What is urban design?
Urban design is what an urban designer makes it. And one of the nice things about urban design is that it’s not a licensed profession, which enables it to be very elastic for people working within it to change their shape and form according to requirements in the project. Every designer can go into a situation and see an opportunity and advocate and help other people see an opportunity. The urban designer can come in later and work with people and develop a concept for a site. An urban designer can work with planners and refining and development programs for a site. And from there move on through every phase of project’s development to delivery. If, for example, the urban designer was also a landscape architect, the urban designer was also an architect, or the urban designer is also a real estate developer. That’s one of the beauties about urban design is that you can change shape according to the requirements and the opportunity. I’ve been in situations where I walk through districts with people who have no idea what might happen on a site. I help them generate ideas for the site and follow through with explicit design ideas that have been handed over to architects and developers for their interpretation. I’ve walked into greenfield development conditions where there’s absolutely nothing at the site. I’ve worked with political leaders, conjuring up a vision for the site that then goes through a number of iterations before delivery. So then... I’ve come in later, when programs have been set, and goals have been set by others. And I help I help shape those goals into design. So that’s the beauty of urban design. It is what you make it. And I hope that especially in our conversations in class, we see that many kinds of people are urban designers, whether they call themselves urban designers or not.
What makes your work urban?
It’s what I make it. It’s what I make of the opportunities that I see or that are given to me. And I connect with urban design at those various points that I described. Before anyone sees what might happen at a site or later when a program has been developed for a site, I shape, shift my shape according to the opportunity. I don’t, I never go in and, I do this in my teaching as well, I never go in with a preconceived notion of formula. So what might happen really is through discussions and analysis and site visits and observations that I shape a design. And then, as an urban designer, I have to be, and I think all urban designers have to be, willing to hand off a project to others to complete a very large project. In New York, for example, for one mayoral administration and in near completion, only three mayoral administrations later. Of course, with each mayoral administration, there were different priorities and different interests and different developers and designers who came into the program. So when I first entered it on the site, it was with a devastated empty area of Manhattan and with my colleagues from the community, we developed a notion of a middle and working-class district, with work opportunities and small industries, as well as housing. And many years later, I visited the site and I saw the rough outlines of the project that we developed in terms of the scale of the buildings and the shape of the buildings and materials of the buildings, some of the use of the buildings. But as I was walking by, a garbage can, and I looked in, there were bottles of Veuve Clicquot champagne in the garbage, outside of one of the apartment houses, which speaks that the original intention of the project the original social economic intention, of the of the project had changed. That was now catering to an upper-middle class, even rich group of people.
I could feel guilty about that, but then, as designers, we really don’t control the ultimate outcomes of what occurs. And that means that we have to let go of some of our ego. (inaudible) ... process, and others may complete the product.
Who is doing compelling work in urban design right now?
I mentioned one person who is a graduate of our program named Rui Qian. He works at AECOM in Beijing. Very smart guy. And you mentioned transit oriented development. He’s speaking and developing the idea of infrastructure-oriented design, which is a really synthetic, multidisciplinary approach to urban design. That opens the field to any number of actors and looks at design in many, many layers. from natural systems. He was trained as a landscape architect, by the way, to build infrastructure, to the buildings that are plugged into that infrastructure. There is not an aesthetic ax to grind in this and there’s no formula to this. But it seems to be a very rich and exciting avenue for exploration, and he’s doing it. And this is a fellow, who like you, was in the MUD program, and returned to his home city, Beijing. And I think that’s very important too, that people should know their place well and be able to read it carefully. And he’s carved a section at AECOM, which is the biggest architecture and engineering company in the world, along this line, not only for Beijing, and China, of course, but urban design delivering worldwide. So I would point to him as an example, but he’s not well known and he’s not some hero, and he’s not photographed. He’s not a name. But he is somebody who’s very thoughtful and has opened up his office to a new process.
What do you try to teach urban design students?
Well, what I’ve been talking about, to see and translate opportunities and to design for them. I believe very much in looking at sites deeply and visiting sites and dealing with real material on the site, I believe in looking at political and social and cultural contexts. I believe in common work, across disciplines, whenever there’s a mixture of kinds of students, in my studio, I try to have them work together so they can teach each other. Whenever they’re different nationalities in the studio, I try to encourage group work around those differences, so that people can teach each other about the national cultural situations. Because urban design is global. And most of the work around the world now is being done in cities. And people need to not only change their shape regarding the project at hand, but also be able to see and hear and interpret these differences around the world and be comfortable. They can’t become other people, but they can listen and look carefully at these different situations. So I try to get them to do that.
What is a common misconception about urban design?
Yeah, they think we’re urban planners. The first urban planning-- urban design in this country, I think was 1947. At Harvard, at the GSD. There are many, many more urban design programs popping up around the country than when I was directing here. There may have been 13, 14. There may be double that number now as schools recognize it as a discipline, and also recognize the opportunity to make connections in this global shift into cities, and also responding to professional demands. Offices that are going to survive are going to have to be able to provide urban design. Because this is where the work is. So the offices need to move out of, say, just architecture into urban design, into landscape architecture, and other disciplines that they’re going to thrive. And I think, a common example, that Skidmore is an example, that there are others, and these tend to be the corporate firms. They have size, the scale, the economies to operate in this multidisciplinary way. Why do you think they’re mopping up so much of the work around the world? Because they can provide this range of services.
Where do you think urban design is heading?
Well, again, urban design will go through transformation, some shifts that I can’t anticipate as cities change. Certainly, the climate crisis is going to affect urban design deeply. Urban designers should be at the forefront addressing this issue. Cities are developed among all the dangerous locations in the world because they were water-driven, economic and transportation centers and the waters are starting to rise. And this is going to create a real emergency for countries and urban designers can confront, if we become realistic and confront those challenges. Some places are, other places aren’t. But we can see the effects as we’ve discussed in class and New York, very visibly now. And there’s always a lag between crisis and response. But we have seen, as we’ve discussed in class, that urban design is often a reaction to crisis. And when the crisis becomes overwhelming, I think you will see urban design make radical shifts and hopefully become a discipline that helps organize people, politically, to take action, by promoting theory, by promoting ideas that get published and are discussed publicly. This is what happened after the first World War, when designers took the lead. After the devastation of the first World War, but also the second, designers took the lead in conjuring visions of what this post accomplished, ah, capitalist, too many vowels. This post crisis world would be, and we’re coming into this crisis, the Earth is now our enemy. It is. The earth is our enemy. And our resources should be poured into addressing this crisis, as if we were at war with the earth, because the earth is no longer a friend, we made it our enemy. And it’s going to take massive amounts of investment to address this problem.
I’m going to be dead!
You guys are going to be living with this, I’ll be dead. So, you know, I’m encouraging my students to carry the flag forward and address this. But again, out of crisis will come a response. How bad that crisis has to become, I’m not sure. But designers have usually responded to crisis. We have to stop calling it climate change or global warming. We need to call it... climate catastrophe... or something along those lines.