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A precise definition of Urban Design is elusive,
as it has been since the term’s first articulation over
50 years ago at a Harvard GSD conference spearheaded by José
Lluis Sert. Today the term, like sustainability, is batted
about leisurely by architecture firms and the media, pointing
towards an interpretation that favors architects and their
super-sized projects. While practitioners of the quasi-discipline
are typically seen to fall somewhere between planning’s
public policy and architecture’s formal concerns, the
urban designer’s role in the process of development
is often misunderstood and many times questioned. Urban
Design for an Urban Century takes steps towards clarifying
the role of urban design and the urban designer in shaping
urban places.
The book is the product of New York-based professor and practitioner
Lance Jay Brown, David Dixon of Boston-based Goody, Clancy
& Associates, and the late architect and planner Oliver
Gillham. The authors begin the book by acknowledging the ambiguity
of the urban designer’s job, determining that a shared
emphasis on “finding the right fit between people and
place” predominates. In illustration of this common
thread they collect all 70 winning projects of the AIA Institute
Honor Awards for Regional and Urban Design over the last ten
years, commenting on these relative to a handful of principles
the authors generated in their review: building community,
advancing sustainability, expanding individual choices, enhancing
public health, and making places for people.
Case studies are grouped into seven areas: regional growth,
downtowns, older neighborhoods, new neighborhoods, waterfronts,
the public realm, and campuses. It is clear from these divisions
that one long-held purview of the urban designer, the public
realm, is not the sole area of concern. Streetscapes and plazas
and their accessory elements (furniture, signage, trees, etc.)
are still addressed by urban designers, but so are land use,
bulk, density, form, transportation, and ecology. Much of
this expanded scope normally falls to planners and local jurisdictions,
a characteristic pointing towards the urban designer’s
role in formalizing public policy and/or private
development at an early stage. Chicago’s award-winning
Lakeshore East Master Plan by SOM is a fitting example of
urban design’s malleability. The plan is a guideline
for future action by other actors, namely architects and their
clients, following developed rules of land use, massing, and
site coverage. Most notable is Studio Gang’s distinctive,
80-story Aqua Tower, a distinctive design marked by undulating
terraces hardly foreshadowed by SOM’s Rockefeller Center-esque
imagery.
Preceding the case studies and principles are an excellent,
concise history of urban morphology and the decentralization
of cities, a call for recentralization (echoing Sert’s
assertion for the same a half-century ago), and the authors’
crack at defining urban design. Brown, Dixon, and Gillham’s
definition outlines three characteristics: multi-disciplinary
collaboration, outreach to stakeholders, and the enhancement
of economic, social, and environmental realms. These broad
concerns insufficiently portray what an urban designer actually
does, but a review of the case studies points to
placemaking generated by buildings, particularly via their
form, size, and style. But instead of falling prey to ever-popular
form-based codes, the authors attempt to steer the reader
away from aesthetics and towards sustainability, social equity,
the health of the common realm, and other concerns.
Defining urban design is difficult primarily because the
discipline has one foot planted in policy and the other rooted
in physical form. The natural pull one way or the other is
obviated by the actual situation in which the urban designer
works. Kevin Lynch’s assertion, quoted in the first
chapter, that urban design “comes down to the management
of change” points us in the right direction. Keen to
the impact of policies on a diverse public and equally to
design’s role in placemaking, urban designers are able
to synthesize the concerns of the competing forces shaping
cities today. Ideally, with an emphasis on process and change,
issues like a questioning of consumption’s role in the
social life of cities and our relationship to nature and its
processes will take precedence over many of the traditional
concerns found here. Brown, Dixon and Gillham are aware of
the need for social and ecological balance, but their admirable
book-length explication remains grounded in practice, as are
the case studies that make up for in diversity what they lack
in vision.
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