What is urban design?
What is urban design? Wow, you guys really start with with the core issues. I mean, I think urban design is actually an outgrowth of architecture. Like, If we look at it as a field, it grows out of an interest in the city that occurs in the kind of post-war period where there’s a kind of professionalization of a new kind of scale. And so I think, you know, it’s gone on to achieve its own domain and expertise. But for me, it’s a kind of, yeah, it’s an intensification of certain kind of logics, mostly coming out of architecture, applied to a new scale of problem solving, which is basically the city but that’s where I think you’ll find conflicts with notions of urban design versus urban planning versus city making, because they actually come out of a different font of knowledge and respond to different kind of, acknowledged or not, disciplinary frameworks that go into the making of it. So I think it’s a kind of like a franchise of architecture reference.
What makes your work urban?
Well, yeah, I think that’s the challenge of it in a way. I mean, I think my work is primarily, you know, my dissertation was on a strictly architectural question, my master’s degree was on a strictly urban design issue. I think there’s a kind of porosity between questions of design in general, questions of architectural design, and questions of the city that move back and forth. I think some people specialize on like, fabrication or city making. But for me, it’s all linked by a kind of general consideration of what goes where and why and who do we need to convince to do it. And so I think you see that at a very small scale with product design, you really just need to convince the manufacturer, I think with an architect, you have a client and you have a room full of people that you need to convince and by convince that don’t mean merely salesmanship, but I mean, like a demonstration of design logics. And I think the thing about urban design is quite interesting. And I think that’s where it sort of has developed new techniques and finds its own problematics. It’s like, well, who do you have to convince for urban design? Is it the client of the mega complex? Is it the constituency, that’s sort of funding the project? Is it the populace at large? And so the tools and techniques of sort of consensus building or design demonstration becomes like a new scale. My primary interest is in like, how do people think about design? So yes, sometimes my work is specifically urban talking about like how say the pedestrian models become a framing mechanism for shopping centers. But in other senses, this is more like, well, how is information gathered, synthesized, and proliferated to generate consensus for design ideas. So in that sense, it’s like I think the questions of whether it’s my work is urban or architectural, I would say architectural. But as I said before, I think that’s a subset of the urban, in terms of its proliferation.
Who is doing compelling work in urban design right now?
Yeah, I had looked at your previous iterations of this conversation, so I knew this question was coming and I find that one the hardest to answer. Partially because maybe I don’t follow the field close enough. And I might be misunderstanding where the development is. I feel like urban design, there might be nice projects, small p projects. I don’t know what the current big, capital-P project is for design at the moment. So I think they’re waiting for, sort of waiting for the next thing to happen in some way to like understand the field. I think there was a moment, a sort of post-CIAM moment, which was skeptical of large-scale planning. I think that was a role that was filled by new urbanism, which like their aesthetics or not, it was a it was a completeness and a kind of totalization of the environmental field. I don’t think we’ve had the next iteration that can deal with questions like global warming and the environment and new sorts of pressures that are going to like affect the way we can build. I think you get a little bit of this stuff with the sort of shrinking cities thing, but I think there’s some yet to be articulated new, big thing for urban design that’s going to start to deal with the sort of slightly apocalyptic conceptions of how we structure and restructure our cities, and I don’t think it’s smart tech, and I don’t think it’s Uber, I think it’s some other kind of more fundamental shift. That’s not just an overlay on existing structures, you know, in that sense to think like somebody would say, Manfredo Tafuri, you know, it’s not just a matter of design, it’s a matter of like a complete reorganization of society. But I feel like for Tafuri, something like that was going to happen because of the revolution, like capitalism would fall and there’d be the revolution of the enlightened masses. I feel like now, it’s going to happen by dint of these other factors. And so I think design will play a part in like that kind of fundamental restructuring. It sounds very grandiose. And so I don’t mean like the actual apocalypse, but I don’t know, it seems like the next big project would be one that could start to deal with questions of scarcity, questions of not accelerating building, but other kinds of logics. I think we see hints of it, but right now, it’s a kind of piecemeal set of strategies and I feel like it’s sort of waiting to happen. So like who’s doing good work now? I don’t think anybody’s doing that yet. I think we see hints of it maybe in something like in our own faculty, El Hadi and Design Earth, as a kind of cartoon of what that could be. But I don’t think it’s yet an approach. And that’s, I don’t know. Who’s doing good urban design work? I think the person who can figure that out well.
What do you try to teach urban design students?
I’m going to pushback on this “I don’t teach urban design,” not because I’m offended, although I’m slightly offended, but I don’t think it breaks down in quite this way. So like in the theory class, we talk about architecture. But how can you talk about architecture and not talk about the city? How does Rem Koolhaas make sense without Manhattan? How can you talk about modern planning or even a modern aesthetic without Hilberseimer? Like these things are intimately connected to the city. So I don’t know, I think the question of like, do I teach urban design? Yes. I think also, it’s just a matter of like, I think the urban design is a kind of framework that can encompass many perspectives.
But as I look at the urban design faculty, like it’s a historian, it’s an architect, it’s somebody who comes at it through geography, it’s a kind of polygot field. And I think that’s it strength and not its weakness. So when the question gets framed as a kind of, like, venn diagram of center and periphery, you know, and I take the question of like, urban design faculty and associated faculty, I don’t know, I think it’s by dint of coincidence that like some people teach urban design studios and some people don’t. Like, you know what I mean? That doesn’t mean it’s not an expertise. It doesn’t mean it’s not a precision of knowledge. And it doesn’t mean that like, some people are more apt than others. I just don’t think it’s that defined a field that you would say that there are urban design faculty and not design faculty.
And if we look at at an institutional level, because you guys seem interested in institutionality, there’s no urban design faculty. There is not an urban design faculty member of this campus. We have architecture faculty and we have planning faculty, who teach urban design classes. So if you just think about the level of institutionality, it kind of doesn’t exist. And so then I think it’s a kind of category error to, like, wonder about who those faculty are. And, instead, I think this is what your project points to, to think about the subject and the subjectivity of the conception of urban design. And that’s where I think you guys can find the real power, not as personifications, but as a sort of subject position and subject matter of people who are advocating for thinking about the city and bringing those design logics into it.
What is a common misconception about urban design?
I don’t know if it’s a misconception because that would mean I would like be speaking for somebody else and their thinking of it. I think something that comes up for me in the consideration of urban design, and it goes back to a previous question is like, it’s a kind of role play of power. It’s a kind of role playing a power. And I think what happens as a misconception is that that power exists as a fixed point, and a fixed authority. And so, you know, I think oftentimes for students or even certain designers like you draw the thing and like imagine that there’s a population that like, either will build it or will inhabit it. And I think it’s actually much more, I don’t know, much more a matter of persuasion. This, it goes back to this, like eliciting audiences for your work. But I think it’s really a kind of like artful manipulation of populations to realize and inhabit this work. And so, I think the conception, the misconception, I would say, is build it and they will come. Not only will they not come, they will not build it. And so I think you have to find means and mechanisms that can, I think the question of urban design is a question realization, more than is a question of the thing itself, even though I’m really into the thing itself, and I love the thing itself, and I think there’s visionary schemes that are quite wonderful, but I think that question in the realpolitik of urban design is like how these things make sense within their context: economic, political, physical? And how can those things actually elicit something like a substantive change in the course of work that would benefit from it being as was not there? And I just think in the end, it’s a mediation of control. architecture or design seems like it’s all about control. And I think it’s actually about like not having control and imagining other means of realizing work. It just think it’s like, when you think about a city, what would be more conducive to try to think about agency and control but something that involves a million people, all with a different opinion?
Where do you think urban design is heading?
Yeah, I think that goes back to this notion of... I think, I think urban design is heading where we’re all heading, which is to try to figure out what happens after expansion. So if you think about it as modernity, you think about it as expansion, you think about like architecture, you think about design, you think about city building. Like, it doesn’t mean that we won’t continue to build cities, like, and I think that’s the misnomer of all “the death of” theses: the death of painting, the death of architecture, these things still happen in a way. But I think this, again, I think the future of urban design is to think about like, what happens after the building and I don’t mean post occupancy evaluation. I mean, like, other logics of, I don’t know, how can I put this? In architecture, in the moment after modernism, there was an emergence of historic preservation as a model that sort of challenged the question of the new in relationship to the fabric. I kind of think there’ll be a similar thing that happens with urban design. That’s not just urban conservation, not just the preservation of like, the pastoral or the picturesque, which was the kind of new urbanist version but some other kind of version that deals with renovation as opposed to like, the novel, in a way. And I think this-- I think this is not for cultural reasons, because I think, like, new urbanism, I mean, it argued it for questions of like, look and feel and lifestyle and I think the new translation will be for more pressing environmental and economic concerns. I mean, you can see this already in the... in the way that, I don’t know, I mean, there’s this book that Howard, I forget the name, Howard Kunstler, who was a sort of apologist for new urbanists and he wrote this book, The World Without Us. If you read it, it’s a fascinating book, it’s probably 10 years old. And it really just describes a new urbanist community after the apocalypse. And it turns out the apocalypse means you get like hand turned butter and nice honey in a way. But it was the beginning of a kind of thought about like, how do these structures get used and reuse after we no longer build new ones in a way? So I just feel like this question is the kind of like sitting project for new urbanism. Like if we think about peak oil, we think about peak metals, like is there a moment where we have peak city? Even in the midst of like an increased urbanization. So It doesn’t mean people don’t keep moving to the city but I think we may have hit like peak a lot of things and we have to think of like what is a post-peak city because peak in terms of fuels but also speaking in terms of like city-ness.