What is urban design?
(laughs) It’s kind of surprisingly difficult. It’s difficult to define for people who don’t know anything about it because people know about architecture, or they refer to it or think about it as having a building scale. People know about planning, and they think about a set of rules at some point in their lives, even if they’re not, you know, directly related to the discipline. So we understand zoning, we understand those issues in cities as related to planning. And then there’s urban design. And, interestingly enough, it’s a rare thing that we get to practice as much urban design as I’d like to see. Simply because urban design requires, in many cases, a civic infrastructure. It requires a desire to think about systems in cities, and the way they are organized and the way they’re scaled and the way they relate to each other. As being greater than the sum of their parts or their uses, but actually the way that they feel they interact and the spaces they produce. So it’s a spatial ordering of the city. And it’s an understanding of all of the component parts and how they interrelate beyond simply an understanding of the individual unit, and beyond the understanding of codes and rules that define how and where things are placed.
What makes your work urban?
Because I hate detail. (laughs) No I’m just joking. I became very interested in figuring out how not simply one object or one instance affects human experience, but how an entire composite of parts and public space and the public realm and landscape all interact together. So that’s where I sort of became inspired and excited to zoom out from the single artifact and the way that it operates and think about that relationally, and it has to do really has to do with my thesis. (party banter) Yeah, so yeah, during my thesis, I met Alexander Chemetoff. Okay. And so he’s a landscape architect, turned urban designer. And I visited a project that he did in Nantes, the island of Nantes, and he was designing that plan for a duration of 10 years. And I said, “God, that’s really long,” it’s really painful this idea of like constantly reworking and finagling a particular plan. But then when you visit this entire neighborhood that’s on an island in a post-industrial city, and you see the care with which he relates the parts of the public ground to each other, and the inclusivity that he’s able to create with elements in the design that are as detailed as the way the sidewalk meets the vegetal plane, to the way the buildings are positioned with the street, the way that portions of the landscape are left untouched and cannot be accessed. So they create an oasis for for biodiversity. When I saw the level of thought that went into some project that was as grand scale I was pretty seduced. Yeah. I wanted to work that scale too.
Who is doing compelling work in urban design right now?
I think for me, some of the more compelling urban designers are working in Europe, to be perfectly honest. They’re working in places where there’s a tax base. I certainly think that, you know, corporate entities, foundations, other private investments are producing spaces at the scale of urban design. But I still think, profoundly, that democratic process influences the quality of an urban design in the end. And that when we have governance structures in place, and when we have a commitment to designing the public realm, and we have policies and publics that are sensitive to the quality of those spaces, we probably have, you know, better outcomes. So, for example, you know, I recently started working with Agence Ter. And they’re an urban design landscape architecture firm that I’ve been looking at with a kind of respect and maybe even, you know, jealousy of the work that they do. And I think they’re doing important work in Europe. I love some of their projects in Germany. I love some of the kind of stylelessness and interventionist ethos. They worked very early on Zeche Zollverein, that I have always been very smitten by as a project. And so I think that they’re there. They actually started off, all three partners of Agence Ter started off by working for Alexander Chemetoff, and he was my original fave. And then I think that his offshoots have also done some pretty amazing projects that are very sensitive. And again, always working between the urban design aspects of place and landscape. I think it’s virtually impossible in the current scenario, not to sensitively include landscape and ecology in anything that you do urbanistically it’s just a baseline of responsibility.
What do you try to teach urban design students?
I think I most generally focus on how certain spatial interventions when they’re contextually driven and when they have a nuanced relationship to culture, can produce an emergent ethos of social mixity. And I think that’s the baseline of what I believe in is exciting in urban design. So I’m very, very careful to try to instill a passion for reading emergent cultural activity, in urban scenarios, and to have that kind of activity and the specificity of context-lead thinkingabout the way we might proceed to organize space, activity, and the public realm. So I’m trying to get people to both accept that it’s very exciting to design for the public ground in the city, but also to be sensitive to the fact that not everything can be designed and that certain things that we create need to be able to adjust and transform and sponsor activity. That is, you know, maybe fledgling ,maybe emergent but carries the kind of popular will of the city and gives it an ethos.
What is a common misconception about urban design?
I think that in teaching urban design, the most difficult thing for students to nail and to master to develop expertise in is scale. It’s very, very difficult. To understand at what level do we resolve space in cities. And what becomes the kind of authoritarian, diagramatic gesture that’s too strong of a solution. And what is, you know, unraveled by its interest in minutia that will never be able to be read or to complete as urban project. So there’s this, you know, difficult sweet spot. When you develop the mastery of scale that is very, very difficult to maneuver without really testing and adjusting expectation and looking at a lot of projects with urban design scale in mind.
In my professional work with people who anticipate something from the urban realm? I think there are, you know, there are a number of misconceptions. I think in the past, there was a sentiment that something gestural might be more evocative or legible or powerful or inspiring in the Bilbao effect, than what people understand it to actually be now. And I think that we’re in a moment of pretty important transformation, when we’re beginning to understand that much more refined, nuanced thinking needs to proceed our our big formal ideas. That those big formal ideas are still part of a kind of modernist moment in design, and that they don’t quite work well with cities anymore because they don’t work well with the way that we imagine program and cultural activity.
Where do you think urban design is heading?
That’s a question of, like, “where is our political system heading?” You know, the further we get into the privatization of everything urban, the more difficult it is to create collective and generous spaces in the city. And, you know, maybe we’ll veer away from current trends and reconstruct our democracy and you know, heal our current condition, and then we can start thinking again about the way that we build public space.