discussion

PUP 420: Theory of Urban Design

Planning has struggled with the proper role of design since the mid–20th Century. The tension revolves around two different notions of planning: planning as a physically oriented search for ideal urban form versus planning as a more process-oriented discipline.

These tensions were explored in a review of planning theory literature in the edited volume The Profession of City Planning, Changes, Images and Challenges: 1950-2000. In this volume, a sizable majority of the 35 papers touched in some way on the separation, but possible convergence, of planning as urban design versus planning as process.

Proper role of design in relation to planning?

Urban renewal

The conflict is tied to the fallout from the negative effects of urban renewal in the 1950s and 1960s.

Both planning and architecture had helped to implement the failed modernist concepts of slum clearance, superblocks, inner-city expressways, and a host of other redevelopment disasters.

Redefinition of the professions

After urban renewal, both professions subsequently withdrew from the field of urban design; architecture retreated from dealing with social goals to instead focus on aesthetics.

The planning profession, having no sheltered field of professional activity to retreat to, recast itself as a profession of negotiators and land use regulators.

Planning retreated from its traditional focus on the design of cities – at least as a dominant concern. Instead, it shifted toward two-dimensional plans, socioeconomic analysis, and the implementation of land development rules in the last half of the 20th Century.

Connection to design Yet at least some part of planning has always been connected to design.

Even in the 1950s, the editors of the Journal of the American Planning Association were writing about the importance of design in planning.

Planners like Edmund Bacon, in 1963, were looking for ways to integrate design into the comprehensive planning process, perhaps by instituting a “basic design framework” that would be flexible and easy to comprehend.

Hans Blumenfeld (a famous planner and architect who worked in the middle of the 20th century) thought that design ought to be used to awaken “the public consciousness” and better integrate urban movement and city form.

Changing thoughts Since the 1980s, concern for design in planning has alternated between design as a variable in social science research, and design as a normative planning goal (as in, a standard goal). So on the one hand, we have research that looks at whether people are more satisfied with their neighborhoods if, for example, they are “better” designed, however we define that.

On the other hand, we see design as something to achieve, much like having minimum environmental standards or economic goals.

Illustration from Kevin Lynch’s The Image of the City

Design as something to analyze To some extent, the concern for design has been replaced by a concern for place, although the two notions are difficult to disassociate. In planning scholarship oriented toward social science research, design ideals have become something to be tested.

Thus planners might be engaged in an effort to discover how physical aspects of places affect human feeling, thoughts, and behavior, or whether design, in fact, matters at all. The concern for places is also evident in awards.

Implications of planning on design It can be argued that planners have become more concerned again with design in recent years. This has been borne out of a recognition that most planning activities have implications for physical design.

Failure to acknowledge that connection has left planning open to critiques about planning practice.

Zoning codes, for example, regulate the height and footprint of buildings, landscaping, open space, and the number and location of parking spaces, all of which could be considered important aspects of place design.

Implications of planning on design Appearances of places are important, and most American communities have design review. The review may cover bulk, style, scale, materials, and environmental or historical factors, but it most often evaluates the compatibility of the design with its context, and planners often serve on design review boards or, as city staff, make recommendations to it. Form-based codes also take into account appearances and the three-dimensional aspect of form. Whereas conventional zoning focuses primarily on use, form-based zoning turns it around and places a greater emphasis on design.

Types of design guidelines When we’re discussing design review, there are three kinds of design guidelines that are used in creating urban design objectives.

Prescriptive guidelines describe the pattern of a building or building component, or a certain feature, such as requiring setbacks of a certain number of feet.

Performance guidelines describe how a building should work – or perform. Example: the infrastructure must have the capacity to handle the traffic. These are more difficult to measure, whereas prescriptive guidelines are pretty clear-cut – we either meet the guidelines or fail to meet them, but these are guidelines that can be measured, observed, etc.

Advisory guidelines are the third type and they are just like how they sound – they’re suggestions.

More about performance guidelines The advantage of performance guidelines is that they do not demand a standard form as a solution, so each individual developer or architect can have more flexibility for creativity. The disadvantage is largely administrative—it is easier to simply see whether a building meets a formal prescription than to understand whether it will perform in a particular way.

Canary Wharf, London

In litigious societies, such as the U.S., being specific about expectations can be really important.

How planners use guidelines Guidelines have to be accepted as official policy by some regulating authority that has the power to control developments within its geographical or functional jurisdiction. Otherwise, compliance with guidelines relies on the good will of individual developers and their architects, and the ability of administering agencies to delay approvals on unrelated grounds.

Winter Garden, Battery Park City, NYC

The process is seen as a bargaining one. Sometimes the power is held by the general developer of a site, who has set the guidelines for the developers of components of the overall project. More frequently, guidelines are written for local or state governments.

How planners use guidelines

In many countries the power to institute urban design policies is delegated to administrative units of governments, but even in these cases there are often opportunities to appeal the policies to a political body or to the courts.

Paternoster Square, London

In the U.S., a municipal council usually has to accept urban design guidelines as the policy for the development of a city’s physical layout. The power to supervise their use is delegated to an authority established to develop an area of a city or a licensing body.

Appeals and review boards

Appeals about urban design rulings generally go to a zoning board. Alternatively, the power to both approve and supervise the implementation of guidelines may be delegated by a municipal government to a review board.

Pariser Platz, Berlin

This board may be a panel of experts selected by a mayor, for example, or it may be part of the ongoing administration of planning and zoning applications in a local government. How such processes should best be carried out in local government has been of concern to planning theorists for a long time.

Development proposals Once development packages and guidelines have been accepted as policy for specific sites, development proposals are sought from potential developers. The evaluation of their design proposals is usually at least a two-step operation: first, evaluation by a review board to see whether the designs comply with the guidelines and fulfill the requirements of the development package.

And, second, a comparative assessment of competing proposals, if any, based on criteria established during the initial programming process (when it was decided what should be done with that land).

Once proposals have been accepted, their compliance with the guidelines as they are being constructed has to be monitored. This responsibility may be delegated to the urban designer or remain under the supervision of the review board of the public agency responsible for giving permission for the project to be built.

Debates about design review There are a few ongoing debates with regard to design review. In the U.S., there’s been a dramatic increase in design review practices over the past 30 or 40 years—meaning there’s been a proliferation of advisory bodies and design commissions to offer design advice and share in decision making.

World Trade Center Memorial, NYC

But one concern has been that there’s been a skepticism about planners’ design skills, and more particularly their ability to make decisions about designs that are demonstrably in the public interest. So one question here is, are planners really qualified to make urban design decisions?

Debates about design review At the heart of the debate has been suspicion of discretionary design guidelines and decision-making procedures, and a preference for administrative processes that have clear, measurable dimensional criteria. The common complaints are that design review is based on vague concepts, and is frequently arbitrary and capricious. So what do you think? If we allow for more flexibility by having more performance guidelines than prescriptive guidelines, are we risking being seen as unfair—that we’ll approve certain designs because we favor that developer, for example?

De Resident, The Hague, The Netherlands

Debates about design review

There are also deep-felt concerns about suppressing the rights of self-expression in architecture and limiting the creativity of the designer as well as an infringement on property rights. So, this is an argument for more laissez-faire development, where there shouldn’t be design guidelines at all, perhaps.

There have also been a number of empirical studies that have demonstrated that the products of discretionary design review are not significantly superior to the products of administrative (or minimal control), at least in the eyes of the public. This goes back to how there’s a significant gap between professional evaluations and the public’s evaluations of the external appearance of development projects. So, are we designing for the public? If we’re not, then for whom are we designing?

Another issue: a professional divide This interest in design among planners does not mean that planners, architects, and landscape architects are on the same page when it comes to design. Even where planners do engage in urban design, it’s likely to be approached differently.

Architects approach the design of a city as an arrangement of three-dimensional objects: massing, texture, materials, and the unique design of individual buildings and spaces, while planners have broader social, economic, and ecological purposes in mind.

Landscape architects are often closer to the planner’s view of design, as their multidisciplinary approach often incorporates social, economic, and ecological concerns—in addition to their traditional concern for environmental factors—in site design.

Design challenges for planners Design in architecture is often concept driven, has one client (such as a private developer), and the buildings and places are conceived and built at once.

In contrast, for planners, urban design has many unknown and independent clients, many independently owned sites each with their own various financing, a longer time frame, and unpredictability.

Planners, and often landscape architects, merge multiple goals— human, functional, environmental, economics, safety, etc.—to involve people in creating a plan that improves the quality of life for those who use it.

Physical planners need to know the questions to ask, how to set criteria, to determine the relevance of criteria, and to evaluate the design relative to the criteria. They lay the ground rules, through design guidelines and other mechanisms that builders must meet.

Role of design in social policy Planners and architects are likely to have a different view about the role of design in social policy.

Planners have faulted architects for failing to understand the broader social implications of their designs. A lack of commitment to “real world” engagement was famously pointed out in the Boyer Report (1998), a study of architectural education, which argued that architecture programs put too much emphasis on the design studio and not enough on social relevance.

In planning circles, it is something of a cliché to express the viewpoint that architects only look at buildings and fail to understand broader contexts. This even goes back to Jane Jacobs and Death and Life of Great American Cities.

Role of design in social policy While many architects and architectural educators have opted for the architect-as-artist metaphor, planners have been more open to conceiving of design principles in broader terms, such that some planners believe that urban design should work for and satisfy the occupants and play a legitimate role in the achievement of multiple human goals, such as health, safety, aesthetic, economic, cultural, technical, and ecological.

This difference in the importance given to design as a statement versus design as satisfying fundamental needs puts architects and planners in conflict. Architects tend to emphasize product, and view research and any underlying social agenda with suspicion. Planners, on the other hand, tend to emphasize multiple objectives and criteria as well as analytical or collaborative process in the application of design.

Landscape architects The focus on planning versus architecture somewhat distracts from the relationship between planning and landscape architecture, which tends to be more positive. Early academic planning programs began in landscape architecture departments. Many early planning practitioners and educators were landscape architects, including Frederick Law Olmsted Jr., and John Nolen.

Positive interactions exist probably even more so in practice than in academia. The strong ties between planners and landscape architects are evidenced by the significant overlapping memberships between the American Planning Association and the American Society of Landscape Architects. Landscape architects are also frequently hired to do physical planning (including urban design and environmental planning).

Landscape architects Landscape architecture’s engagement with urbanism has a long history, beginning perhaps with the senior Olmsted’s advocacy of parks as a social space in crowded cities. The very definition of the word landscape involves the integration of cultural and natural processes. Along these lines, planners frequently misunderstand landscape architects’ advocacy for ecology and interpret it as overlooking people.

Frederick Law Olmsted, Sr.

However, the basic definition of ecology, as the interactions of all living organisms with each other and their environments, encompasses people. Emerging research in urban ecology underscores the fundamental role of people in shaping, and being shaped by, their environments. As a result, landscape architects view ecological understanding as helpful for creating urban forms.

Design and private interests

Within planning, there’s a concern is that the contemporary urban design outcome mainly serves the interests of the private sector and corporate capital, but not the larger public interest, welfare, or good.

Within this perspective, it’s argued that this is a result of urban design not having the oversight of planning – that planners could ensure that the larger public interest is being met if planners were more in control of urban design.

Further, it’s argued urban planning should reassert its claim on urban design. If planning had more oversight of urban design, then planning’s broader imperatives for equity, justice, and sustainability could prevail over investment and the profit-driven directives of contemporary urban design.

Design and private interests Recent urban transformations in the West and emerging economies have come to represent a “privatopia” of gated communities, shopping malls, entertainment complexes, hotels, luxury housing and office towers, and the like. These projects are often designed by star architects and financed mainly by global capital. These places are not very democratic and access is controlled, so some people are systematically excluded.

Very little of this outcome reflects grassroots initiatives or community involvement. The downside of “privatopia” as some observers point out is social exclusion, and in some cases economic and racial segregation.

Design and public interests The argument is that if design is conducted under the tutelage of urban planning, these undesirable, socially edited products of contemporary urban design will not be possible.

The explanation for this logic is that urban designers will be required to be concerned with the larger public purpose and collective welfare and to address issues of sustainability, spatial inequities, and distributive justice (equal allocation of resources). If there were public imperatives of urban design, it would lead to open, inclusive, and just cities.

Scope of the profession Some people disagree with the idea that redemption will come only if urban design could be claimed as a subset of urban planning. One reason is that the practice of urban design, in reality, involves contributions from architects and landscape architects—many of whom see themselves as urban designers—and also developers, financiers, and the like.

Similarly, the practice of urban planning is not just limited to the members of the planning profession. It comprises the work of geographers, engineers, lawyers, environmental professionals, as well as architects and landscape architects. In reality, many urban design projects are results of collaborative efforts by architects, landscape architects, real estate developers, and yes, urban planners.

In every instance of the privatopias, planners are either directly involved in the location, land use, or traffic planning, or engaged in the entitlement process and drafting the development and disposition agreements.

Cooperation among professions Architects and landscape architects could also try to claim urban design as a subfield in their own professions, and history may be on their side, as planners have largely turned a blind eye to aesthetics for the past fifty years.

The direction that we’re probably headed is viewing urban design as an interdisciplinary field, involving planning, architecture, and landscape architecture. Many planning students are attracted to architecture and landscape architecture schools because they perceive a connection—and rightly so.

One platform for positive interactions is the annual Urban Land Institute Urban Design Competition, which fosters cooperation among students in planning, landscape architecture, architecture, business, urban design, and preservation. Furthermore, technologies, such as GIS, Google Earth, and Sketch-Up, are creating platforms for greater communication between planners and designers. Certainly, there is no shortage of opportunities for increased communication and more thoughtful collaboration.

End of Unit 5.