Explorations in Urban Design

An Urban Design Research Primer

Matthew Carmona

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781317137528
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: City Planning & Urban Development
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Whilst recognising that distinctly different traditions exist within the study and practice of urban design, this book advances an interdisciplinary and innovative approach, which is of direct importance to understanding the urban forms, conditions, practices and processes. It enthuses and inspires users who are grappling with urban design research problems, but who need inspiration to move from idea to methodological approach. Through the work of 32 urban researchers from the arts, sciences and social sciences, it demonstrates a wide range of problems and approaches and shows how the diverse range of complementary approaches can come together to provide a holistic understanding to the design of cities. While each of the contributors presents a particular approach to researching the field, sometimes focusing centrally on particular research methodologies, others cutting across methods, or focusing on theory, all include discussion of actual research projects to illustrate their application to 'real world' problems. This book will be valuable to everyone from the informed undergraduate student about to embark on their first dissertation, to PhD students and seasoned researchers immersed in methodological and conceptual complexity and wishing to compare available and appropriate methodological paths.

1 Investigating urban design

Matthew Carmona

This introductory chapter sets the diverse contributions contained within this book within a wider context and establishes a simple framework through which urban design (and other) research projects can be compared. The chapter begins with a brief examination of urban design as a subject for investigation, setting out the somewhat mongrel nature of the discipline and the importance of crossing disciplinary boundaries in order to address its ‘wicked’ problems. Three key questions are asked and answered – Why is research in urban design important? How do we conduct urban design research? and How should urban design research be used? – before the structure of the book itself is explained.

INTRODUCTION

Researching Urban Design

Multiple overlapping and sometimes contradictory definitions of urban design exist. For the purposes of this book, urban design is simply and broadly taken to mean: the process of shaping places for people. In other words, urban design is ultimately about place (new and old, physical and social) and about all the processes that, for good or ill, intentionally and unintentionally shape it for its users. Through research, ‘explorations in urban design’, the title and subject of this book, focus on understanding this field of human endeavour.

The origins of urban design as (more narrowly) the ‘intentional’ activity of shaping places for people, and the contemporary use of the term ‘urban design’ to describe the process, have quite different origins. The former, of course, has ancient roots. Thus conscious hands have been shaping urban form from the very earliest of civilisations around the world: in the Middle East, Europe, Africa, East Asia and in Central and South America; all consciously shaping very particular sorts of places for people. The term urban design, by contrast, is much more recent, although contrary to many published accounts was in use well before conferences at Harvard in 1956 and the University of Pennsylvania in 1958 popularised it (see Chapter 24). Forshaw and Abercrombie (1943: 20), for example, were certainly amongst the earliest users of the phrase, using it in their hugely influential County of London Plan, whilst other terms in widespread use in the early twentieth century – city design, town design, townscape, civic design, urbanisme (in France), or Stadtbaukunst (in Germany) – had similar (or identical) meanings. Indeed the postmodern ideas reflected in works such as Gordon Cullen’s ‘Townscape’ or Jane Jacobs’ ‘Death and Life of American Cities’ are arguably far closer to what urban design quickly became (a critique of Modernist urbanism) than the still Modernist predilections of the organisers of the 1956 conference who are thereby sometimes credited with having coined the term.

Yet despite its pedigree, and in more recent times its increasingly prominent role in public policy across the globe, as a field urban design has remained much smaller than the closely allied professional fields of real estate, architecture, planning, and landscape architecture,¹ and some have argued that it has struggled to develop as a serious research arena in its own right. However, when one brings together the sorts of multi-disciplinary researchers who either centrally or tangentially engage with the field, as is done in this book, it is clear that a wide array of research is being conducted of direct significance to understanding the urban forms, conditions, practices and processes that urban design seeks to address. Researchers with an interest in urban design can (and do) draw from a rich seam of methodological and epistemological approaches, combining them together to address the range of problems and contexts that require an urban design response.

To explore urban design as an inter-disciplinary research field, this book brings together a wide range of researchers from different disciplinary backgrounds – architects, planners, geographers, engineers, environmental scientists, historians, and so on. The collection reflects the range of approaches to researching the field, illustrating them through actual research projects. Sometimes the contributions focus centrally on particular methodologies whilst others cut across approaches, or focus on particular research problems, with methodological insights revealed as a by-product of the substantive discussion. All reveal something of the process and problematics of research in this area, but also their application to the sorts of complex real world problems that form both the substance and endlessly stimulating challenges faced by researchers and practitioners in urban design.

The book does not offer a comprehensive guide to conducting research in urban design. Instead it is a primer, intended to: first, inspire users who are grappling with urban design research problems but who need inspiration to move from idea to methodological approach; and second, through the work of one of the world’s largest and most active urban design research groups at The Bartlett, UCL, to demonstrate problems and approaches within the subject that span the arts, sciences and social science dimensions of the field.²

A Mongrel Discipline

Urban design has variously been criticised as a tool of neo-liberalism, a movement without social content, historicist and nostalgic for traditional urbanisms, value free, too focused on ends rather than means, and even the handmaiden of global capitalism. This for a discipline which the professionals involved in its delivery are more likely to describe as being focused on the creation of useful, attractive, safe, environmentally sustainable, economically successful and socially equitable places. Either something is going dramatically wrong or there is simply a gulf in understanding between those approaching the subject from different intellectual traditions, or between those devoted to understanding and critiquing the urban realm and those focused on changing it (through policy and practice).

Urban design is in fact a mongrel discipline that draws its legitimising theories from diverse intellectual roots: sociology; anthropology; psychology; political science; economics; ecological, physical and health sciences; urban geography / studies; and the arts; as well as from the professional or applied theories and practices of: architecture; landscape; planning; law; property; engineering; and management. Indeed, wherever it can. In this position some have long praised urban design as an integrative force, deliberately straddling and helping to connect the silo-based disciplines of the past (Bentley 1998: 15), even praising its intellectually incomplete yet responsive status as an asset, helping it to ‘compete and survive’ by staying relevant to academia and practice (Verma 2011: 67). Others, however, bemoan the ‘vagueness’ of urban design as ‘an ambiguous amalgam of several disciplines’ (Inam 2002: 35), denounce it as too mundane and orthodox, obsessed with the perceived eternal truth of its prescriptions and not enough with their wider social and environmental consequences (Sorkin 2009: 181), or accuse it of suffering an intellectual ‘anarchy’ in the absence of a dedicated intellectual core of its own (Cuthbert 2011a: 94).

Critics of the latter type often reject urban design as a free-standing field, and instead see it as a sub-set of something larger. In this respect spatial political economy (Cuthbert 2006); urban studies (see Chapter 5); urban planning (Gunder 2010); sustainability (Sorkin 2009); and architecture (Koolhaas 1995) have all been cited as likely candidates.

But, if one accepts that urban design is already a distinct field of practice, as seems evident by the spread of universities around the world with programmes dedicated to the education of urban design professionals,³ and if, as many have observed, urban design addresses some of the most complex and fundamental of urban problems, then it seems improbable to deny at least the potential for a distinct intellectual tradition. Equally, given its comparatively small size as a discipline, albeit one with ancient roots, it is hardly surprising that urban design draws much of its substance from the larger and longer established disciplines that surround it. Thus, just as the ‘professional’ activity of urban design developed to fill the gaps between the sorts of professional remits outlined above; as a focus for academic enquiry, the case can equally be made that urban design occupies key interstices between larger and longer established academic disciplines.

The diminutive size of the discipline may also explain why Marshall (2012: 267) finds ‘that urban design is at least part pseudo-scientific’. He argues, for example, that many of the underpinning works of urban design are scientifically robust in themselves, but there has been a tendency to uncritically adopt them into the fabric of the discipline without adequately testing their validity in different circumstances, or against alternative hypotheses. The need, he argues, is ‘not just for more and better science, but more specifically [for] more systematic verification and critical assimilation of scientific knowledge within urban design theory’. Yet, with a relatively small pool of researchers to call upon and a bewildering array of research avenues to pursue, it is perhaps understandable that individual avenues only progress slowly with attention constantly focusing on new rather than old lines of enquiry. For Marshall (2012: 268) urban design needs to be fortified from within, rather than (as others have argued) effectively abandoning it to more developed knowledge fields outside the discipline which may have little to say about its primary preoccupation with how to actively shape place for the better. This argument is further developed in Chapter 7, where it is suggested that the process of urban design represents an irreducible core for intellectual enquiry and policy / practice innovation in the discipline.

Figure 1.1 Urban design knowledge

Whatever the focus of enquiry, today, knowledge about urban design exists:

• First, as a focused amalgam of core knowledge and practice pragmatically drawn from other fields, both professional and intellectual, as conceptually represented in Figure 1.1

• Second, as a distinct and evolving field that has added to, worked over and given new meaning to this borrowed knowledge and practice through:

A. Fashioning it together into a singular and tolerably coherent field of knowledge (broadly the field articulated in such works as Moudon 1992, or more recently Carmona et al. 2010 that provide an integrating overview of the subject).

B. The generation of new knowledge around what is unique about the subject and practices of urban design.

THE POWER OF RESEARCH

Taking an Interdisciplinary Perspective

Whilst borrowing analytical techniques from elsewhere, in different ways most of urban design’s acknowledged foundational texts, the work of Jane Jacobs, Gordon Cullen, William Whyte, Christopher Alexander, Kevin Lynch and Jan Gehl, amongst others, fall into category ‘B’ of the second group of knowledge. However, although new knowledge for the discipline is continually generated (and borrowed) as a feed into category ‘A’, considerable discord is often apparent between those representing different traditions within the field.

Most obviously this occurs between those taking a critical social sciences perspective on urban design, and those hailing from practice-based, particularly design, backgrounds. Thus the literature is replete with critiques of design-led approaches to large-scale development, dismissing such perspectives as physically deterministic or simply irrelevant when placed alongside less subjective and ‘more certain’ socio-economic or scientific considerations (see Kashef 2008). In their defence, large numbers of well-documented grand projects (and arguably much of the built output of the Modern Movement) have been incorrectly promoted on the basis of their social benefit, when such benefits turned out to be largely illusory (Knox 2011: 49–52).

Both perspectives are equally troubling, the first advancing a space-less (political economy) perspective, challenging the very notion of urban design itself, and the second a place-less (physical / aesthetic) vision for a phenomena that will always be rooted in both place and space. In reality physical form will impact decisively on the socio-economic potential of space, just as the socio-economic context should always inform any adopted design solution. Equally, neither will determine absolutely the outcomes; as Biddulph (2012) argues, urban designers should not be misled into believing they are simply applied social scientists, equally, they should temper their tendency to normative thinking with a deep awareness of ‘the interpretive and very political nature of the context in which they work’.

The conundrum therefore concerns how to reconcile these understandings...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Investigating urban design
• Part I Philosophical Approaches
• Part II Process Investigations
• Part III Physical Explorations
• Part IV Propositional Experiments
• Part V Performance Enquiries
• Bibliography
• Index