The%20Scope%20of%20Urban%20Design

1
The Scope of Urban Design

• From Historical, Professional, and Policy
  Context.. Why?
• to provide a framework for exploring the meaning
  and scope of urban design in contemporary
  planning and urban development
• Central Argument UD is neither big architecture
  nor limited to urban landscape issues. It does
  not operate solely at the interface between
  planning and architecture.
• UD is a problem-solving activity with
  applications to spatial decision-making at all
  scales of urban planning

2
Urban Design Definition

• UD at its broadest, UD is about the form of
  cities. We may regard it as that element in the
  planning process that is concerned with finding
  an appropriate physical framework for human
  activities in cities.
• Urban form may be viewed in two or three
  dimensions, depending on the scale or level of
  resolution at which the design process is
  operating.

3
The Scope of Urban Design

• The need for UD as a discipline has arisen as a
  result of the fundamental cultural, political,
  social and economic changes.
• Other issues include the impact of environmental
  issues and quality of life on the nature of the
  city and how urban form can best be adapted to
  our current and future needs.
• It has proved difficult to provide a simple,
  commonly accepted definition of the scope of UD

4
Origins of Recent Urban Design Theory

• Urban Planning was introduce to place a growing
  body of theory and practice in suitably general
  geographical context.
• Urban was a description of what had become a
  culture and life style rather than a particular
  geographical territory.
• Urban Planning could comfortably accommodate
  city, town and suburb, no matter how these were
  administratively defined or physically
  constituted.

5
Origins of Recent Urban Design Theory

• Paul Sprieregaen Urban Design the Architecture
  of Towns and Cities was published in 1965 The
  conventions of urban planning at this time
  favored rigidly-defined, functionally-zoned urban
  development.
• This was influenced by the International Modern
  Architectural Congress (CIAM) set up in 1920s in
  Europe by Le Corbusier, Walter Gropius others.
• Some of their ideas a wholesale renewal of the
  contemporary city through zoned, single-use
  high-rise developments.
• At the same time, organic view of urban form,
  originating in the English Garden City movement,
  was being developed in the United States by
  Olmsted, Mumford, Perry and others. This
  suggested a regional model of the city,
  decentralized, low-density and more suburban in
  character, hierarchically organized on the basis
  of semi-autonomous community-based neighborhood
  units or super-blocks

6
Origins of Recent Urban Design Theory

• In the United States in 1960s, the economist Jan
  Jacobs published her powerful critique of modern
  town planning in The Death and Life of Great
  American Cities, bringing the attention to the
  complexities of land use arrangements, and
  high-density living in traditional city blocks
  and the shared activities of the traditional city
  street in a new light.

7
Origins of Recent Urban Design Theory

• Defectors from CIAM formed Team X in 1953
  exploring new low- and medium rise, high density
  interwoven urban structures that would allow
  opportunities for social exchange and encounter
  that the international style excluded. This laid
  the theoretical basis for an approach to urban
  renewal which emphasized vehicular and pedestrian
  separation

8
Origins of Recent Urban Design Theory

• In the 1950s, Kevin Lynch at MIT began to devise
  new techniques for analyzing and representing the
  perceptual structure of cities His work, The
  Image of City, 1964 helped give rise to a new
  science of human perception and behavior in the
  city.
• Later, Scott Brown and Robert Venturi published
  their book Complexity and Contradiction in
  Architecture questioned the International style
  and advocated the catholic (conservative)
  approach to the use of architectural styles and
  symbolism

9
Origins of Recent Urban Design Theory

• Ideas of a morphological approach to UD was
  explored by Colin Rowe of Cornell University and
  others in Europe. The basic idea was to maintain
  and restore the traditional 19th century street
  pattern and form of urban block, street square,
  without constraining the contemporary
  architectural expression of new building
  additions.
• Aldo Rossis the Architecture of the City, 1989
  introduce the notion of the collective memory of
  the city with urban form as a repository of
  culture from generations past and from
  generations to come.
• Rob Krier in his book Urban Space, 1984 sought to
  catalogue all possible forms of urban space
  generated from the geometric fundamentals of
  circle, square, and triangle.