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luisa maria calabrese
A key and a hero1
‘Urban design is a powerful tool. It plays a key role in the formulation and realization of strategic urban projects. It is a crowbar for innovation and a gate to unexpected solutions. It has the capacity to serve as a medium for negotiation and consequently leads to strong, stimulating and simultaneously open-ended plans, leaving margins for evolution and adapta-tion; contradictions can transcend into productive paradoxes. While urban design is the ‘key’ to the strategic urban pro-ject, the ‘hero’ is urban space itself. No matter how good an urban design might be, in the end it is merely addressing the endless capacity of and possibilities existing space offers, such as making use of the resourcefulness of space and the medi-ating capacity of space, strategic urban projects deal with urban space and urbanity remaining, by definition, related to an urban place. Organisation, servicing and management of city form are consequently the main tasks for urban policy and fundamental dimensions for a vast majority of strategic urban projects. They are structured in a manner by which the essential principles and concepts – derived from the spe-cifics of the context as well as related to an interpretation of sustainability – are not lost.’
Bruno de Mulder et al., A Project of Projects (2004: 196) This issue of Atlantis highlights the ‘old question’ of urban form and the role of Urban Design2 within it.
This is not without reason. In the past decades remark-ably negative opinions were voiced on the urban con-dition and particularly on public space. In the 1990s Michael Sorkin’s well known Variations on a theme park was given the subtitle ‘The end of public space’. Soon thereafter Rem Koolhaas spoke of the ‘evapora-tion of public realm’ in his cult essay The Generic City, and Bruce Robbins named his book The phantom of public realm.
This wave of publications has made it seem as if urban form – of which public space is the most targeted aspect – has suffered permanent erosion and loss of qual-ity, and is no longer a matter of concern to Urbanism. True? True. We do not need to take overseas exam-ples to admit it. We just need to open the window and look outside. The Dutch case – with a few exceptions – shows that the making of the modern and contemporary city has been characterized mainly by basic pragmatism and bird-eye views. Four concerns were, and in my view still are, leading decision making in Dutch Urban
Planning: accommodating quantities, solving technical problems through sound technical solutions, satisfying the market demands and speculating on ‘new’ urban identities through the experimentation of ‘new’ urban models3. The motto was and is ‘order, control, technique
and economic feasibility’; all of this lately spiced up with a flavor of ‘sustainability’, the unavoidable byproduct of global issues.
This awkward situation begs a number of questions. In the best academic tradition I offer five propositions regarding two specific questions: the possible role of urban design in contemporary (Dutch) urbanism and the role we (urban planners and urban designers) could play in ongoing planning processes. I choose my posi-tion. I challenge you to single out yours.
proposition 1
There is no present and no future for Urban Planning without Urban Design.
Planning through politics, policies and bureaucracy is doomed to fail. The present Dutch situation speaks for itself. The Ministry traditionally appointed to produce large-scale planning policies, countless paperwork and toolboxes lost its raison-d’être and has been shut down4.
Infrastructure Planning wins 1-0 on Urban Planning; and even worse than that, public money is currently invested in road development instead of in improving public transportation. People’s needs and people’s voices are unheard, whilst developers and politicians talk end-lessly. Effective normative tools are missing, especially at those scales of design and interventions where it’s all about ‘quality of life’. Historical heritage is usually considered a burden; therefore demolition is easier than restoration. Urban composition is arbitrary, even unnec-essary when developers and politicians are satisfied with the allocation of functions. Urban Design disappears and Architecture takes over. ‘It’s all about the process’, they say. Should we still believe it? Recent history teaches us that only a few of those planning processes survive the ‘polder model’ and finally get built5.
I usually dislike catastrophic thinking and especially writing about urbanism, however the present and espe-cially the future of our cities and territories ask for a radical change. In my view, urban designers need to get
An essay on the current state of urban design
5 more engaged in realizing such change through design
knowledge, which means producing fewer words and more meaningful drawings. Design is engagement. Design is politics. A better urban form needs participa-tion, smartness, quality and flexibility. A durable urban form needs durable design. We need to stop supporting blue print planning and big promises. It’s time to focus on creating tangible facts on the ground. In order to do so we should learn to do many things at the same time: we should have the courage to test our ideas in con-crete and detailed design (each scale asks for a different knowledge!) even when we are not asked to do so, to run risks, and to anticipate the future by means of meticu-lous scenarios.
Urban designers need to enter fearless and aggres-sively into the arena of the real challenges, confronting, contemplating, setting the agenda and engaging the dialogue. Urban designers need to re-think their pos-sible role(s) within the actual planning processes. Most of the tools we need to influence Urban Design in prac-tice with, exist within the present planning system, but we are not explicit enough in using them. It’s our task to make Urban Design evident and effective. We must as well show the awareness that creating quality spaces involves more than just us. Other roles involved in making a development happen also have an influence on the environment and this is often forgotten.
proposition 2
Urban Design is an inevitable necessity.
Realizing strategic urban projects sounds almost like a mission impossible. They have to comply with an entire repertoire of difficult criteria. A strategic urban project has to be structural, multi-dimensional, visibly inno-vative and beautiful. The recent developments in the design discipline offer some necessary help. The rein-vention and resurrection of urban design over the past fifteen to twenty years has reinvigorated the field by reformulating the roles and methods of urban design. Experiments and projects in a wide range of contexts and situations have demonstrated the essential role of urban design – proved through the development of stra-tegic urban projects. The fact that urban design literally contributes to shaping the city is evident – it deals with forms, the quality of urban space and built form. At the same time, there are a series of other tasks for urban design that are perhaps less visible, but by no means less important. Urban design is more inclusive than design of objects as such. Urban design is investigative and can be termed ‘design by research,’ which, amongst other things, includes the acquisition and use of local social
knowledge by communication and participation. Urban design is also a tool for negotiation towards a workable synthesis of conflicting realities. Design helps in the for-mation of agreements and becomes, in some instances, a legal instrument. Thus, urban design is an essential component that steers the entire development process of strategic urban projects.
Urban design is premised upon a fundamental rethink-ing of the discipline of urbanism followrethink-ing the ‘crisis’ of modernist planning methods in the post-war welfare state and various self-critical reflections that occurred amongst professionals in the 1970s and 1980s. Unlike the modernist master plan, urban design in general and the strategic urban project in particular, are not consid-ered final. On the contrary, they are seen as intermediate steps, mediums that explore the potential of urban sites, allow for the achievement of qualitative consensus, and safeguard and accentuate existing spatial qualities. They are structured in a manner by which the essential princi-ples and concepts – derived from the specific reading and opportunities of sites – are not lost throughout the long and complicated development process, while also allow-ing for flexibility to deal with changallow-ing circumstances. Urban design, vision-making and strategic urban pro-jects start as ‘designerly’ research. The process is initi-ated by a penetrating reading of the site, in which its his-tory, characteristics, the structural grounding of the site in the urban morphology and the problems and oppor-tunities of the given urban site are analysed. Designerly
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research explores the identity of the study area and crea-tively speculates upon the possibilities to reorganise or develop the site with qualitative urban spaces and urban activities. A variety of fields of knowledge are deployed in this analysis: urban history and morpho-typology, urban ecology and landscape, societal issues, such as the power game of decision-making or processes of inclu-sion and excluinclu-sion, architecture and urbanism, and, last but not least, local social knowledge concerning daily life in particular places. From the initial stages, architectural knowledge is present as a way to question the existing realities and spatial structures and the desired interplay between future urban space and urban functioning. This type of research work oscillates between analysis and synthesis, between vision and action, between intuition and rationality, between the global scale of the city and the actual scale of a building, and between an existing and desired spatial structure.
propositions 3
If we do not re-learn how to design at the intermediate scale Architecture will soon erase Urbanism.
Is design one whole from the spoon to the city? Most architects would answer yes. What is the answer of urbanists? The idea that architects would pursue, throughout their career, a multidisciplinary/multi-scale production is not a new one: they have always looked beyond the boundaries of their discipline, appropriating materials, methods and processes from other industries as needed. Often in history they disguised themselves as artisans, scientists, artists and philosophers all at the same time. In the 1920’s, the Bauhaus founder Walter Gropius famously declared that architects should design everything. His school cultivated a totalizing concept in which Architecture was only one aspect of design. It promoted the idea of the architect as someone who could and would design buildings, cities and objects all with the same involvement6.
Contemporary (Dutch) Urbanism thinks differently. Scale matters only if it is big. Design matters only when it is regional and metropolitan. Processes are ‘designed’ more than the physical world is. No hidden or manifest ambition to ‘design a spoon’ in urbanism. Why?
In his essay Urbanism at the turn of the century (2000), Joan Busquets talks clearly about the importance of the intermediate scale in contemporary urbanism, the scale of the urban project. According to Busquets the urban pro-ject is a type of propro-ject that focuses on an urban fragment, as a starting point for tackling wider ranging problems in the city. It is situated on an intermediate scale and should
have territorial effects outside its area of intervention (de Solà-Morales, 1989). Each urban project must have the ambition to constitute a partial contribution to a consistent overall strategy. The formulation of this wider strategy can be considered a project in itself. This wider strategy is what Busquets has called a ‘project of projects’, a concrete demonstration of the way in which local projects can be part of a wider constellation of projects. This distinction between projects and ‘projects of projects’ corresponds to what in the French tradition is understood by ‘pro-jets urbains’ and ‘projects de ville’ respectively. A ‘projet urbain’ is the expression of concrete intentions to go out and build an urban fragment. Projets de ville, in contrast, are as such not realized. Apart from not-counting excep-tions, one does not make cities, but one builds parts, bits and pieces. However, as argued by the ‘urban project’ tra-dition, that in itself should not keep us from developing projects for the city, from reflecting on the future form of the city, from constructing ‘projets de ville’ as the horizon for and the context in which fragmentary projects can be evaluated (De Meulder, et al., 2004). This view concurs with Salet’s (2006) definition of strategic projects as stra-tegic devices with collective missions, visions and plans, attempting to settle or stimulate certain joint courses in individual actions.
The city produces grey by itself. Strategic urban projects are of no use if they only add to the greyness of the city. On the contrary, strategic urban projects must make a fundamental difference and in that sense they are usu-ally very visible. They change the face and perception of the city. Strategic urban projects are indicators of future development, producers of identity. They support and strengthen the identity of the city and its inhabit-ants. This characteristic necessitates considerable design skills and aesthetic sensibilities, qualities that are often neglected in urban development initiative.
propositions 4
Urban form goes beyond morphology. Urban form is about the use that people make of space and the meaning they attach to it.
"Most urbanism students lack indeed
not only design knowledge, but also
basic design skills to be able to work at
the intermediate scale."
7 The city should express the needs of the people and
respond to them, including the need to build up a collec-tive memory. By analyzing existing places and the com-plex relationships between their constituent parts we can learn to recognize and create the qualities of a rich and stimulating urban environment. This means on all scales, on all levels of scale, a city should accommodate change with respect to the past, present and future.
On the other hand, a city consists of certain scale levels. Each level should have a structure that accommo-dates change in the next level. Each structure should be precious to the ones who use it. For example, the scale level of the neighborhood should have precious street patterns and accommodate changing use of the streets. The street should be precious in its own. As well as buildings should be.
propositions 5
Designing at different scales should be taught consistently throughout the curriculum to all students at our faculty, not only to architects.
Lately I noticed a blooming production of toolboxes7
and oversized metropolitan strategies as main subjects of our graduating students in the Urbanism master track. Sadly few of them choose to develop a project, I mean, a design project well-articulated at different scales of interventions, from strategic planning to convinc-ing strategic design. At first I thought that the reason why this happens is that there is not enough interest in design, especially at the intermediate scale. I thought that the notion of urban form is outdated, as it’s all about planning processes.
However, talking and working with our students, I realized that design knowledge is what is missing at specific scales, not their interest. Most urbanism stu-dents8 lack indeed not only design knowledge, but also
basic design skills to be able to work at the intermediate scale. That’s why, when it’s time to choose a graduation theme or Lab, they mostly go for a toolbox instead of for a strategic project. One explanation to this – in my view - embarrassing situation is ‘what you teach is what you get’. Is it a matter of curriculum structure and content? It might be. On the other hand, it’s also a matter of offer and demand. Students should learn to firmly ask for what they need to become professionals who are capa-ble of seeing the city from multiple viewpoints and who relish working with interdisciplinary teams.
From our (teachers) side, we should reflect upon our choices as educator. In my view, the present curriculum chooses for a vision of urbanism as a pure process, where
the large-scale issues, the planning and technical aspects are openly privileged upon design. A few quick insights in what (urban) design is are offered, however there is not enough space and time to elaborate in depth on why (urban) design is a powerful tool to steer planning pro-cesses. There’s no time to reflect-in-action9, neither to
find out why “urban design is the ‘key’ to the strategic urban project and why the ‘hero’ is urban space itself”. (De Mulder, 2004).
Notes
1 I borrowed this title from an essay by Bruno de Mulder et al., A Project of Projects (2004: 196). 2 One important aspect of urban form is the way urban programs are shaped on the ground, in other words, the way they are composed and ‘designed’ in order to be used.
3 The Dutch New Towns, the Vinex, American style CBD’s, etc..
4 After over thirty years the Dutch Ministry of Housing and Planning (VROM) has been merged with the Ministry of Transportation and Infrastructures in 2010.
5 Examples of lengthy processes are the South Axis in Amsterdam and the missing link of the A4 motorway in Midden Delfland.
6 In Italy the method ‘Dal cucchiaio alla citta’ (“From the spoon to the city”, Ernesto Rogers, 1952) was born precisely from the meeting between the nascent Prussian industry and the visionary educational model developed in Dessau. This utopian sentence defined an attitude that Italian designers have developed and sustained since the 1950’s. This philosophy found its ground in the optimistic belief that a newly-born industrial production once applied to Architecture would be able to produce a better and more affordable standard of living for many people. This social approach was deeply engaged in the political dialogue with a grow-ing post-war country in need of progress. A famous example of this design philosophy was the light switch that Castiglioni designed in 1968 for VLM, which he used to call “his little secret”, because this easily missed piece of inexpensive hardware was for him the ultimate anonymous design typology that improved the quality of life in millions of European apart-ments.
7 Toolboxes are catalogues of standardized rules for urban (re)development and a methodol-ogy to apply them.
8 I say ‘most of’ as we can see a clear difference in design knowledge and skills between MSc students who were previously trained as architects (abroad) and students coming from our own Bachelor program.
9 In this well-known book Educating the reflective practitioner: Toward a new design for teaching and learning in the professions (1987), Donald Schön argues that professional edu-cation should be centered on enhancing the practitioner’s ability for “reflection-in-action”, that is “ learning by doing and developing the ability for continued learning and problem solving throughout the professional’s career”.
References
Busquets, J. (2000) Urbanism at the turn of the century. BNSP, The Fifth Van Eesteren/Van Lohuizen lecture 2000, Amsterdam, pp. 3–20
Calabrese, LM (2006). Urban eyes; het stedelijk project en de stedenbouwkundige dienst. Stedebouw & Ruimtelijke Ordening, 04 (2006), 1-5
Claessens, F., & van Velzen, E., (2006). De Actualiteit van het Stedelijk Project. Stedebouw & Ruimtelijke Ordening, 4, 32-37
De Sola Morales, M. (1989) Another modern tradition. From the break of 1930 to the mod-ern urban project. In: Lotus, No. 62, pp. 6–32
De Sola Morales, M. (1987) La secunda historia del proyecto urbano. In: Urbanismo Revista, No. 5, pp. 21–40
Koolhaas, R. (1994) “What Ever Happened to Urbanism?”, in S,M,L,XL, OMA, (with Bruce Mau), The Monicelli Press, New York, 1995, pp. 959/971.
Meyer, H., Hermans, W., & Westrik, J., (1998). Stedebouw onder Nieuwe Voorwaarden: Stedelijke Transformaties in Amsterdam, Rotterdam en Den Haag. In Bekkering, H., et. al, Stedelijke Transformaties: Actuele opgaven in de stad en de rol van de stedebouwkundige discipline, Delft, Delft University Press, 73-93 Rossi, A., (1966). L’Architettura della Città, Padua, Marsilo.
Salet, W., (2006). Framing Strategic Urban Projects. In Salet, W., & Gualini, E. (eds.), Framing Strategic Urban Projects: Learning from Current Experiences in European Urban Regions, Oxon, Routledge, 3-20.
