URBAN DESIGN

1. URBAN DESIGN New territory for building the urban mind

2. Can Urban Design be defined Josep Lluis Sert: • Urban design is that part of city planning which deals with the physical form of the city. • “The most creative phase of city planning, in which imagination and artistic capacities play the important part.” • Urban design is wider than the scope of Architect, the Landscape Architect and the City Planner • It is a discipline to be practiced by all those who are “urban-minded”.

3. Urban design: evolution between architecture and urban planning • cities have, of course, been the subject of design theory and design action for centuries. • There always have been pioneers who affected the development of city form • Many of them are architects and urban planners but many others are not….. • But who were the most influential? And who will continue to be?!

4. Philanthropists of urban design • Ebeneezer Howard was an economist. Camillo Sitte was an art historian. Frederick Law Olmsted was a landscape architect and earlier still a social activist. Lewis Mumford was a philosopher and author. • Pope Sixtus V's impact on the physicality of sixteenth century Rome was profound • Spain's king Philip II promulgated one of the most precise codes for laying cities: the Laws of the Indies

5. The link between architects and urban design • The foremost Renaissance urban theorists were architects and artists, as was LeCorbusier. During much of the history of city-making an architect's expertise was assumed to extend to matters of town layout • an architectural point of view has tended to prevail in most efforts to describe what urban design is

6. Alex Krieger • territory is defined as a “sphere of action.” • Urban design is spheres of urbanistic action • urban design is a special category of public policy, an improvement on traditional land use regulations. • It maintains lofty ideals by arguing on behalf of codifiable design qualities, while at the same time operates at the pragmatic level of the real estate industry, facilitating better development.

7. 1. The Bridge Between Planning and Architecture: • urban designers mediate between plans and projects. • It is the urban designer who determines what is good or appropriate urban form • Expertise of the urban designer in architectural thinking directs the formulation of plans to consider physical implications.

8. 2. A Form-Based Category of Public Policy: • Restrictions on height or massing in zoning codes are ostensibly determined through measurable criteria such as access to sunlight, could be considered as good form-based values. • It seems too administrative and passive a role for urban design.

9. 3. The Architecture of the City: • Its roots may be traced in 19th century European Beaux Arts and the 20th century American City Beautiful movement. It seeks to regulate the shaping of public areas of the city: shaping the public space. • This notion of urban design is best embodied by a stable and stabilizing form anchoring its part of the city with unique characteristics that are expected to endure and influence future neighbors.

10. 4. Urban Design as Restorative Urbanism: • The traditional city seems at once so clearly organized, humanely sized, manageable and beautiful. Such virtues seems absent in the modern metropolis. Why not mobilize to regain these qualities? • New Urbanists advocate a return to what they consider time-honored principles of urbanism • The walkable city, the city of public streets and public squares, the low-rise high-density city, the city of defined neighborhoods gathered around valued institutions, the city of intricate layers of uses free of auto-induced congestion are characteristics that remain appealing.

11. 5. Urban Design as ‘Place-Making’: • As more contemporary urban development acquires generic qualities, or is merely repetitive, the distinctive urban place, old or new, is harder to find. • More urban designers should devote their attention to making new places as worthy as their time-honored predecessors. • It is the American New Urbanists who have articulated this goal most clearly, but with mixed results. Their rhetoric extols intimate scale, texture, the mixing of uses, connectivity, continuity, the privileging of what is shared. • Their designs tend to focus on familiar old forms and traditional aesthetic detailing.

12. 6. Urban Design as Smart Growth: • Sprawl control and environmental stewardship should form overt parts of urban thinking directed to urban protection. • Urban designers should advocate ‘smarter’ planning and urban design especially at metropolitan periphery. • Exposure to the natural sciences, to ecology, to energy management, to systems analysis, to the economics of land development, to land use law, to issues of public health have not been fundamental to an urbanist’s training, but are increasingly becoming more so.

13. 7. The Infrastructure of the City: The arrangement of streets and blocks, the distribution of open and public spaces, the alignment of transit and highway corridors, and the provision of municipal services constitute essential components of urbanism. • Neither planners nor designers have played a significant role in the realm of transportation or other urban infrastructure planning. • engineering is shifting emphasis from hardware to systems design, from adding lanes, to traffic management technology. • Factors such as livability, sustainability, economic and cultural growth, in other words good urban design, are the real goals of infrastructure optimization.

14. 8. Urban Design as “Landscape Urbanism”: Landscape Urbanism has newly emerged to incorporate ecology, landscape architecture and infrastructure into the discourse of urbanism. • Its main proponents are Ian McHarg, Patrick Geddes and even Frederick Law Olmsted • Nature and human artifice are opposites. Landscape urbanism projects purport to overcome this opposition, through the intersection of ecology, engineering, design and social policy. • Landscape is the modern glue that holds the modern metropolis together • The radicalism inherent in conceptualization landscape as generative for urbanism is the central component of urban design

15. 9. Urban Design as Visionary Urbanism: The twentieth century witnessed immense urban harm caused by those who offered a singular or universal idea of what a city is, or what urbanization should produce. • Theorists provide insight and models about the way we ought to organize spatially. • This sphere of action is associated with the great figures of modern urban change, from Baron Haussmann, to Daniel Burnham, to Ebeneezer Howard, to Raymond Unwin, to LeCorbusier, and maybe even Rem Koolhaas and Andres Duany today. • The urban sociologist/theorist -- from Louis Wirth, to Henri Lefebvre, to Richard Sennett, Edward Soja or David Harvey supplanted in our own time the great urban transformers of the past.

16. 10. Urban Design as Community Advocacy: Urban design evokes notions of large-scale thinking. • Contemporary dwellers of urban neighborhoods associate urban design with local, immediate concerns such as improving neighborhoods, calming traffic, minimizing negative impacts of new development, expanding housing choices while keeping housing affordable, maintaining open space, improving streetscapes, and creating more humane environments in general. • Urban design approximates what used to be called “community planning”. • Today, it is the urban designer, not the planner, who has emerged as the place-centered professional, with “urban design” often assuming a friendlier, more accessible popular connotation

17. Urban Design as a Frame of Mind • Urban design is less a technical discipline and more a mindset among those, of varying disciplinary foundations, seeking, sharing and advocating insights about forms of community. What binds different urban designers are their commitment to city life, the enterprise of urban-maintenance, and the determination to enhance urbanism.