Urban design: requiem for an era – review and critique of the last 50 years

From the time cities first evolved, they have been subject to human intervention at every level of activity – in other words they have been designed. The following paper argues that since this process was formalized at the beginning of the 20th century as urban design, its rationale as a discipline has been fraught with consequence. It has been continuously defined as other – half way between the two professions of architecture and urban planning. This unjustified otherness has been reflected in approaches to urban design theory. Even the middle ground which urban design is supposed to occupy is an amalgam of architectural and planning ideologies and practices. The following paper takes a hard look at the last 50 years, exposing the most serious attempts to synthesize or theorize significant urban design paradigms. While each attempt has much to commend it, variously exhibiting great insight, dedication, knowledge and scholarship, I feel that the collective result has been a generalized anarchy of creative ideas that bear little coherence, either internally or collectively. Whether this is ‘good’ or ‘bad’ is beside the point, it is where evolution has brought us. Nor does this situation signify any immunity on my part to the uses of disorder, chance and chaos, in the spirit that ‘there is no idea, however ancient and absurd, that is not capable of improving our knowledge’ (Feyerabend, 1975, p. 33). The hypothesis explored below proposes that the failure has an obvious cause – there has been no concerted attempt within the discipline to link the material creation or ‘designing’ of urban space and form to fundamental societal processes. More importantly, this linkage is desirable, and can be made. The fracture has many causes – historical, professional, ideological, academic, egocentric, as well as misplaced idealism. Rather than pursuing the quest for an integrated theory which has little possibility of success, I argue that a better outcome already exists in spatial political economy, itself a somewhat anarchistic pursuit, but one of better quality. The framework of ideas which it encompasses offers urban design both legitimation and theoretical coherence. In so doing, urban design can exit the nefarious middle ground allocated to it by architecture and planning. Instead, it can connect directly to the economic, political, social and cultural processes which structure social life.