The practice of urban design, and its role in creating cities, is a contested space. In this original article Judith Ryser examines tensions between professional disciplines in the creation and delivery of urban design in European cities. Drawing on the work of Francis Tibbalds, Ryser uses three key city issues - climate change, ICT and public participation - to identify ways through these tensions and new opportunities for the urban design profession. Ryser tests conceptions of urban design in the shaping of cities, and identifies new ways for the profession to help achieve sustainable urban development.

Urban design, traditionally shaped by architects and engineers, has assumed a new and essential role in the making of the built environment and its social symbols. Historically, architects designed churches, fortresses and palaces as symbols of power, followed by town halls as symbols of democracy. Later they turned to skyscrapers as symbols of capitalism: global corporate headquarters, financial institutions and, more recently to high-rise living quarters for those who staff them.

The other family of large structures (significantly called ‘ouvrages d’art’ – ‘art works’ in French) was designed by engineers: bridges, viaducts, railways, motorways, airports, power stations, water reservoirs, sewage plants, waste disposal facilities, communication masts. Although considered ‘supporting’ infrastructures by architects, their scale and functional role have a considerable impact on the built environment. Urban design has filled a gap by weaving across the specialist built environment professions, contributing a more integrated approach to the built environment.

Population explosions and rapid urbanisation have created a space for new interventions in the built environment. They generated the need to manage land uses equitably, a task taken on by a new profession, the spatial planners, while the role of architects and engineers remained to design physical structures. Global conflicts led to social change, and their mass destruction brought about new attitudes toward, and uses of, the built environment. Modernist design principles promoted by architects and supported by transportation engineers are one example, but different approaches emerged alongside them as well. One became urban design, initially focusing on the assemblage of buildings and the spaces in between.

From the outset the professions of the built environment conceived two opposing roles for urban design. They considered it as either yet another professional specialisation, or as an activity weaving across the specialist design professions. What had become a major challenge for a new professional approach to the design and management of the built environment was to free its approach from the models of thinking deeply embedded in the existing professions and invent its own ethos.

Conventional wisdom perpetuates the stereotypical roles of built environment professionals with emphasis on design. Accordingly, architects see themselves as leaders of the built environment professions. Many of them still perceive spatial planning as large scale architecture and urban design as an extension of architectural design. Too often they misunderstand urban design as simply upscaling architecture and downscaling planning. In reality, urban design practice shows that operating between scales and linking them requires transposition, namely designing for a particular scale, not merely shifting between them.

Engineers dominate infrastructure and consider transportation their fiefdom. This may explain why integration between land-use and mobility, a key task of planners, remains unfulfilled.

Crudely, some architects continue to see architecture as art, engineers are banking on technology, while planners rely on restrictive checklists instead of producing forward looking conceptions for the transformation of the built environment.

A moot-point is that built environment professionals tend to under-prioritise genuine consideration for the recipients of their professional output. Although public participation appeared in planning parlance more than half a century ago[1], it has been practised only scarcely up to now. A vast literature produced by academics, practitioners as well as community activists criticises the lack of genuine citizen involvement in their built environment and its stewardship.[2]

Even urban designers have not yet been able to escape from being captives of such conventional wisdom. Many of them tend to conceive masterplans solely as physical designs, adopt new technologies unchallenged and produce guidelines and checklists under the assumption that urban design principles are universally transferable. Clearly the complexity and fuzziness of the built environment and its rapidly changing uses contradict such a simplistic outlook.

Despite these contradictions noticeable exceptions exist. Francis Tibbalds (1941-1992), a qualified architect, was a great advocate of urban design and worked on the distinction between architecture and urban design[3]. One of his legacies is the Urban Design Group[4], and its magazine ‘Urban Design’[5], which promote good urban design by sharing experiences worldwide. His understanding of urban design is “place-making”. This concept goes far beyond physical design and encompasses a broad understanding of the built environment as human and natural habitat with the various requirements it has to fulfil (many of them contradictory or in competition with each other.)

For Tibbalds, the task of urban design was to negotiate between the many demands on the built environment and develop solutions, albeit with unavoidable compromises, acceptable to most. In turn, this required urban designers to cooperate with a wide range of stakeholders and broaden their skills accordingly. Drawing on some of the most pressing contemporary issues in the built environment - climate change, the digital revolution, and communities demanding a greater say in their living environment - a few examples are selected below to further illustrate Tibbald’s approach and reflect on the future of urban design and urban designers.

Urban design and climate change

The radical intervention of Madrid Mayor Manuela Carmena in the Gran Vía, a major traffic axis in Madrid, demonstrates how cities can reduce greenhouse gas emissions while increasing quality of life. In this case, urban design consisted of reducing traffic lanes, restricting private car use, reorganising public transport and its interchanges, widening pavements, planting trees and adding street furniture. From the opening, more pedestrians were increasing foot traffic and led private landlords to upgrade and extend ground floor uses while public pocket spaces (often unused or neglected areas) were attracting pop-up activities.[6]

For such physical and tangible transformations of the built environment to be innovative, urban designers need to engage in experimentation, ‘action research’ and work with scientists. They have to work in teams, partnering with academics to carry out research and to cooperate with both architects and planners. Most importantly, they have to communicate with the public, obtain views/wants and adjust their designs accordingly.

Urban designers also need to recognise their part in politics as their work is intimately linked with that of political decision makers. This means taking risks by engaging with many other stakeholders, ranging from developers and local authorities to the general public, as well as learning from such cooperation and feedback. However, their role will always be subjected to the vagaries of party politics. The new right-wing president of the Madrid region Isabel Díaz Ayuso for whom traffic jams form part of city identity vowed to reverse the previous mayor’s efforts, despite tangible evidence of air pollution reduction.[7]

Urban design and technology

Digital technology, virtual reality, artificial intelligence, robotics, genetic engineering, to name but a few, are bound to transform the built environment radically. Information and communications technology (ICT) is affecting all built environment professions, ranging from architects and engineers to planners, urban designers and experts in communication with the general public.

Early applications of ICT in urban design were computer-aided design tools (CAD), geographic information systems (GIS) for digitised mapping of planning information and algorithms to simulate structures and their uses. Increasingly, built environment education and research are also leveraging new technologies to improve the understanding of the urban environment and how it affects people. Experiments are being carried out at Karlsruhe University with body fitted sensors to measure people’s responses through their emotions, how they influence their actions and how these results can be fed back into urban design practice.[8] AccessibleMap Association Vienna has developed another use of ICT aimed at encouraging mobility of senior citizens and people with dementia by analysing how they use the built environment, adapting it accordingly and supplying members of these communities with ICT based tools to remain independent.[9]

The use of ICT by urban designers can encourage closer cooperation with scientific research, greater use of observational data in concrete designs and improved feedback (from monitoring of implemented designs) that can enable further experimentation. This constitutes a sort of ‘circular evolution of urban design’. Akin to the notion of the ‘circular economy’ this can enable a more sustainable use of information resources. In particular ICT can be a powerful tool to share urban design knowledge, know-how and practical experiments more widely by disseminating them among the urban design profession and decision makers as well as facilitating interaction between urban designers and the recipients of their projects.  

Urban design and people

Genuine commitment to urban design that brings satisfaction to end-users is spreading across the public and the social sector, as well as across various scales of the built environment. For example, at the urban scale, in Brussels ‘sustainable neighbourhood contracts’ and ‘sustainable urban contracts’ have been negotiated for the regeneration of its vast disused industrial canal area. [10] The political will of Brussels Capital Region was to realise socio-economic mixed areas and these innovative contracts were adopted as a tool to attenuate development pressures. Their particular aim was to stem displacement of existing, often disadvantaged, residents by actively assisting them in improving both their built environment and their local economy. These contracts guaranteed security of tenure for housing as well as work places.  

At the micro scale, an expanding fringe community of the Rotterdam conurbation involved children as key participants in the design of their play space next to the new community school.[11] Examples abound of experiments in more equitable cooperation between the built environment professionals and the users of their designs. They tend to show that such negotiated solutions are accepted and well maintained as the users feel co-authorship with their outcomes.  

Conclusion

Initially, urban design was an innovative newcomer to traditional architecture, planning and landscape design. Free from professional accreditation channels urban designers were able to experiment with fresh ideas linked to socio-economic contexts and rapid urbanisation. Urban design moved beyond pure design preoccupations and extended to engineering and infrastructure. With mounting environmental concerns (particularly climate change) urban design has also increasingly encompassed sustainable urban management, weaving across traditional built environment professions and trying to influence them.

What this evolution means for the built environment professions and urban designers, in particular, is that they need to acquire new skills continually. A moot point remains the remoteness of designers from the recipients of their designs which hampers genuine interaction with the future users of their designs. Their ability to listen to and understand concerns, and then to incorporate at least some of the reflected views and ideas, may make designs more readily acceptable. This applies whether a development is a public project, privately-led or mixed-sector. Experience shows that such a participatory and interactive approach to urban design can lead to a win-win situation. Once such urban designs are realised those who use them tend to develop a sense of ownership and belonging toward these new built environments and will be taking good care of them for a long time to come.

 WORKS CITED

[1] The Skeffington Report: People and Planning, 1969 HMSO was a landmark in governmental recognition in the UK of the worth of public participation.

[2] The professional contributions from 135 countries worldwide in the International Manual of Planning Practice, Judith Ryser & Teresa Franchini eds, give a comprehensive overview of public participation deficiencies. ISOCARP 2015. 

[3] Francis Tibbalds. Making People-Friendly Towns: Improving the Public Environment in Towns and Cities. 1992. Taylor & Francis.

[4] Urban Design Group. www.udg.org

[5] E.g. Urban Design Issue 150. NorthWestern Europe. Topic editor Judith Ryser. The examples in this article are selected from this issue.

[6] Teresa Franchini analysed the scheme in ‘Remodelling of the Gran Via’ in Urban Design, Issue 150, spring 2019.

[7] ‘Madrid could become the first European city to scrap low-emissions zone’. The Guardian, Arthur Neslen, 11 May 2019.

[8] Peter Zeile, et.al. ‘Urban Emotions’. ‘Road Safety from Cyclist’s Perspective’. ‘Walk and Feel, a new integrated walkability research approach’. Papers presented at REAL-CORP conference 2019. Competence Center of Urban and Regional Planning Karlsruhe & Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Karlsruhe University. Peter Zeile & Fabia Schlosser. ‘Places of Fear’. Urban Design, Issue 150, spring 2019.

[9] ‘Encouraging Mobility for People with Dementia’. Clemens Beyer & Wolfgang Wassenburger, Urban Design, Issue 150, spring 2019. ’

[10] Judith Ryser (ed). Planning for a New Era, sustainable responses to urban change. Chapter 2, Brussels, an epitome of urban complexity and contradictions for planners. The Isocarp 2015 Foundation. Forthcoming. 

[11] Aafke Nijenhuijzen. ‘Designing with Children’. Urban Design, Issue 150, Spring 2019.

AUTHOR

Judith Ryser, qualified as an architect and urbanist with an MSc in social sciences, is dedicating her cosmopolitan professional life to a sustainable built environment. Her research, writing and reviewing is focusing on cities in the knowledge society, carried out in London, Paris, Berlin, Geneva (United Nations), Stockholm and Madrid. She is on the editorial board of the Urban Design magazine and CORP (International Conference on Urban Planning and Regional Development in the Information Society) and senior member of the Chartered Institute of Journalists and a life member of ISOCARP, where she served as Vice President, General Rapporteur of the 50th anniversary congress 2015, and editor and writer of several publications, the latest “ISOCARP, 50 Years of Knowledge Creation and Sharing”; and with Teresa Franchini, the 6th edition of the International Manual of Planning Practice.