Jong Lang - A typology of Procedures

2013

A special issue of ATR edited by William M. Taylor, Andrew Leach & Lee Stickells, with contributions by Greg Castillo, Robin Wilson, Ben Campkin, Nigel Westbrook & Rene Vam Meeuwen, Karen Burns, and Anoma Pieris.

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.

Journal of Urban Design, 2001

Places, 2007

Journal of Urban Design, 2019

The Academic Research Community Publication (ARChive), 2019

The city is a complex living organism mostly affected by decisions taken whether they are political, organizational, or design decisions. Such decisions vary in scale starting with planning, urban design, and architectural scales. Urban design has been commonly agreed to occupy a hypothetical intersection between planning and architecture. It emerged to bridge the disciplinary gap between architecture and planning. Since 1960s urban design literature attempted to define what good urban design and good city form is, and the process to achieve it; yet in practice the endproduct doesn’t always achieve high quality in terms of urban design initial objectives. Over the last decades, the gap between disciplinary dreams in theory and real outcomes translated as urban design product of different practices has been growing in the field of urban planning and urban design. Since the urban design product does not meet its expected objectives in theory then something must be wrong with it, and a thorough investigation must come in order to perceive such gap. The Research aims to answer two main questions regarding urban design through examining the Urban Design Process; the first is whether the urban design process is capable to bridge the multidisciplinary gap? And the second question is with the little knowledge and lack of success criteria for the urban design process; how can the success of urban design be measured?

URBAN DESIGN International, 2012

2015

Urban Morphology

review of [Cities and design rules: an architect's approach]