Whose Urban Design? ALEXANDER CUTHBERT
Planning and Urban Development,
University of New South Wales, Kensington, Australia Urban Design Alex Krieger & William S. Saunders (Eds) Minneapolis MN, University of Minnesota Press, 2009, ISBN 978 0 8166 5638 7 Urban design compendia (readers) have averaged about one a year over the last six years (Cuthbert, 2003; Moor, 2006; Larice & Macdonald, 2006; Carmona & Tiesdell, 2007; Krieger & Saunders, 2009; Bannerjee & Loukaitou-Sideris, 2010, in press). Each would be unambiguously accepted by most individuals as ‘urban design’ (with the possible exception of my own). But there are other closely related readers where there is a morphing of urban design, planning and landscape architecture (Fainstein & Campbell, 1996; Mandelbaum et al., 1996; Legates & Stout, 2000; Campbell & Fainstein, 2003), Waldheim (2006). So directly or indirectly we have 11 readers that address urban design. Each is significant in a field that outranks the chameleon in its capacity to evade detection (and I use the word ‘field’ discriminately in opposition to discipline, practice, profession etc.) Differing perspectives on urban design are contrived by the nature of the chosen material, the varying number of chapters, and how each is sourced and structured. Exemplary in this context are the 52 essays by experts in the field of urban design which form the content of (yet another) forthcoming compendium (Banerjee & Loukaitou-Sideris, 2010). But it is clear that the market is nearing saturation point. Central to the legitimacy of any reader is its organization, since it is the grouping of constituent bits that presumably reveals the editors raison d’eˆtre for the choice of material. For example, Carmona & Tiesdell use the concept of ‘dimensions’ e.g. The morphological dimension; The perceptual dimension; The social dimension; The visual dimension etc. Moor uses themes such as ‘Urban design comes of age’; ‘Connecting social spaces’; ‘Sustainability through technology’; ‘New frameworks for urbanism’ etc. Bannerjee & Loukaitou-Sideris categorize sections into Roots; Concepts of urbanism; Influences; Pedagogy; Praxis etc. Overall, readers have a range of between 10 to 50 chapters. So how do we judge these? For me, a reader stands or fails to the degree that its contents add up to more than the sum of its parts. With the best of intentions, this is seldom accomplished. The central reason for such a hiatus is that urban design as a whole lacks a cohesive framework within which relations between its constituent elements make sense (Cuthbert, 2006, 2010, in press). Until this occurs, readers Correspondence Address: Alexander Cuthbert, Planning and Urban Development, University of New South Wales, Kensington, Australia. Email: [email protected] Journal of Urban Design, Vol. 15. No. 3, 443–448, August 2010 1357-4809 Print/1469-9664 Online/10/030443-6 q 2010 Alexander Cuthbert DOI: 10.1080/13574809.2010.487816 will remain useful, interesting, intriguing and insightful, but enduringly incoherent. Urban Design is part of a series of six prior books edited by Saunders alone (2005, 2006, 2007, and 2008). Curiously the series is not published by Harvard University Press, but by the University of Minnesota Press, raising the question as to why Harvard did not support publication of the series issuing from its own University. The current offering by Krieger & Saunders is composed of six sections with 18 chapters, all of which were commissioned over several years, with four used as commentaries on the others. We are left to guess which is which. Krieger’s introductory essay An Urban Frame of Mind dates from the Spring/ Summer 2005 issue, but dates are not given for the remaining 18 chapters. Articles range in length from three to 28 pages and the extended discussion which concludes the book is not composed of the contributors. It is therefore no surprise that it lacks a feeling of purpose and intention, reinforced by the editors’ statement that “While each essay touches on many themes and is not easily categorized, the purpose of the loose grouping is to highlight key issues about the nature of urban design” (Krieger, p. 14). Problematically, this had already been done in some depth in nine prior readers. In addition, readers that are commissioned, as in this case, can exert singularly greater focus over content since the chapters may be crafted to some purpose. So it is then reasonable to ask why Urban Design remains so fuzzy and ill-defined, except perhaps to mask some deeper ideological currents running through the volume. The alpha point of Urban Design originates in two somewhat exalted claims, both of which need to be refuted. The first is that the new Dean of Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD), Jose Lluis Sert, named urban design in 1953 and that “he eventually developed the discipline of urban design” (Mumford, p. 17). His method was to initiate a series of six urban design conferences at the GSD from 1956–1970. These are repeatedly mentioned throughout the book. But while Sert may have ‘named’ something he thought was urban design, what he actually did was name a particular form of capitalist development at a specific historical moment. His definition of the discipline fitted neatly into an architectural lexicon focused on constructing projects in the aftermath of World War II. Another contributor having reviewed the archival material of the period describes Sert’s strategy as “a territory grab more than his idealistic dream” (Crawford, p. 304). So rather than making a huge contribution to the interpretation of new phenomena, it is arguable that Sert actually set constraints on the field of urban design by conflating it to project design, a situation from which it has not yet recovered. Indeed, the third Harvard conference in 1959 concentrated exclusively on projects, and 10 years later, Roger Montgomery was still defining urban design as “project scale design” (p. 51). Sert’s vision was not one that could encompass the reality of urban design as a social, economic and political process from which it evolved into a multitude of cultural and aesthetic forms. This process has a trans-historical identity whose objective has been the formation of social space, fundamentally the public realm, not architecture. In reality, urban design invented itself, and no authorship can be made on it. The second claim is the statement on the rear cover of Urban Design, that “Harvard University established urban design”, an assumption that envelops the contents. This far we are asked to believe that Urban Design was named, established and developed solely at Harvard University (despite the fact that, for example, Liverpool University had a degree in Civic Design as early as 1908). So for the 444 Review Article uninitiated, urban design as presented in Urban Design can only be understood as a discipline practiced by architects; its object the construction of (American) projects, its arrival stillborn at Harvard in 1953, and with its trajectory remaining basically unaltered over the intervening 50 years. So the foundation for Harvard’s monopolistic claims rests solely on the talent of a single immigrant from Spain, Jose Lluis Sert, ignoring the fact that the cultural capital he represented was in almost all respects, European. Sert was born in 1902 in Barcelona and did not emigrate to America until 1939. He was Chairman of CIAM (Congre`s Internationaux d’ Architecture Mode`rne) from 1947 to 1956. He was also a member of ‘Team Ten’, which was formed to refute many of CIAM’s fundamental principles (Mumford & Sarkis, 2008; Mumford, 2009). The reality of the situation is that Harvard University hired a person of unrivalled talent and political acumen whose education and professionalism was sourced in Europe, one also informed by brilliant architects from around the world through his participation in CIAM and Team Ten. His professional experience was also derived from Europe and South America (Chimbote, Peru; Bogota, Columbia; Motor City Brazil, Havanna, Cuba etc.). This leads at least one scholar to refer to “the repeated appropriation of the Harvard imprimatur for the personal ideological projects of imported celebrities from Sert to Gropius to Koolhaas” (Sorkin, p. 156). So as Marshall puts it (p. 44) “Staking the claim”, for urban design on the basis of naming a phenomenon that has existed since C¸ atal Huyuk, let us say 10 000 years, seems far-fetched to say the least. Apart from its enduring ideological thrust, many of the chapters provide insight into project-based design in the United States. As one would expect, individual chapters are erudite and well written, although largely descriptive, and with a solid phalanx of contributing Harvard Graduates and staff. My best guess is that some 16 out of 18 contributors are architects, a situation which imposes serious limitations on any open discussion of urban design as a field of knowledge. As in the first conference at the GSD in 1953 where defining urban design was a predominant theme, the issue is raised throughout the book. In the final ‘talking heads’ section of Urban Design, Saunders opens the discussion with the statement “The definition of urban design seems up for grabs”, making one wonder how far we have travelled in the intervening 55 years, a journey I described in Cuthbert (2007). As evidenced by definitions in Urban Design, the answer is ‘backwards’. Hence the same time-worn platitudes are trotted out as definitions, mostly useless. Urban design is: “a frame of mind” (Krieger, p. vii); “a way of thinking” (Marshall, p. 45); “large scale architecture” (Thompson, p. 51); “the central concern ... of humankind” (Maki, p. 97); “an art of place making” (Krieger, p. 121) etc. (p. 294). Unsurprisingly, most contributors can see no further than Sert’s project-based definition of urban design where any social or political agenda is singularly absent, to the extent that Battery Park City (by now mined to extinction for content), signifies the turning point of urban design in the 20th century (Love, p. 208). Such enduring insistence on defining the undefinable only serves to underline the claustrophobic intellectual vacuum which pervades mainstream urban design, neatly characterized by Machado’s statement that “urban design can only be recharged by the direct involvement of the best, most forward thinking architects we have” (p. 294, my italics). Setting aside the crusade to canonize Sert, Mumford contributes an excellent summary of the relationship between CIAM and Sert’s influence at Harvard, and has also written the definitive text on the history of CIAM (Mumford, 2009). Review Article 445 Marshall also provides a knowledgeable account of the Harvard conferences, while raising the enduring spectre of defining urban design (he did not write Exquisite Corpse as the endnotes suggest, it was Michael Sorkin). Rowe is one of the few who attempts a global picture that includes the world outside the United States, and Sommer’s excellent chapter is also somewhat alone in raising the issue of critical thinking and theory in urban design. Busquet’s four pages punch above their weight and Denise Scott Brown’s chapter is an interesting autobiographical account of her experience over the last 50 years. But against the overall pressure of urban design orthodoxy, the contributions of Sommer, Sorkin and Soja are refreshing. From his first line, Sorkin hits the nail squarely on the head: Urban design has reached a dead end ... While the task grows in urgency and complexity, the disciplinary mainstreaming of urban design has transformed it from a potentially broad and hopeful conceptual category into an increasingly rigid, restrictive and boring set of orthodoxies. (p. 155) Sorkin’s ‘dead end’ has to be contrasted with Moor’s ‘coming of age’ for the discipline (above), leading one to consider that they may not be addressing the same phenomena. The one negative feature of Sorkin’s paper is that it has no breaks over its 28 pages, and should have had at least five divisions in the writing to give it greater coherence. But the fact that he is the only contributor to be savaged by several other contributors is a gilt-edged guarantee that he must have something very insightful to offer (specifically by Talen, Crawford and Goldberger). Sorkin’s writing contains the vital ingredient of the ridiculous (i.e. ‘subject to ridicule’), a necessary condition for creativity that reflects Einstein’s famous dictum “if at first an idea is not absurd, then there is no hope for it”. Some of Sorkin’s phrases are indeed memorable “Urban design validates the grafting of a particular system of taste onto a limited set of organisational ideas” (p. 168); “Disneyland is a concentration camp for pleasure” (p. 169); “the role of urban design as the expression of privilege has never been clearer” (p. 163). None of this would be particularly welcomed by the mainstream. Another reason for some of the vitriol is his resistance to the New Urbanism, which he refers to as “the Opus Dei of Urban design” (p. 168). Soja adds to this by wryly remarking: The New Urbanism has been the most successful attempt to recapture or at least to stimulate the ecumenical spirit and far reaching vision of urban design emanating from the Harvard Conference ... The New Urbanism for all its successes and failures has had little effect on the isolation and detachment of urban design from a more comprehensive multidisciplinary understanding of contemporary urbanism ... presenting to the world a way out of the incomprehensible chaos of the present through a comforting retreat to an idealised past. (pp. 257, 261) Emily Talen, one of the foremost evangelists for the New Urbanism, is Sorkin’s main inquisitor, describing his paper as “the familiar architects rant” (p. 183). Correspondingly, her own contribution is a three-page rant against architects in general and Sorkin in particular. She is no fan of social science either, and has expressed the belief elsewhere that because the system of order promoted by the New Urbanism is based on nature, not social processes “It eludes the criticism that the organization of spatial form must be a search for control over moral and 446 Review Article political order”—thus vaporizing much contemporary social science at a single stroke (Talen, 2002, p. 305). Chapters in urban design readers overall are akin to various descriptions of falling objects (apples falling from trees, climbers falling from rocks, planes falling from the sky)—without a theory of gravitation or other guiding principles to explain and unify events. Many are comfortable with this situation. This is also true of Urban Design where a critical view of history and theory are singularly absent, despite its synoptic title. But rather than reproducing ad nauseam the same tired and treadless definitions of urban design, the scaffolding of a unified field should be explored. If we fail it will have been to some purpose. While Urban Design provides a convenient method of promoting the GSD, Harvard Design Magazine, and a reinforcement of Harvard’s image, it is perhaps an image it might rather relinquish in the year 2010, since it perpetuates an archaic vision of the field, against which much of the material in this journal may be contrasted. There is no reason why we should conflate urban design to project design, and much harm has come from this. Where Sert got it wrong was in believing that he could monopolize history, brand it, turn it into a commodity, and in the process capture the cultural capital represented in the product. But in the process of naming, he reduced the vast social complexity of urban form generation to an endless regression of architectural compositions, a process which the text actively supports. To conclude, while project-based urban design is a useful categorization by the architectural community of its own efforts to accommodate urban functions of various kinds, we should not confuse this with the social production of urban form where the real design of the urban actually happens. While the slight to history as well as to other individuals and institutions worldwide by Harvard is clearly unintentional, it is nonetheless perpetuated by the blind belief in individual superiority and institutional hegemony, a position others do not feel free to adopt despite their own accomplishments. Categorically, Harvard did not establish urban design. Designing cities is an evolutionary process, the consequence of thousands of years of social conflict in the collective moral battle over the material production, ownership and symbolic representation of urban space. So while Urban Design contains much interesting writing, the record of who established the field should perhaps be more democratically shared cross the planet.
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