I have been wanting to write this post since August 2012, but have didn't yet have an answer to the title. I'm excited to be here.
The problem was that I was reading and thinking about things with names like Urban Design, Urban Studies, Urban Planning, Landscape Urbanism, etc. to figure out what Urban Design is. This was a logical approach, but I was too close to the subject to get it in focus, I needed to step back. It turns out that all along, the most simple and useful definition of Urban Design is one I wrote myself, in my head, last week:
landscape architecture in an urban context
The problem was that I was reading and thinking about things with names like Urban Design, Urban Studies, Urban Planning, Landscape Urbanism, etc. to figure out what Urban Design is. This was a logical approach, but I was too close to the subject to get it in focus, I needed to step back. It turns out that all along, the most simple and useful definition of Urban Design is one I wrote myself, in my head, last week:
landscape architecture in an urban context
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| International Fountain by Kenichi Nakano and Assocates, 1995 a fine example of urban design that is clearly landsape architecture it is a city park - a park that functions like a city |
What do you do as an urban designer? You do Landscape Architecture!
Wikipedia* has a slightly more nuanced explanation that admits urban design almost completely overlaps with other disciplines but is still confusing:
An autobiographical note:
I was first introduced to the term urban design by my Urban Studies Major handbook at Berkeley that listed "tracks" in the major including real estate, transportation, housing, and ...urban design. I circled it my freshman year, partly out of poetic intrigue. I noted the College of Environmental Design's Urban Design Post-Professional degree, which led me to believe its students graduated to find jobs in their field. I reasoned that an undergrad degree in urban design would lead to a job too. Fast forward to my job hunt: I found job postings with the title Urban Designer, but never ones with the prefix Junior or Intern that traditional disciplines had. My post To Be an Urban Designer responds to the frustration a job posting that makes you believe you need to be just about everything including a registered architect, and 50 years old, to do urban design. Thus my most recently held theory has been that urban design is something people do at a very senior level in all of the built environment disciplines, it is a kind of architecture/planning/landscape nirvana, where you can visualize the city on a large enough scale to make decisions that affect thousands of people - with great power comes great responsibility.
My recent epiphany is not that urban design doesn't happen on this elevated level, but that it happens ALL THE TIME in landscape architecture, in the creation of parks, plazas, streets, multimodal trails, campuses, parking lots, every front yard and planting strip, and a million unofficial places. And that is where urban design comes down to the people, where there is space for participation, even radical praxis.
* I do respect Wikipedia as an authority in this case because I am looking for widely held definitions of disciplines that will be of practical use rather than precise theoretical definitions.
Urban design may encompass the preparation of design guidelines and regulatory frameworks, and in this sense overlaps with urban planning. It may encompass the design of particular spaces and structures and in this sense overlaps with architecture, landscape architecture, highway engineering and industrial design. It may also deal with ‘place management’ to guide and assist the use and maintenance of urban areas and public spaces.The explanation of Landscape Architecture Wikipedia* encompasses everything I think of as Urban Design:
The scope of the profession includes: urban design; site planning; stormwater management; town or urban planning; environmental restoration; parks and recreation planning; visual resource management; green infrastructure planning and provision; and private estate and residence landscape master planning and design; all at varying scales of design, planning and management.It looks to me like not all landscape architecture is urban design, but if it's in a city, it more than likely is!
An autobiographical note:
I was first introduced to the term urban design by my Urban Studies Major handbook at Berkeley that listed "tracks" in the major including real estate, transportation, housing, and ...urban design. I circled it my freshman year, partly out of poetic intrigue. I noted the College of Environmental Design's Urban Design Post-Professional degree, which led me to believe its students graduated to find jobs in their field. I reasoned that an undergrad degree in urban design would lead to a job too. Fast forward to my job hunt: I found job postings with the title Urban Designer, but never ones with the prefix Junior or Intern that traditional disciplines had. My post To Be an Urban Designer responds to the frustration a job posting that makes you believe you need to be just about everything including a registered architect, and 50 years old, to do urban design. Thus my most recently held theory has been that urban design is something people do at a very senior level in all of the built environment disciplines, it is a kind of architecture/planning/landscape nirvana, where you can visualize the city on a large enough scale to make decisions that affect thousands of people - with great power comes great responsibility.
My recent epiphany is not that urban design doesn't happen on this elevated level, but that it happens ALL THE TIME in landscape architecture, in the creation of parks, plazas, streets, multimodal trails, campuses, parking lots, every front yard and planting strip, and a million unofficial places. And that is where urban design comes down to the people, where there is space for participation, even radical praxis.
* I do respect Wikipedia as an authority in this case because I am looking for widely held definitions of disciplines that will be of practical use rather than precise theoretical definitions.
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