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Urban Design This page intentionally left blank Urban Design Alex Krieger and William S. Saunders, Editors University of Minnesota Press | Minneapolis | London This book is a collaborative project between the University of Minnesota Press and Harvard Design Magazine. Most of the essays published here previously appeared in Harvard Design Magazine, Harvard University Graduate School of Design. Peter G. Rowe, Dean, 1992–2004; Alan Altshuler, Dean, 2005–7; Mohsen Mostafavi, Dean since 2008. Thanks to coordinator Meghan Ryan for her work on Harvard Design Magazine. Every effort has been made to obtain permission to reproduce the illustrations in this book. If any acknowledgment has not been included, we encourage copyright holders to notify the publisher. Copyright 2009 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. Published by the University of Minnesota Press 111 Third Avenue South, Suite 290 Minneapolis, MN 55401- 2520 http://www.upress.umn.edu Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Urban design / Alex Krieger and William S. Saunders, editors. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8166-5638-7 (hc : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-8166- 5639-4 (pb : alk. paper) 1. City planning. I. Krieger, Alex, 1951– II. Saunders, William S. III. Harvard Design Magazine. NA9040.U677 2009 711'.4—dc22 2008042230 Printed in the United States of America on acid- free paper The University of Minnesota is an equal- opportunity educator and employer. 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 09 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Contents vii Introduction: An Urban Frame of Mind Alex Krieger Origins of an Urban Design Sensibility 3 The First Urban Design Conference: Extracts 15 The Emergence of Urban Design in the Breakup of CIAM Eric Mumford 38 The Elusiveness of Urban Design: The Perpetual Problem of Defi nition and Role Richard Marshall Perspectives on a Half- Century of Urban Design Practice 61 Urban Design at Fifty: A Personal View Denise Scott Brown 88 Fragmentation and Friction as Urban Threats: The Post- 1956 City Fumihiko Maki 101 The Way We Were, the Way We Are: The Theory and Practice of Designing Cities since 1956 Jonathan Barnett Territories of Urban Design Practice 113 Where and How Does Urban Design Happen? Alex Krieger 131 Defi ning the Urbanistic Project: Ten Contemporary Approaches Joan Busquets 135 Beyond Centers, Fabrics, and Cultures of Congestion: Urban Design as a Metropolitan Enterprise Richard Sommer Debates about Mandates and Purpose 155 The End(s) of Urban Design Michael Sorkin 183 Bad Parenting Emily Talen 186 Facts on the Ground: Urbanism from Midroad to Ditch Michelle Provoost and Wouter Vanstiphout Expanding Roles and Disciplinary Boundaries 201 A Third Way for Urban Design Kenneth Greenberg 208 Urban Design after Battery Park City: Opportunities for Variety and Vitality Timothy Love 227 The Other ’56 Charles Waldheim 237 Democracy Takes Command: New Community Planning and the Challenge to Urban Design John Kaliski Challenges for the Unprecedented Phenomena of Our New Century 255 Designing the Postmetropolis Edward W. Soja 270 Unforeseen Urban Worlds: Post- 1956 Phenomena Peter G. Rowe 285 Urban Design Looking Forward Marilyn Jordan Taylor 291 Urban Design Now: A Discussion 327 Contributors 331 Index Introduction: An Urban Frame of Mind Alex Krieger It was divine nature which gave us the country, and human skill that built the city. — Marcus Terentius Varro, fi rst century BC wo millennia following Varro, as the world’s urban population surpasses Tthree billion, city- building skills are more important than ever. We are becoming an urban species to a degree unimaginable as recently as a third of a century ago, when only one out of three people dwelled in cities. Today they— we— are the majority, growing worldwide at more than one million per week.1 The knowledge required to address such urbanization is, of course, spread among many disciplines and areas of knowledge. This collection of essays examines the contribution of the varied enterprises that can be collected under the umbrella of “urban design.” Far from coalescing into a singular set of activities, urban design has, over the half century that it gained autonomy from its progeni- tor design and planning disciplines, evolved less as a technical disci- pline than as a frame of mind shared by those of several disciplinary foundations committed to cities and to improving urban ways of life. This I consider its strength, though not everyone concurs with such vii viii | Alex Krieger Art2Architecture, EDAW, Tadao Ando Architects, and Ove Arup, Piccadilly Gardens, Manchester, England, 2001. Copyright EDAW. Photograph by Dixi Carrillo. a sweeping, some would say vague, view of urban design. There are those for whom urban design represents a very particular set of skills, specifi c areas of professional focus, and even a particular “look.” But no singular defi nition of urban design is broadly shared.2 The absence of a simple defi nition remains a conceptual hurdle for some. How, they ask, can any enterprise perform its fundamental role, much less gain broad social status and responsibilities, without being able to explicitly describe its essential purpose? There is con- siderable skepticism, even in this volume dedicated to urban design, about the very possibility of “designing” cities or substantial parts of them. Each essayist wrestles with this dilemma, acknowledging the inherent diffi culties of designing urbanity, while remaining commit- ted to that goal. The eighteen essays in this volume were commissioned over several years, with four written as commentary on the others, which were fi rst published in two consecutive issues of Harvard Design Magazine in 2006 and 2007. A number of the essays rely on the infl uential 1956 conference on urban design, held at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design, as a point of departure to offer perspective on the intellectual distances traveled since 1956. The essays, along with excerpts of the 1956 conference proceed- ix | ings and a transcript of a discussion on urban design held at Harvard Introduction in 2006, are organized into six parts. 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. Among the themes that recur across the essays, I would highlight the following three as central to current debates around urban design practice. Changing Disciplinary Allegiances The modern concept of urban design grew out of still familiar mid- twentieth- century concerns: urban sprawl at city peripheries and decay in aging central areas. A goal was to fi nd “common ground” among the design disciplines (namely architecture and urban planning) for dealing with the kinds of exasperating problems that are beyond the mastery of any single design discipline. However, most agree— some enthusiastically and others with reservations—that urban design has largely been the domain of urban- minded architects. The proponents of this view argue that since giving shape to urban space and settlement is an essential task of urban design, it requires an architect’s training.3 Still, as the planning profession increasingly reengages physical planning, which it more or less abandoned for a generation, its claims on urban design grow. And physical planning, planners say, involves many issues that, while carrying spatial impli- cations, are not at heart architectural, so an architecture- dominated approach to urban design is limiting. Meanwhile the public at large, with their everyday concerns like housing affordability, traffi c calm- ing, neighborhood enhancement, and containment of development, sees urban design as a friendlier, less abstract concept than planning (which has never fully shed its urban renewal–era reputation as a top- down approach to problem solving) and so demands good urban de- sign from its public planners. But, as several of the essayists write, the most recent and radical (in view of the prior half century) relationship being forged is with landscape architecture. Urban and landscape design have generally been viewed as separate, if not confl icting, activities. The initial cadre of self-described urban designers, primarily architects, viewed urban design as at the intersection of planning and architecture, where it would mediate and overcome the perceived gaps between the two. x | Alex Krieger The goals of landscape architects were seen as peripheral and over time were even accused of facilitating decentralizing tendencies and suburbanization. Urban design, many believed, had to concern itself primarily with the tougher mandates of Modern architecture and its transformative urban manifestos, not with the softer art of designing with natural things or fostering kindness to ecosystems.4 An emerging generation of designers calling themselves landscape urbanists questions the supposition that urban design insight is the prerogative of architectural form-making sensibilities alone and asks, “Isn’t the landscape the real glue of the modern metropolis?” This startling proposition becomes less revolutionary the moment one tours virtually any contemporary metropolitan area from the air to observe the small proportion of building as compared to landscape. We are no longer building the solid city represented in fi gure- ground plans in which open space is what is left where there are no buildings, or what is shaped by surrounding built form. While still somewhat vague in methodology and projects, the promise of landscape urbanism is power- ful, since it promotes a logical integration of land use, environmental stewardship, and place making. The increasing intellectual claims on urban design from urban planning and especially from landscape architecture present the most fascinating recent developments for the fi eld.