The Theory and Practice of Designing Cities Since 1956

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The Way We Were, the Way We Are
The Theory and Practice of Designing Cities Since 1956

by Jonathan Barnett
(in Harvard Design Magazine, The Origins and Evolution of "Urban Design," 1956—2006 Number 24, Spring/Summer 2006)

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Cities today are designed by an intricate interplay of private investment, public subsidies and incentives for development, government regulations, public participation, and public protest. The professional urban designer needs to know how to work with and guide all these forces. Landscape architecture, architecture, and city planning each relate most directly to one of the constituencies for urban design. The urban designer is likely to have a professional credential in one of these disciplines and needs to be conversant with all three. But how does the designer get a seat at the table when the decisions are being made? (....)

José Luis Sert and most of the speakers at Harvard in 1956 would be pleased to see that today hundreds of architecture, landscape architecture, and planning firms offer urban design services as a significant part of their professional practice and that many urban design concepts have actually been implemented. However, they would look at today's rapidly urbanizing world and tell us that there has also been a big increase in the kinds of problems urban designers need to solve.

Not acknowledging the civic component of urbanism turns sidewalks and public spaces into utilitarian places between buildings, providing little more than light and air, and passages for pedestrians. Most urban plazas of the last fifty years provide good views of the buildings they front but are devoid of social significance. The research of Jan Gehl and William H. Whyte, among others, has helped establish how people use public space, and that in turn has helped show designers how to configure and furnish sidewalks and public places so that they will be used and thus regain significance in community life. Other lessons for the design of civic space have come from the devices retailers use to attract people to shopping precincts. “Place-making” has become a slogan of modern-day retailing. With retailers saying, “Hey, this stuff really works,” civic spaces have again become important in city design as a means of attracting people to the city and of keeping them there. Urban designers are now in demand to provide the inspiration for such places.(....)

continue reading: Harvard Design Magazine, http://www.gsd.harvard.edu/research/publications/hdm/current/24_Barnett.html