luis Sert, defined it as “the part of planning concerned with the physical form of the city,” an unfortunate definition that eventually came to handicap the profession by excluding “nonphysical” but just as influential concerns from its scope.

The concept gained momentum, spearheaded namely by the ideas of Kevin Lynch and Jane Jacobs, and urban design courses appeared in many major American and European universities in the 1960s and 1970s. This formalization was partly a reaction to the Modern Movement’s disastrous effect on the quality of urban space ( Modernity). It aimed to overcome the perceived loss of the sense of place and identity caused by general zoning and planning rules, generic architectural expression, and a disregard for the intermediate scale where the human user interfaces with her environment. Christopher Alexander, Leon and Rob Krier, and Robert Venturi, amongst others, developed their definitions of urban design in the 1970s and 1980s.

As a reactionary solution, the postmodern 1980s ( Postmodernism) saw a large section of mainstream urban design education and practice become dominated by new dogmas such as the New Urbanism movement. In turn, New Urbanism has been criticized for naivety and nostalgia because of its insistence on neo-classical form and morphologies and its failure to deal with more complex urbanization. By 1995, it was almost impossible to find any unified definition of what urban design actually was, and even public institutions agreed that it was not for governments to dictate what constitutes good urban design. Traditionally, one of the most popular definitions had been that urban design is the mediator between urban planning and architecture ( Architectural Design).

The latter directly tackles the physical built form in unitary particles, while planning manages more “abstract” notions such as zoning, functions, transport networks, and economy. Even so, most actors and players in the planning process still perceive urban design as little more than “big architecture,” limiting its effectiveness in most reallife scenarios. Beyond planning and architecture, other seemingly independent disciplines play equally crucial roles in the study and creation of cities: landscape architecture, topography, communication and transport engineering, and many of the “soft” disciplines sociology, economy, ecology, group and individual psychology, and behavioral studies, art, and the humanities are some of the poles that together shape the urban environment and give it its inherent subjective qualities. These have unfortunately been left out of most formal urban design courses, but the current attitude is toward cross-disciplinary courses integrating urban design with sociology, economics, politics, and so on. Since the mid-1990s counterreactions have been calling for less formal attitudes that would take into consideration the major shifts in technologies, lifestyles, and worldviews.

The highly influential Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas was one of the first to call for a new form of urbanism as a “way of thought” and as “the staging of uncertainty” in his S, M, L, XL. In reaction to the inadequacy of urban design education’s current formalism in addressing chaotic, ultra-dense, non-western cities, the 2002 book Quantum City developed the conceptual language to deal with such a paradigm shift from formal to relational.

It extended the definition of design beyond the shaping of mere physical form to the shaping of virtual ( Virtuality) and mental spaces in a society-space-time continuum, bringing back both the urbs (city) and the civitas (culture) into the realm of urban design ( Environmental Design, Event Design). A redefined role of urban design thus emerges: Urban design is the multidimensional interdisciplinary interface responsible for managing and transforming the interactions of the different aspects of urban life into a physical and/or usable environment. And since a setting is only “real-ized” once activated by its endusers, then the definition of “urban designers” crosses the boundaries of disciplines and professions to include all actual anonymous citizens in their daily interaction with one another and their environments.

Urban design enables society to create settings relevant to its current paradigm, respectful of past worldviews, and adaptable to future uncertainties and potential. Urban design is slowly shifting away from top-down approaches based on fixed master plans to more flexible and error-tolerant, long-term strategic plans involving end users ( Participatory Design) and multiple scenario development ( Scenario Planning).