What is urban design?
[due to tragic technical errors, we lost Kit’s definition of urban design](party foul)
What makes your work urban?
What makes my work urban is I care about the overall built environment beyond just the building. And maybe if the agglomeration of buildings and infrastructure and public realm, it’s all of that stuff together, more than just individual buildings.
Who is doing compelling work in urban design right now?
Well, I’ve been very involved with the lean urbanists. Not all of whom would consider themselves urban designers, but they would consider themselves urbanists. It’s almost an anti-design movement, in a sense. It’s approaching urbanism and the development of the built environment from the bottom up and urban design is traditionally seen as you know, master planning, top-down, the hand of the designer shaping things rather than shaping the systems that result in a built outcome.
What do you try to teach urban design students?
Well, I would say that in my own practice, you know, I’ve come to recognize that we have to have some impact on what ultimately gets built. And I would say that this might be the distinction between architecture and urban design, is kind of the scale of influence. You can be an architect that does bespoke housing and designs every hinge and door handle. And you’ve really, you have very direct and profound influence on that immediate environment for the few people that experience that environment. You could be an architect that does spec housing and multiple plans and you have less control over the design of houses that get built but you’ve influenced the design of several houses or dozens of houses. An urban designer, you know, now your influence is getting even more dissipated, that you have a much broader-- you’re influencing and impacting a much broader arena of the built environment. And so, if you can understand urban design in that way, then you have to realize that, that just designing and visioning, you know, drawing renderings of the beautiful street or public space or a city plan, it’s not necessarily going to be built to your vision. You’re not going to be doing the construction documents. They’re not going to be building it exactly to your specifications. And so you have to understand, well, what is important about your ideas? What do you want to carry through as it’s carried implemented by others over time? And so, so how can you ensure that whatever it is that you think is sort of the core kernel, the germ in your idea or your vision for a place? How can that ultimately, you know, remain as the city, or whatever it is you’re designing, gets built or evolves or changes over time. So, the distinction between urban design and smaller scales of design, I think is the sphere of influence. The amount of control and the time of your influence, you know, the length of time that you’re projecting into. So then, then you have to think. Well, you know, what does matter? And how do I control those things? And it may be designed things, you know, just setting a block pattern, for instance, will, that’s something that will probably persist over time but it could be things like transportation systems or even, you know, how a project is financed, how parcels and ownership is defined. All of these will have big impacts and influences over what ultimately gets built, and how a place evolves over time. What persists and what doesn’t really matter?
What is a common misconception about urban design?
Well, most people assume I’m a planner. Yeah. Because they’ve never heard of urban design and people outside the college, the party question that you mentioned, everyone assumes it’s urban planning. And I don’t think they understand the design piece. You know, they think of architects as designing buildings, and I don’t think they think of anything outside of the buildings really being designed, necessarily. That’s non designers.
Where do you think urban design is heading?
I think there is always been, if you think of urban design as something that started in, I think it was 1952. And they have a conference at the GSD where they decided to have an urban design program. And that’s when urban design was thought of as a form of practice. Even at that conference, there’s always been a tension between the Jane Jacobs idea of urban design and for one of the opposite the Robert Moses’ idea of urban design, and I see this, you know, pendulum kind of swinging back and forth. I really think that Robert Moses’ idea of urban design was really predicated on very strong government. You know, Robert Moses was a creature of the government. Jane Jacobs was a creature of, you know, the citizen. But really there’s this sort of third player, which is the developer and finance and capital and the built environment has become increasingly a form of capital. And as you know, capitalism has entered into its very Baroque period. We see developers kind of co-opting the Jane Jacobs notion of what makes a good city, and in doing so defeating, really, what to Jane Jacobs actually made a good city. So I’ve heard this called, you know, cappuccino urbanism. So we have the sidewalk ballet and the cappuccinos and the sidewalk cafes and the gritty old buildings, but it’s really for that, you know, the upper elites of the creative class and the capitalists. So it’s kind of become a tool of capitalism. I think that’s going to be for urban designers how-- what is the role of urban design in a capitalist society? You know, the discussions that we’re even having in our political elections now, between the one-percenters and the green new deal and the wealthy versus the working class, how is this going to play out in the role of the urban designer? Because I do think urban design has been co-opted by neo-liberal capitalism and I think there will be a push back against it.