The Scope of Urban Design

From Historical, Professional, and Policy

?Context.. Why
to provide a framework for exploring the meaning
and scope of urban design in contemporary
planning and urban development
Central Argument: UD is neither big architecture
nor limited to urban landscape issues. It does not
operate solely at the interface between planning
.and architecture
UD is a problem-solving activity with applications to
spatial decision-making at all scales of urban
planning

Urban Design Definition

UD: at its broadest, UD is about the form of
cities. We may regard it as that element in
the planning process that is concerned
with finding an appropriate physical
.framework for human activities in cities
Urban form may be viewed in two or three
dimensions, depending on the scale or
level of resolution at which the design
.process is operating

The Scope of Urban Design

The need for UD as a discipline has arisen
as a result of the fundamental cultural,
.political, social and economic changes
Other issues include the impact of
environmental issues and quality of life on
the nature of the city and how urban form
can best be adapted to our current and
.future needs
It has proved difficult to provide a simple,
commonly accepted definition of the scope
of UD

Origins of Recent Urban

Design Theory
Urban Planning was introduce to place a
growing body of theory and practice in
. suitably general geographical context
Urban: was a description of what had
become a culture and life style rather than
.a particular geographical territory
Urban Planning could comfortably
accommodate city, town and suburb, no
matter how these were administratively
.defined or physically constituted

Origins of Recent Urban

Design Theory
Paul Sprieregaen Urban Design: the Architecture of Towns and
Cities was published in 1965 The conventions of urban
planning at this time favored rigidly-defined, functionally-zoned
.urban development
This was influenced by the International Modern Architectural
Congress (CIAM) set up in 1920s in Europe by Le Corbusier,
.Walter Gropius & others
Some of their ideas a wholesale renewal of the contemporary
.city through zoned, single-use high-rise developments
At the same time, organic view of urban form, originating in the
English Garden City movement, was being developed in the
United States by Olmsted, Mumford, Perry and others. This
suggested a regional model of the city, decentralized, lowdensity and more suburban in character, hierarchically
organized on the basis of semi-autonomous communitybased neighborhood units or super-blocks

Origins of Recent Urban

Design Theory
In the United States in 1960s, the economist
Jan Jacobs published her powerful critique
of modern town planning in The Death
and Life of Great American Cities,
bringing the attention to the
complexities of land use
arrangements, and high-density living
in traditional city blocks and the
shared activities of the traditional city
.street in a new light

Origins of Recent Urban

Design Theory
Defectors from CIAM formed Team X in 1953
exploring new low- and medium rise, high
density interwoven urban structures that
would allow opportunities for social
exchange and encounter that the
international style excluded. This laid the
theoretical basis for an approach to urban
renewal which emphasized vehicular and
pedestrian separation

Origins of Recent Urban

Design Theory
In the 1950s, Kevin Lynch at MIT began to devise
new techniques for analyzing and representing
the perceptual structure of cities His work, The
Image of City, 1964 helped give rise to a new
science of human perception and behavior in
.the city
Later, Scott Brown and Robert Venturi
published their book Complexity and
Contradiction in Architecture questioned the
International style and advocated the catholic
(conservative) approach to the use of
architectural styles and symbolism

Origins of Recent Urban

Design Theory
Ideas of a morphological approach to UD was explored by
Colin Rowe of Cornell University and others in Europe. The
basic idea was to maintain and restore the traditional
19th century street pattern and form of urban block,
street square, without constraining the contemporary
.architectural expression of new building additions
Aldo Rossis the Architecture of the City, 1989 introduce
the notion of the collective memory of the city with
urban form as a repository of culture from generations
.past and from generations to come
Rob Krier in his book Urban Space, 1984 sought to
catalogue all possible forms of urban space generated
from the geometric fundamentals of circle, square, and
. triangle