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    The Urban Design Process
    The Urban Design Process
    The Urban Design Process
    Ebook217 pages2 hours

    The Urban Design Process

    By Philip Black and Taki Sonbli

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    About this ebook

    This useful guide sets out clearly the urban-design process in practice, from initial site analysis through consultation, design development, and design delivery across a range of scales within the built environment. It provides a clear overview of the role that urban design and urban designers play in shaping and creating places today and how designers conceive and deliver contextually responsive, high-quality design solutions. Beginning with a brief history of contemporary urban design, the book tracks urban design's roots in architecture and planning and identifies how and why it has emerged as a separate discipline. It then sets out the principles and key criteria that underpin urban design and explains how urban designers interpret policy, baseline data, and graphical analysis to present an understanding of place and space. Following the urban design process through concept development/strategic framework provisions to public consultation and final design, the book discusses subjects such as costing, phasing, construction, post-construction monitoring, and maintenance. It describes the complexity of project management in delivering large-scale projects, such as master planning and major public-realm and civic schemes. Illustrated with a series of international case studies, the book concludes by highlighting a number of growing urban challenges facing cities today, discussing how urban design can play a leading role in tackling issues connected with climate change, globalization, and technological advancements, as well as how it can respond positively to the current and future needs of society.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherLund Humphries
    Release dateMay 9, 2019
    ISBN9781848223042
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      Very Amazing Book, Wish i had read in before joining the university.

    Book preview

    The Urban Design Process - Philip Black

    us.

    Section I

    Introduction to Urban Design

    Urban design

    Urban design is a complex yet critical field, it is an arena with a multitude of territories it can act within, providing flexibility in how it is defined and practised in the built environment. Yet these many ‘territories’ also make urban design a contested field that lacks a clear mandate, consolidated theory, or domain. It is vulnerable to the effects of contemporary discourses such as globalisation, urban branding, and notions of the generic city. The consequence of these issues is that urban design has shifted somewhat from one of the primary reasons it evolved from the Harvard Conference in 1956 – to provide a more considered, contextually responsive approach to designing places. A conflict has arisen in modern city development between makers, regulators, and users in terms of who, or what, is being represented and how this might be related to competing claims to the field of urban design.

    This book approaches urban design as a design-focused applied vocation, a discipline that works between the scales of the town planner and architect, shaping neighbourhoods and places through effective engagement with local context. To achieve this aim, we have developed a studio-based technical approach utilising traditional design skills across multiple scales. This book outlines the process developed through research and teaching at the University of Manchester, providing the reader with a clear process for practising contextually responsive urban design. Urban design is the process of making places for people, places that reflect and enhance local culture, identity, and sense of place, places that are well connected and part of a greater whole.

    The book presents this urban design process through a ‘live’ case study from Manchester, UK. Section II presents the process in its entirely, from site to place. The Urban Design Process is intended to provide a wide audience with an understanding of the role of the urban designer, and the ability of urban design as a discipline to shape better more contextual places.

    Note from authors: Throughout The Urban Design Process we refer to ‘context’ or ‘contextually responsive’, this should not be confused with a fixation on physical form or style. We are referring to a more layered and complex understanding of context, meaning a places history, people, function, form, and identity. A contextually responsive approach seeks to design places of, for, and with local people.

    Design agendas

    From as far back as the first cities can be traced, urban design has existed in some form – from early Mesopotamia, through Babylon and later, Rome, design has been central to the growth and prosperity of human settlements. The birth of ‘urban design’ as we know it today however can be traced back to the Harvard Conference of 1956, a conference called to tackle changes to cities in the USA, changes that had prominent thinkers, leaders, and designers calling for immediate action in the urban environment. In particular, issues arising from a problem of relationship between buildings and a need to think at a larger scale beyond the architectural or street. These issues had partly been the result of two key urban philosophies that prevailed in the USA from the early 1900s.

    The first was coined the ‘City Beautiful’ movement. This design approach is best associated with the beautification and monumental grandeur designed into cities such as Chicago, Cleveland, Detroit, and famously, Washington, DC (The McMillan Plan). City Beautiful was a reaction to the poor quality of life prevalent in these major cities, with the aim to create moral and civic pride through harmonious social order. However, critics saw the approach as overly cosmetic and aesthetic, an ‘architectural design cult’ of sorts (Jacobs, 1962). Daniel Burnham’s Plan for Cleveland is the embodiment of that movement, based on Burnham’s own prototype city from the Chicago World’s Fair (1893) where balance, symmetry, and splendour took centre stage. The Cleveland Plan saw the city develop its central mall with Beaux-Arts style architecture and neoclassical detailing. Such design was expensive and focused overly on the civic, and while these grand central manners remain popular they provide little in the way of quality of life improvements for locals in their day-to-day activities and living.

    In attempting to tackle these concerns and provide a more suitable approach to the design of cities to ensure better functionality for the people themselves, a second philosophy emerged. This philosophy is most closely aligned to the Congrès Internationaux d’Architecture Moderne (CIAM), founded in 1928. Spreading the principles of modernism beyond architecture into planning, this group of 28 European architects led by Le Corbusier (but also including Alvar Aalto, Walter Gropius, and Josep Lluís Sert) became highly influential, particularly after World War II. The Athens Charter (1933) became their manifesto and proposed social problems in cities be sorted by strict functional segregation and the distribution of the population into tall blocks at widely spaced intervals. Perhaps the best example of this approach to city building is Brasília, Brazil. The city was planned in the later 1950s by Lúcio Costa, around a 220-foot-wide central government axis, but crossed by a curved second axis, which would act as a transportation thoroughfare and was designed to follow the natural topography (Fig.1). The architecture was mostly designed, or inspired by, Brazilian modernist architect Oscar Niemeyer, who along with Costa followed the pattern of providing superblocks (following the theories of Le Corbusier and CIAM), seeking to provide spaces that engendered social equality and justice.

    The charter set rigid rules for planning and as such lacked an awareness of issues such as neighbourhoods, it concealed a narrow view of how to develop place. The emphasis on tall housing blocks killed other types of housing solutions, leading to the loss of diversity and choice. A lack of attention to community and amenity was detrimental, and the provision of large open spaces without consideration for how people might use them led to much criticism and a negative reaction from those living in these modernist locations. Le Corbusier’s Plan Voisin (Fig.2) for Paris is widely recognised as a symbol of these failures.

    Figure 1

    Plano Piloto, Brasília – Lúcio Costa

    Figure 2

    Plan Voisin, Paris – Le Corbusier

    Figure 3

    Alt-Erlaa Social Housing, Vienna

    Schemes such as Alt-Erlaa, Vienna (designed by Harry Glück) did manage to show the modernist approach could be successful if the spaces between buildings received equal attention (Fig.3). CIAM was disbanded in 1959, but not before one of its original members recognised its key failures and sought a new, better way of thinking about the plight of the city.

    The birth of a discipline

    Without a reorganisation of our everyday life, which depends on the proper functioning of dwellings, recreation centres, work places, and the streets and highways that are the connecting links, life in the city cannot produce benefits for the individual or for the community as a whole.

    Josep Lluís Sert (cited in Mumford, 2009)

    Josep Lluís Sert, Dean of Harvard Graduate School of Design, and founding member of CIAM, developed a new vision at Harvard, aiming to shift thinking about cities towards a more holistic perspective – an ‘urban design’. Sert advocated for a new urban facilitator, between the disciplines of architecture and planning, and thus, urban design was born at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. To develop the new discipline, Sert organised a series of symposium conferences addressing planning’s inability to address the issues of the city, to define ‘urban design’.

    Urban design quickly established its own unique territory, however, more as a field of activity than as a professional discipline in its own right. This allowed theorists and designers to develop the discipline moving forwards, to shape the role and impact urban design could potentially have for, and on, people and place. Outlined below are some of those whose research or approaches have made significant lasting impressions on contemporary urban design and who remain critical to our understanding of the design process.

    Gordon Cullen – The Concise Townscape (1961)

    Cullen defined urban design as ‘the art of relationships’, placing emphasis on emotional impacts that people have when in place. The goal, therefore, is for the designer to develop the ability to manipulate buildings and physical city elements to provide visual impact or drama. Cullen argued that cities could therefore reasonably be designed from the point of view (POV) of a moving person. Cullen theorised that urban scenes are experienced as a series of revelations as current views juxtapose with emerging ones (the serial, or sequential, vision). To achieve this ‘drama’ townscape elements needed to ensure diversity, but as part of a whole or common visual framework. This could be done by providing distinct housing areas; working with the topography and landscape; providing a network of landmarks; creating distinct edges and boundaries; using natural assets to create interest; and providing a series of sequential enclosures and climaxes. Cullen’s ideas provide that basis for much of contemporary urban design, and indeed the process later outlined in this book – notably the focus on the context of people and place.

    Kevin Lynch – The Image of the City (1960)

    Lynch’s work has had a profound impact on how designers perceive the city and urban form. Lynch had a specific interest in legibility and, similar to Cullen, the visual perceptions people have of cities. He believed that people understood and mentally processed the form of cities through recognition of key physical elements. He coined the term ‘imageability’:

    That quality in a physical object which gives it a high probability of evoking a strong image in any given observer. It is that shape, colour, or arrangement which facilitates the making of vividly identified, powerfully structured, highly useful mental

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