Book Chapter: Meaningful Urban Design
Aseem Inam
Sign up for access to the world's latest research
checkGet notified about relevant papers
checkSave papers to use in your research
checkJoin the discussion with peers
checkTrack your impact
Abstract
"Urban design continues to grow as an increasingly important and expanding field of study, research and professional endeavour. Distinguished by its broad scope and comprehensiveness on the subject of urban design, this new collection combines selected essays from both practitioners and academia. Writing Urbanism is the ideal volume for both students, architects and urban designers." This book chapter is an edited and abridged version of a longer and more detailed journal article with the same title. To view the original version, please see: https://www.academia.edu/279902/Meaningful_Urban_Design_Teleological_Catalytic_Relevant
Figures (1)
Related papers
Meaningful Urban Design: Teleological/Catalytic/Relevant
Journal of Urban Design
The paper begins with a critique of contemporary urban design: the field of urban design is vague because it is an ambiguous amalgam of several disciplines, including architecture, landscape architecture, urban planning and civil engineering; it is supercial because it is obsessed with impressions and aesthetics of physical form; and it is practised as an extension of architecture, which often implies an exaggerated emphasis on the end product. The paper then proposes a meaningful (i.e. truly consequential to improved quality of life) approach to urban design, which consists of: being teleological (i.e. driven by purposes rather than dened by conventional disciplines); being catalytic (i.e. generating or contributing to long-term socio-economic development processes); and being relevant (i.e. grounded in root causes and pertinent human values). The argument is illustrated with a number of case studies of exemplary urban designers, such as Michael Pyatok and Henri Ciriani, and urban design projects, such as Horton Plaza and Aranya Nagar, from around the world. The paper concludes with an outline of future directions in urban design, including criteria for successful urban design projects (e.g. striking aesthetics, convenient function and long-term impact) and a proposed pedagogical approach (e.g. interdisciplinary, in-depth and problem-driven).
Introduction: Urban Design Kaleidoscope 2017
2017
With this anniversary publication we celebrate 20 years of urban design at Aalborg University. The contributors to the publication are students, graduates, and faculty members, who have generously sharpened their pens and minds for this diverse collection of essays and accompanying illustrations. The resulting collaborative catalogue celebrates urban design teaching and research at AAU, and the urban design practice by graduates from this program. Authors have been invited to contribute with a brief essay, focused on a pertinent urban design issue of their own selection. Together they form a rich collection of subjects, concepts, objects, projects, and questions, which have been-and still are-on our minds in urban design throughout the past 20 years. The richness and variation demonstrated by the catalogue is in keeping with urban design's orientation towards diverse considerations when addressing contemporary urban challenges. The past years of AAU urban design endeavours have demonstrated that urban design is about acting within networks of multiple interests, concerns, stakeholders, and other actors. Urban design is perhaps well conceived of as a sensibility of the 'urban-minded', as Harvard GSD dean José Luis Sert suggested at the world's first Urban Design conference in 1956. This somewhat indefinite inception for urban design still persists, and clarity of definition seems to be defied. Rather, in the engaged attempts to operate with synthesis in the ever-changing complexity of the urban condition, urban design's elusive mandate and purpose remains in debate. If attempting to stir up this hornet's nest of urban design's contemporary raison d'etre and scope, multiple co-existing positions impose themselves. Just some of these include: Koolhaas' radical Fuck Context and push to leave architectural delusions of potency and splendor, next to Gehl's human-friendly 'let's meet between the buildings' agenda, next to Mostafavi's optimistic call for a cross-disciplinary sensibility to respond to the ecological crisis, next to Harvey's sturdy emphasis on power, justice, and the right to the city, next to Jacobs' and Appleyard's manifesto of e.g., livability, community, and public life as normative goals of urban design. This multiplicity suggests that to be an urban designer demands skillful and flexible navigation across complex issues of cities and countrysides. Urban designers must work with many elements with meticulousness and readiness. We must strive to continuously adapt to situations and to even be at the forefront of change. This also applies to urban design teaching and research at AAU, as well as to the practices of graduates. For these reasons, this publication offers its modest space for engaged professionals and students to address the diversity and variation of urban design through what they determine to be pertinent urban design matters. Thus, the contemporary versatility of urban design is reflected in this kaleidoscopic catalogue, addressing such diverse issues as urban design's social ambitions; affective encounters of urban space; the conceptualisation of spaces, landscapes, and buildings; relationships between local sites and global change; ecology; events and culture in the city; urban design's role in a complex field of interests and actors driving urban development and planning; dreams of the future; technologies; continuous urban change; experimental methods; and disputed concepts. We are proud to present these voices, and we invite you to dive into them. Thanks to all the contributors for sharing! Last but not least, thanks to the Spar Nord Foundation for its generous funding of this publication, as well as to the Study Board of Architecture & Design and to the Section of Architecture & Urban Design at the
Journal of Urban Design Reconsidering urban design: Thoughts about its definition and status as a field or profession
Since its emergence and rise to significance over the fast 30 years urban design has been loosely defined. In this regard, its definition can be grouped into categories of being cursory, qualitative and prescriptive, historic, proprietary and process oriented. A practical definition, i.e. with regard to its status as a field, sees urban design as being form-giving to built environments as a primary activity involving the professions of architecture, landscape architecture and planning. In addition, 'thresholds of scale' factor into a practical definition whereby interrelationships of building site, neighbourhoods and districts, the city, metro region and 'corridors' are building blocks of design intervention. Quality of life, the public realm and process are significant aspects of the thresholds of scale.
DESIGNING URBAN DESIGN: TOWARDS A HOLISTIC PERSPECTIVE: METUDSYMP2016 Proceedings
2017
The book respectively addresses the following seven basic domains in which urban design operates in the way of a more definite and deliberate definition of the field: ideology, sociology, morphology, bio-ecology, methodology, pedagogy and praxis. Representing a specific research field by in itself, each domain actually involves a certain series of questions, which are still subject to be investigated by various studies and explorations.
Urban Design Kaleidoscope 2017: Celebrating 20 Years of Urban Design at Aalborg University
2017
With this anniversary publication we celebrate 20 years of urban design at Aalborg University. The contributors to the publication are students, graduates, and faculty members, who have generously sharpened their pens and minds for this diverse collection of essays and accompanying illustrations. The resulting collaborative catalogue celebrates urban design teaching and research at AAU, and the urban design practice by graduates from this program. Authors have been invited to contribute with a brief essay, focused on a pertinent urban design issue of their own selection. Together they form a rich collection of subjects, concepts, objects, projects, and questions, which have been-and still are-on our minds in urban design throughout the past 20 years. The richness and variation demonstrated by the catalogue is in keeping with urban design's orientation towards diverse considerations when addressing contemporary urban challenges. The past years of AAU urban design endeavours have demonstrated that urban design is about acting within networks of multiple interests, concerns, stakeholders, and other actors. Urban design is perhaps well conceived of as a sensibility of the 'urban-minded', as Harvard GSD dean José Luis Sert suggested at the world's first Urban Design conference in 1956. This somewhat indefinite inception for urban design still persists, and clarity of definition seems to be defied. Rather, in the engaged attempts to operate with synthesis in the ever-changing complexity of the urban condition, urban design's elusive mandate and purpose remains in debate. If attempting to stir up this hornet's nest of urban design's contemporary raison d'etre and scope, multiple co-existing positions impose themselves. Just some of these include: Koolhaas' radical Fuck Context and push to leave architectural delusions of potency and splendor, next to Gehl's human-friendly 'let's meet between the buildings' agenda, next to Mostafavi's optimistic call for a cross-disciplinary sensibility to respond to the ecological crisis, next to Harvey's sturdy emphasis on power, justice, and the right to the city, next to Jacobs' and Appleyard's manifesto of e.g., livability, community, and public life as normative goals of urban design. This multiplicity suggests that to be an urban designer demands skillful and flexible navigation across complex issues of cities and countrysides. Urban designers must work with many elements with meticulousness and readiness. We must strive to continuously adapt to situations and to even be at the forefront of change. This also applies to urban design teaching and research at AAU, as well as to the practices of graduates. For these reasons, this publication offers its modest space for engaged professionals and students to address the diversity and variation of urban design through what they determine to be pertinent urban design matters. Thus, the contemporary versatility of urban design is reflected in this kaleidoscopic catalogue, addressing such diverse issues as urban design's social ambitions; affective encounters of urban space; the conceptualisation of spaces, landscapes, and buildings; relationships between local sites and global change; ecology; events and culture in the city; urban design's role in a complex field of interests and actors driving urban development and planning; dreams of the future; technologies; continuous urban change; experimental methods; and disputed concepts. We are proud to present these voices, and we invite you to dive into them. Thanks to all the contributors for sharing! Last but not least, thanks to the Spar Nord Foundation for its generous funding of this publication, as well as to the Study Board of Architecture & Design and to the Section of Architecture & Urban Design at the
URBAN DESIGN: Seeking Solutions to Modern Problems [2009]
The greatest challenges of the 21st century will presumably require tremendous shifts in the way cities, neighborhoods and buildings are formed, designed and shaped. While the regulations and constrains predicated primarily by environmental concerns steadily rise the role of planners, urban designers, architects and engineers in shaping metropolitan cities and urban areas of the future will, more than likely, remain in the forefront of providing unparalleled vision and innovation.
Urban Design Made by Humans: A Handbook of Design Ideas
2022
The design of urban environments is complex and involves diverse needs, organisations, professions, authorities, and communities. It requires relationships to be constructed and sustained between infrastructure, resources, and populations across multiple scales. This can be quite daunting. However, at the core of urban design is a simple idea - our urban spaces are designed to allow people and communities to thrive. For that reason, a good starting point for urban designers is to focus on the way people think when engaging our built environment. This thinking is embodied, developed through the interactions between our mind, body, and the environment around us. These embodied concepts are central to how we see the world, how we move and gather, and how we interact with others. They are also the same ideas we use to design our environments and cities. Urban Design Made by Humans is a reference book that presents 56 concepts, notions, ideas, and agreements fundamental to the design and interpretation of our human settlements. The ideas here parallel those found in Making Architecture Through Being Human but extends them into urban environments. Urban Design Made by Humans distinctly highlights priorities in urban design in how we produce meaningful environments catering to wider groups of people. Each idea is isolated for clarity with short and concise definitions, examples, and illustrations. They are organised in five sections of increasing complexity. Taken as a whole, the entries frame the priorities and values of urban design while also being instances of a larger system of human thinking.
Urban Designs as Social-Natural Resolutions
Nature Based Solutions for Cities, 2023
This chapter presents an integrative notion of urban design as an array of small-scale practices that “trigger” (Merwood-Salisbury and McGrath 2013) regenerative social-natural processes towards achieving a just transition from extractive to regenerative economies (https:// cl imatejusti cealliance .org/ just-transition/ ). Our perspective is that equitable and sustainable urban designs are only achieved through the material resolution of the dynamics between socially produced spaces and natural processes, rather than exclusively as modern nature-based solutions (NBS). Good urban designs achieve not only the right to the city (Harvey 2008), but also the right to nature (Apostolopoulou and Cortes-Vazquez 2018). Since its mid-twentieth-century origins, however, urban design has had a troubling authoritarian, anti-social and anti-natural history, tied to the misuse of bureaucratic power based on Western ideas of modernization (Berman 1981; McGrath 2020) and the misuse of natural metaphors to describe urban social processes (Light 2009). Based on this troubling history, we argue against uncritically adopting modern NBS to the already overly technocratic disciplines of centralized urban design planning, and advocate for the cooperative formulations of continually evolving social-natural resolutions (SNR) negotiated through diffuse but nested consensual management and governance practices. Social-natural resolutionary processes can continually advance both new frontiers in ecological science as well as advancements in design justice (Costanza-Chock 2020). The growth of low- to medium-density urbanization across the globe is a pressing issue today with urban land consumption outpacing population growth (McGrath et al. 2017). We offer here indigenously based designs through the practice of “spatial ethnography” (Sen and Silverman 2013) in Chiang Mai, Thailand, as an example of designing for the new complex, connected, diffuse and diverse global urban realm (McHale et al. 2015).
Emerging knowledge on the social dimension of urban design
URBAN DESIGN International
Related topics
Related papers
Urban design re-examined: urban vs. design
This paper examines the relative emphasis of urban and design in theories and practices of urban design. Traditionally, urban design has been conceived as a discourse in design and has been practiced as an extension of architecture, urban planning, and civil engineering. Post-modern critical thinking, in recent literature, questions the design dominance and calls for understanding complex relationships of politics, economics, sociology, behavior, and environment embedded in the urban context. In the prevalent paradigm, urban designers are primarily trained as architects, planners or engineers, each having one’s own design bias. Architects see design as formal orientation in space. Planners conceive design as implementation of policies reflecting social and economic values. Engineers understand design as efficiency in production. This eclectic approach of urban design creates a partitioned education model with conflicts and contradictions. This paper posits an inclusive model with the focus on urban instead of design. Such an approach defines the uniqueness of urban design. It allows opportunities of interrelationships and interactions among multiple disciplines and diverse issues. The inclusive approach is teleological (process oriented), relevant (specific), and catalytic (empowering). Rethinking the pedagogy of urban design is critical in understanding diverse roles urban design can play in the process of placemaking and in defining specific responsibilities urban designers can have in the society. Balance of urban and design in teaching should be explored. Proportion of the two may vary based on specific needs and individual programs. This is significant in developing urban design courses reflecting heterogeneity and complexity of the current urban environment. Further opportunities exist in applying this pedagogic model in areas of sustainable development, smart growth, and design research. Keywords: Urban Design, Pedagogy, Urban theory, Placemaking
A Critical Review on The Current Thought and Practice of Urban Design: New Roles in the Future
2016
Though urban design is historically rooted in development of cities, urban design, as a contemporary discipline, is relatively new compared to associated disciplines of architecture, urban planning, and landscape architecture. Urban design’s close connection with these allied disciplines has also been the reason for its ambiguous nature, and its muddled definition. Accordingly, it is claimed here that a reexamination of the definition, status, and role of urban design is essential for the future directions of urban design as a discipline and cities as sustainable environments. In line with this, this article provides a critical framework regarding the current understanding of the discipline of urban design which is based on form, policy and efficiency, and highlights the need for place oriented approaches performed in an interdisciplinary working framework. The paper first focuses on the meaning and significance of urban design, and discusses the problems with the manner in which ur...
Political Theory and Urban Design
The Urban Design Companion, ed. Tribid Banerjee (Routledge) , 2011
Today the practice of urban design has forged a distinctive identity with applications at many different scales – ranging from the block or street scale to the scale of metropolitan and regional landscapes. Urban design interfaces many aspects of contemporary public policy – multiculturalism, healthy cities, environmental justice, economic development, climate change, energy conservations, protection of natural environments, sustainable development, community liveability, and the like. The field now comprises a core body of knowledge that enfolds a right history of ideas, paradigms, principles, tools, research and applications, enriched by electric influences from the humanities, and social and natural sciences. Companion to Urban Design includes more than fifty original contributions from internationally recognized authorities in the field. These contributions address the following questions: What are the important ideas that have shaped the field and the current practice of urban design? What are the major methods and processes that have influenced the practice of urban design at various scales? What are the current innovations relevant to the pedagogy of urban design? What are the lingering debates, conflicts ad contradictions in the theory and practice of urban design? How could urban design respond to the contemporary challenges of climate change, sustainability, active living initiatives, globalization, and the like? What are the significant disciplinary influences on the theory, research and practice of urban design in recent times? There has never before been a more authoritative and comprehensive companion that includes core, foundational and pioneering ideas and concepts of urban design. This book serves as an invaluable guide for undergraduate and postgraduate students, future professionals, and practitioners interested in architecture, landscape architecture, and urban planning, but also in urban studies, urban affairs, geography, and related fields.
Revisiting and Rethinking Contemporary Urban Design
JOURNAL OF ARCHITECTURE AND URBANISM, 2013
Urban and architectural theorist Nikos Salingaros, a professor of mathematics at Texas University, San Antonio is affiliated with departments of urbanism in several countries and has made a significant contribution to the understanding of urban planning on a human scale. His important books on various issues in urban and architectural theory are well-known to all members of the profession and academy, especially those seeking for the application of scientific principles in urbanism. Nikos Salingaros has contributed significantly to the New Athens Charter (2003) – an important yet largely neglected document providing timely guidelines for reshaping present mainstream urbanism that still remains under the spell of urban ideology coined by Le Corbusier, Giedion and legions of their followers. A critic of Corbusian doctrines as well as more recent tendencies of urbanism based on stale legacy of Modernism, Nikos Salingaros offers a different approach to the interpretation of contemporary...
A HUMANISTIC ADDENDUM TO URBAN DESIGN
Academia Letters, 2022
Theorizing about contemporary cities as I am focusing on my research projects, is highly appealing, and greatly challenging. Appealing, because it helps to keep my imagination widely open; challenging, because information technologies do not cease to feed my imagination with breaking ground innovations. Otherwise, while theorizing about contemporary cities, scholars agree that planet Earth already has more than seventy percent of its inhabitants embodied by urbanites -humans who live in urban environments. Some even claim this figure suggests planet Earth has reached a millennial malaise expressed by what they consider as an anthropocene period -meaning Humanity is entering a new epoch in the planet's geological history in which humans have, for the first time, become the primary agents of change on a planetary scale. Understandably, this poses a heavily disturbance in our area of research in Architecture-Urbanism, setting signals that a thorough re-examination of the idea of city -so far, the favourite acknowledged habitat for humans on the planet -needs urgent revising. Indeed, there is all likelihood that new morphological configurations would be welcome for modelling different patterns in urban design. Equally obvious, it seems that a previous inventory to assess the structural components that ascribe contemporaneity to a city should be processed beforehand. In general terms, a modern city is composed of different types of areas: gentrified city centres, housing estates in open countryside, shantytowns, central business districts, gated communities, shopping areas, industrial zones, residential suburbs, new towns, and more. Surprisingly, though quite distinct among themselves, these areas tend to increasingly resemble one
Urban Design
Urban Design
Today, urban design is a core competence of every planner and architect training. This has been repeatedly confirmed in teaching and planning practice. In planning, monitoring and implementation of urban development projects, I have experienced how important the connection between an individual house and its context as well as the level of the neighbourhood and the city is. Public space is an important link in this process-as the backbone and business card of a city. Built and open space must be examined and planned with equal intensity, because a quality neighbourhood can only be created through a balanced dialogue. I have compiled my experiences from planning practice and as a university lecturer at various architecture and planning faculties over the last twenty years in this handbook. The fifth edition is supplemented by two current thematic focuses: informal urban development and regional urban planning. This thematic and spatial orientation of urban design has gained importance in recent years and is therefore given appropriate consideration in the updated edition. Urban design, urban planning and urban development are complex processes involving not only architects, urban planners and engineers, but also politicians, institutional and private investors, creative people, sociologists, climate researchers, lighting designers, event managers and, more than ever before, the urban community itself. Urban design requires an examination of the whole complex city and must define qualities both at its edges and in its centre. In doing so, it is necessary to listen to the history of the city, understand its origins, connect to it or-where the substance no longer corresponds to the rules of the present-develop a new layer. The modern city today is one of these layers; our actions today will also be one of these layers tomorrow! But urban design is always a process of discovery and research that makes the historical foundations of a place comprehensible and advances history(ies). Architects and planners who will design cities in the future and continue to build existing cities must learn to deal with this new complexity. They must be empowered to define the framework for possible developments with the necessary technical know-how and their own position. The handbook aims to meet this demand by providing assistance in reading about cities and a tool for designing urban structures. The layer method presented here is the result of many design processes and is intended to do justice to the complexity of the city.
“Toward an Urban Design Manifesto” – revisited
2016
Toward an Urban Design Manifesto was prepared by Alan Jacobs and Donald Appleyard, two notable United States urban design practitioners and academics. The former is perhaps best known for his books Great Streets (1995), The Boulevard Book (2003) and The Good City: Reflections and Imaginations (2011) and the latter for his important Livable Streets (1981) published before his tragic early death in a car accident in 1982.
Loading Preview
Sorry, preview is currently unavailable. You can download the paper by clicking the button above.