Foundations of Urban Design

Marcel Smets

Foundations of Urban Design

Actar / Public Space

Marcel Smets

Foundations of Urban Design

Actar / Public Space

Introduction This book has its origins in the Legacy Award I received from property developer Matexi in 2016. The CEO at the time, Gaëtan Hannecart, had set up the award to preserve the expertise that significant people in our field had acquired over the course of their extensive careers. He invited me to synthesize the fundamental lessons that my theoretical and project-based research, as well as my practice as a policy adviser, had taught me about urban design. For him, this personal experience was a valuable form of implicit knowledge that had to be passed on to future generations in an intelligible way.

In the intricate process of formulating a meaningful answer to this apparently simple question, I gained a number of essential insights. On the one hand, I realized that attempting to synthesize the complex layered nature of spatial design in a few forceful principles would be a mistake. Indeed, there is good reason why the training to become an urban designer requires years of study, application and apprenticeship. On the other hand, it did seem feasible to identify recurring concepts that have played a role in the design of cities throughout history. Their appearance at different periods of time clearly demonstrated the fundamental importance of these theories for urban design. By sounding out their meaning, it would become possible to understand the insights on which our design-based reflection rested. Without delving deeper into the method that enabled us to synthesize these concepts into a meaningful project, we could still manage to discover the ‘foundations’ of urban design.

Proceeding by this methodology, I might succeed to open up the core ideas of urban design to the wider public. Contributing to such a form of intellectual emancipation in the field of urban development would help people to look at the urban environment with a trained eye.

It would inspire them to be more demanding with regard to its overall spatial quality. To achieve this ambition, however, I would need to incite my readers to reflect by themselves on the concepts I advanced.

My responsibility went beyond making the ‘foundations’ that were set out clear and comprehensible. I also had to provoke readers into

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FOUNDATIONS OF URBAN DESIGN

INTRODUCTION

06

confronting their insights into the built environment with the perspectives that would emerge from my texts. The multiple meaning of the concepts I proposed would then be constructed through the implicit dialogue with the reader’s own views and opinions.

To promote this dialogue, I chose not to approach the selected concepts singly, but to illuminate them from complementary viewpoints. Spatial concepts or design attitudes only fully acquire their ‘holistic’ character when one understands, as an assessor, that they lead to a certain result in one case, but that in another design they can be implemented in a different but equally consistent way. By contrasting both views, each one of them is clarified individually – through opposition with the other. In addition, the main concern underlying both views is made more obvious.

Working with antagonisms inevitably raises the question of which of the two (contrasting) visions or interpretations should prevail. Without evading the question, I would like to offer a few thoughts that may help us to approach the following texts aptly. First of all, the antagonisms that are played off against each other in this publication are not intrinsically in opposition with one another but are rather complementary. One view supplements the other and is not necessarily in conflict with it. Complementarity prevails in some pairs of concepts, while in others it is difference. In the former case, the more obvious choice is dictated by context. In the latter case, the preference results from a sociocultural consideration. Despite the detachment required for a thorough analysis of an idea or characteristic, the careful reader will undoubtedly see my contextual and social involvement shine through in the texts.

This barely concealed personal stance does not prevent this volume from aiming first and foremost at clarifying the meaning of the foundations put forward. Its ambition is not to evaluate but to explain. The texts seek to illuminate the key concepts of urban design for everyone. They do not prescribe a course of action but let the reader decide how to deal with the proposed positions.

To avoid being long-winded or pedantic, all texts have deliberately been kept short. They attempt to gauge the essential substance of the concepts dealt with, but they also want to leave room for further

interpretation by the reader. Despite its rather strict configuration, this volume aspires to stimulate the imagination. It is not a textbook, but the start of a conversation about urban design. It hopes to broaden the discussion rather than settle it.

The illustrations are in line with this way of thinking. In the age of the internet, when interested readers can see the cited examples illustrated with two mouse clicks, it seemed indicated to complement the textual exposition with personal sketches. The intensive dialogue with Heinrich Altenmüller – to whom I offer my sincere thanks – resulted in images that interpret the texts in their own way, but whose self-sufficiency also leaves room for personal interpretation.

Marcel Smets

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FOUNDATIONS OF URBAN DESIGN

Foundations of Urban Design F01

Ribbon

Cluster

F02

Ladder Star

15

F03

Network Polynuclear Field

18

F04

Fabric

Citadel

23

F05

Fortified Castle Palace

26

F06

Tower Belfry

31

F07

Monument Icon

35

F08

Island Archipelago

39

F09

Oasis

42

F10

Market Square Parade Ground

47

F11

Cape Lighthouse

50

F12

Slope

55

F13

Threshold Transition

58

F14

Street Road

63

F15

Path Avenue

68

F16

Brook Ditch

73

Camp

Step

10

F17

River

Canal

F18

Current Shelter

85

F19

Hole Void

88

F20

Natural Artificial

93

F21

Panorama Perspective

98

F22

Appearance Experience

105

F23

Use Morphology

109

F24

Grid

115

F25

Creator

F26

Blueprint Implementation Incremental Development

125

F27

Continuity Change

129

F28

Growth Improvement

133

F29

Reminiscence Renovation

136

Composition Curator

79

120

F01

10

Ribbon—Cluster

A settlement comes into being through an accumulation of built-on plots. In its most primitive form, such a settlement is made by a juxtaposition of farmsteads along a common access road. This is the primal form of the ribbon. Each plot stands on its own. And each is in principle large enough to be self-sufficient.

Its size enables the individual family to build a house and live off agriculture and cattle breeding.

The plot is private. The road is collective. The road opens up the plots and provides access to the rest of the world. The road allows for exchanges with travelling artisans and between the plots themselves, among others for barter in the manorial economy. It constitutes the only collective element – the only urban component – in this type of urbanization.

The road has neither beginning nor end. The ribbon can always be extended. Hypothetically, the accumulation of plots is infinite. The only condition restricting the length of the ribbon is the walking distance between the scattered plots or the remote position of collective destinations. For even the most autonomous household in terms of lifestyle or production method still requires certain shared facilities: jetties on lakes and rivers, markets or supply points, temples for religious services.

Besides the primal form of the agricultural settlement, the ribbon also involves other types of applications. In the late eighteenth century, mansions emerged in British spas and leisure resorts.

Located along ring roads on royal plots, these mansions gave onto landscaped parks. They were self-sufficient thanks to their domestic staff. In this sumptuous form of urbanization, the size of the lots was no longer determined by agricultural yield but by social status. Its plot surface was primarily intended to create a garden large enough to highlight the status of its ‘bourgeois palace’.

This model of stringing together self-sufficient plots persisted in the nineteenth and especially also in the twentieth century.

The size of the plots decreased gradually and the little ‘villas’ built on them moved closer and closer to each other. The introduction

of the tram and metro, at first, and later also of the car extended the serviceable length of the ribbons. The appearance of domestic appliances, telecommunications and later the internet firstly increased the autonomy of the individual house and ultimately connected every household directly with the world. The initial limitation of the ribbon came to disappear. The ensuing decentralization of collective facilities instigated the phenomenon of urban sprawl, the contemporary expression of the ribbon.

The cluster is the complement of the ribbon. The cluster results, not from the juxtaposition of plots, but from their densification. The primal form of the cluster goes back to the first extension of the medieval suburbium, around the gates of its earliest city walls. It appeared as an organic entwining of building plots around a main trunk with branches and twigs. For the distance to the city gate could always be reduced by laying a cross-connection rather than prolonging the approach road. The shared concern about minimizing the walking time to the communal destination of gate and city thus served as an organizing principle. The cluster took on an ingrained form of functional hierarchy. From the lane, one first had to go along the residential street to reach the area’s distribution road, and from there the city’s radial artery.

The settlement pattern of the cluster is therefore dictated by the communality of the first core. The cluster grows out of the intention to optimize proximity and the willingness to adapt the allotment pattern to a reduction of the distance to the common goal. Contrary to the ribbon, the configuration of the plot is no longer determined by the yield of the ground, but by participation in a collective existence.

The cluster represents a different economic model from the ribbon, one that is no longer centred on agriculture and the manorial economy, but on trade and industry. Its plots are no longer self-supporting, but founded on the exchange inherent to urban life.

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FOUNDATIONS OF URBAN DESIGN

RIBBON—CLUSTER

12

Unlike the ribbon, the cluster is essentially limited. If the cluster grows too big, proximity to the city gate – or, more generally, to the collective destination – is lost. Because the advantages of concentrated settlements disappear if the extent of the area on which that form of concentration takes place brings with it a distance that is not proportionate to the force of attraction of the collective facilities.

Old maps of medieval cities clearly show the cluster-shaped structure and functional hierarchy of the medieval fabric along the radial road. But typical nineteenth-century factory districts are also organized in cluster-shaped patterns. Series of standard housing types are spread around the factory in such a way that its access – on foot – is facilitated for the workers. Narrow rows of houses stand perpendicularly to long ‘draining streets’ leading to the factory gate. Today’s favelas are modern examples of the cluster. Often built on hilly terrain, these informal settlements follow a logic of compact land occupation and hierarchical street layout starting from the access road to the official city.

RIBBON

CLUSTER

The road has neither beginning nor end. The ribbon can always be extended. Hypothetically, the accumulation of plots is infinite.

The cluster is the complement of the ribbon. The cluster results, not from the juxtaposition of plots, but from their densification.

13

LADDER

14

STAR

The ladder originates from the natural densification of the ribbon.

The star comes into being through the multiplication of clusters along the approach roads of the urban core.

F02

Ladder—Star

The ladder originates from the natural densification of the ribbon. Indeed, the linear extension of the ribbon is limited by the walking distance it imposes. To reduce this distance, the ribbon can be duplicated by constructing a parallel road nearby. Integrating both roads into a unifying system additionally requires cross-connections at regular intervals. In this sense, the formation of the ladder is related to the creation of communal facilities.

It stems from the need to make these amenities accessible to all inhabitants.

Because of the advantages inherent to settling near flowing water, the ladder often encompasses both flanks of a valley. The initial ribbon, with plots that give onto a brook or watercourse, is then duplicated on the other side of the dale. The ladder extends on both banks, at a sufficient distance from the bed to limit the risk of flooding. The intermediate space – the flood area of the brook – generally remains empty. The cross-connections enabling the system to function as a whole make the boggy terrain traversable.

In the ladder structure, the intersections of rungs and stiles form the locations of choice for the establishment of community facilities and the creation of hamlets. The denser the fabric, the greater the yield of the facilities and the stronger the nodes. That difference in weight between the service provision of the nodes is reflected in the movements pattern. The latter creates a hierarchy within the ladder structure, which in turn stimulates a denser clustering and facilitates the reinforcement of existing cores.

Ladder structures have been used frequently throughout history. In the thirteenth century, they appear in the bastides, fortified settlements built in south-west France to serve as instruments of colonization and defence. The alleys and narrow lanes serving to prevent the spread of fire ensure that the elongated blocks remain traversable and model the city map into a near-perfect ladder form. In Delft and other Dutch dam cities, the ladder structure

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FOUNDATIONS OF URBAN DESIGN

LADDER—STAR

16

is a product of the drainage system. The streets along the canals form the rungs of the ladder. The alleys that connect the successive bridges make up the stiles. The municipality of Hoeilaart in Brabant developed around the broadening of the Kerkdam, one of the traversable connections between the parallel roads higher up on either side of the IJsse valley. The morphology of the Leie region, finally, reveals a structure of parallel roads with the Leie valley on which a hierarchical system of villages and cores came into being around the intersections with their transversal connections.

While the ladder emerges as the natural densification of the ribbon, the star comes into being through the multiplication of clusters along the approach roads of the urban core. For that reason, the primal form of the star is to be found in the radial medieval city. The land between its different clusters remains open and undeveloped. It generated the ‘rear sides’, the swamplands, meadows and bleaching fields that were part of our cities until the early nineteenth century.

The individual cluster is characterized by a hierarchical ramification of its street system, split up in trunk, branches and twigs.

When the clusters along the successive radial arteries expand, their main distribution streets – the branches in the classification above – run into one another. Joining these successive sections leads to new tangential connections. The cross-connections assemble into a concentric structure. They render the star traversable by making it possible to move from one cluster to another without having to pass through the core via the radial. In the medieval city, these cross-connections still present themselves as a random web of polygonal segments. In the idealized concepts from later periods, they become a substantial constituent of the city model, which generally comprises a succession of concentric streets. The crossings of these tangents with the radials are places where many people pass through. They represent central locations in which sub-cores and facilities thrive.

The star is a key figure in the urban design vocabulary. Many ideal cities from the Renaissance were envisioned in the shape of a star. Often, they were constructed as fortified towns (Palmanova, Philippeville, Mariembourg, Rocroi) where the star shape served to fire on advancing enemies from a central location. But later too, urbanists often returned to the radial or radio-concentric pattern, especially when they were eager to address the idea of a ‘centre’. In Paris, this tradition began with the Place des Victoires, a circular square designed in 1685 by Jules Hardouin-Mansart in such a way that the equestrian statue of Louis XIV would be visible from all arriving streets. The model achieved its climax under Napoleon III, with the construction around 1860 of Place de l’Étoile, from where twelve avenues fan out in a star-like shape to emphasize the Arc de Triomphe. A more recent example is Walter Burley Griffin’s prize-winning design in the 1912 international competition for the new Australian capital Canberra. The interconnected star-shaped figures of his plan define the city’s political, administrative and commercial centres.

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FOUNDATIONS OF URBAN DESIGN

F03

18

Network—Polynuclear Field Ladder and star are centripetal settlement patterns. They are turned inward. They are configured as micro-communities that strive for the optimization of neighbourhood-oriented objectives: adequate plots for common housing types, facilities accessible on foot, the preservation of natural grounds, and so forth. But the ladder and star are difficult to expand. Once they grow beyond a certain size, journeys become excessively long, supply lines get to be saturated, and central facilities are no longer accessible to all.

Ludwig Hilberseimer, a German urban theorist and planner who emigrated to America, realized this in 1944 already. That year he published his ideal model for the decentralized city, in which he aims at organizing the explosive urban expansion in the United States by grafting an in-theory endless number of ladder structures on a central highway. His intention was to combine the central and green pedestrian areas including schools and community centres – which, at a local level, had to ensure the formation of a neighbourhood centre, the permanence of ecological continuity but also the demarcation of the successive residential areas – with the smooth, universal accessibility of attraction poles on a regional level.

With the exception of such theoretical models, larger agglomerations and urbanized areas hardly ever assume the form of enlarged ladders or stars. Rather, they morphologically consist of an amalgam of fragments, which themselves may assume the spatial logic of a ladder or star. In order to make these fragments work as part of a larger whole, an overarching figure is required.

Roughly speaking, such a figure can take two forms: the network and the polynuclear field.

The network is an infrastructural system that serves the entire territory (in the case of energy or telephony) or opens it up (in the case of transport). The type of network depends on the scale of what people experience as a coherent territory. Initially it was meant to make the (agricultural) plots accessible and serve inci-

dental settlements. Later, these primal country roads developed into connecting roads between villages and incidental cities. With industrialization and the ensuing growth in trade, this composite system of local roadways entwining successive villages became inefficient to reach more distant destinations. To accelerate transport between the regional centres, high roads, railway lines and canals were created and established direct connections between the major cities.

To overcome a standstill of the high roads network under the explosive growth of car travel, engineers developed a new system of separate motorways. Because these motorways were positioned outside the cities and designed free of roadside constructions, as an autonomous network with separate lanes and without conventional intersections, their capacity and average driving speed grew exponentially. As such, they not only added a new hierarchy to the national (and later international) accessibility system, but they also realized a fundamentally different objective.

For the first time, one had created an infrastructural network that did not simply follow the urbanization pattern. For the motorway system did not only make poles of attraction accessible, it also opened up the entire country. As a self-sufficient network, it was not so much conceived to connect existing cores, but to serve the whole territory. It intended to create an equal, universal accessibility. It was meant to ensure that all destinations within the network were equally accessible from all points of origin within that network.

Achieving that egalitarian, territorial condition appears to be the fundamental objective of a properly functioning network.

In other words, the network is there to create isotropy. Thanks to the network, the territory acquires the same qualities everywhere.

When the mesh size of the motorway network gets to be small enough, every location gets to be situated at a short distance from this supralocal network and is therefore equally well connected to the world as any other location.

The territorial isotropy created by the network enables the city to spread unrestrictedly across the countryside. Contrary to the ladder and the star, the network therefore works centrifugally.

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FOUNDATIONS OF URBAN DESIGN

NETWORK—POLYNUCLEAR FIELD

20

It ensures that cities can expand, without dictating where that extension should occur. In itself, the network is non-hierarchical.

It opens places up to the production of new spatial programmes but does not define in advance what they should be or look like.

The network thus produces flexibility for specifying and designing future developments.

The network contrasts with the polynuclear field. The latter is founded on the observation that centripetal cities lose their intrinsic raison d’être when they grow out of proportion. Indeed, the logic of the star only holds if the distance to the communal centre remains reasonable for all its inhabitants. If the star grows too big, the proximity to the centre is lost. Instead of having the prevailing radial structure expand pointlessly, one therefore wins by multiplying it into a field of manageable and interconnected starlike structures. Urbanization thus arises as a system of regionally spread-out nuclei engaging in informal forms of cooperation. For that reason, the apparent dissolution of the city into an amorphous urbanized area should rather be seen as the formation of a polynuclear field which, through the planning of adequate and aptly chosen connections, can begin to operate as a territorial unity.

The Flemish nevelstad (nebular city) and the città diffusa in Veneto function as polynuclear fields. The (mainly unplanned) transition to this form of coagulated settlement appears like the by-product of the universal accessibility that accompanied the recent growth of the transport and communication network. In that sense, the polynuclear field rests as much on the territorial equivalence introduced by the network as on the sense of singularity and belonging that relates to the collective meaning of the core.

Network and polynuclear field are two sides of the same phenomenon. They are the positive and negative versions of the same photo, the cast and mould of the same statue. The main difference between both lies in the way in which they are viewed. The network creates a field in which things can emerge, but it also ensures that the existing cores in the polynuclear field get to be connected naturally.

NETWORK

POLYNUCLEAR FIELD

The network is an infrastructural system that serves the entire territory (in the case of energy or telephony) or opens it up (in the case of transport).

The polynuclear field is founded on the observation that centripetal cities lose their intrinsic raison d’être when they grow out of proportion.

21

FABRIC

22

CITADEL

A settlement structure that has developed organically is labelled as fabric. It is neither planned nor created.

Its shape is not predetermined.

The citadel is a type of settlement that has been planned from above and is designed on the basis of a specific, intrinsic functionalism.

F04

Fabric—Citadel

We label a settlement structure that has developed organically as fabric. It is neither planned nor created. Its shape is not predetermined. The fabric comes into being under the influence of local circumstances. Its configuration and spatial organization are determined by climate and composition of the soil. They reflect the economic or social conditions of the inhabitants.

This organic relationship between the built morphology and the characteristics of the place gets particularly articulated when the ground features differ significantly over a short distance. The overall structure of Mediterranean mountain villages, for instance, but also the layout of their streets and alleys and the position of their buildings closely reflect the topography of the hillside or mountain ridge they are constructed on. In the historic city centre of Berne, the texture of the streets and housing blocks ties in perfectly with the ground figure of the ness shaped by the local meander in the Aare river. But even in the absence of extreme preconditions, the shape of the fabric can be traced back to its underlying conditions. In the historic cities of Flanders, for instance, the location and shape of the squares is generally related to the type of market that took place there in the Middle Ages.

Opposite the fabric we find the citadel. The citadel is a type of settlement that has been planned from above and is designed on the basis of a specific, intrinsic functionalism. The citadel constitutes an enclave within the fabric. It does not conform to the formative logic and declines the particular character of the latter.

The primal form of the citadel – a fortified and ramparted structure defending the city but also ruling over it and exerting control – came about from a military perspective. Between the sixteenth and eighteenth century, many such autonomously conceived bastions appeared against the walls of major European cities: in Antwerp, Lille, Barcelona, Turin, Plymouth, Le Havre

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FOUNDATIONS OF URBAN DESIGN

FABRIC—CITADEL

24

and Helsingor, among others. During the colonization of North America, fortified encampments served as both base of operations and trading post. They emerged all over the occupied country, first on the East Coast along the main rivers, later as stepping stones for the conquest of the ‘Wild West’.

From the late eighteenth century onward, architecture applied itself to designing specific building types for the new institutions of the modern age. Accordingly, prisons and hospitals, but also schools, ministries and universities were systematically envisioned as citadels. They were built as separate fragments, streamlined on the basis of their own rationale. Their design is clearly dictated by internal efficiency. It neither takes into consideration their location, the composition of the soil or their relation to the surrounding constructions. In such a way, the ambition to exert maximum control with a minimum of staff led to the typology of both the star-shaped prison (which materialized in Ghent, Mechelen, Leuven and many other places) and the hospital, with separate pavilions on either sides of an open interior courtyard or a broad walkway (applied in, among others, Lariboisière Paris, Brugmann Laken and Bijloke Ghent). In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, the prototypical neo-Gothic colleges multiplied as bastions of Catholic education. After the Second World War, the corporate and financial world went looking for image-defining design and representativity. Buildings such as Bank Brussel Lambert (Brussels) and Royale Belge (WatermaalBosvoorde) were designed to be iconic but remain fundamentally self-centred objects. When safety became an important issue finally, the office complex alienated itself permanently from the bordering public space. It behaves like a contemporary citadel vis-à-vis the city it is embedded in, as the Berlaymont building in Brussels, the headquarters of the European Commission, nicely illustrates.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

142

Marcel Smets is emeritus professor of urban design at the University of Leuven (BE). He has been a visiting lecturer and critic at ILAUD (Urbino, 1976, 1979), the University of Thessaloniki (1987) and Harvard GSD (2002, 2003, 2004). During his academic career, he has written several books, including monographs on Huib Hoste (1972) and Charles Buls (1995/1999), as well as the reference works on the history of public housing (De ontwikkeling van de tuinwijkgedachte in België / L’Avènement de la Cité-Jardin en Belgique, 1977) and the reconstruction of Belgium after 1914 (Resurgam, 1985). Together with Kelly Shannon, he published the authoritative The Landscape of Contemporary Infrastructure (2010/2016). In 2016 he released the autobiographical De Stad ontwerpen. His articles have appeared in Archis, Casabella, Lotus, Planning Perspectives, Storia Urbana, Topos, Urbanisme and Urbanistica.

Marcel Smets acted as urban designer for the redevelopment of the station area in Leuven (1991–2002) and the transformation of Île de Nantes (2010–16). As a member of various teams, he has worked on the reappropriation of comprehensive port sites in Rouen (1993–94) and Genoa (1998/2001), the upgrading of obsolete industrial sites in Cornegliano (2001–02) and Treviso (2003–04), the regional development strategy for the Durance Valley (2009–11) and many other large-scale urban projects in Belgium and Europe.

His social commitment has manifested itself in his mandate as second Flemish Government Architect (2005–10), his work on the Scientific Committee of Europan (1988–2004) and his Presidency of the Institut pour la Ville en Mouvement (IVM, 2012–16).

Marcel Smets has also served as a jury member for several international competitions.

Since 2015 Marcel Smets has been a senior adviser for ORG Urbanism, the Brussels- and New York-based design firm led by his former collaborator Alexander D’Hooghe. He actively took part there in various projects, among others, the covering of the Antwerp Ring, the development plan for the riverbanks in Aalst, the Europalaan in Genk, the Regulatory Plan for and the design of the public domain in the Brussels Canal Zone, the development plan for the Science Park Leuven North and the refurbishment of the E411 urban motorway in the south-west of Brussels.

Marcel Smets was elected a member of the Royal Flemish Academy of Belgium in 2009. He was awarded the first MoRO Prize of Ghent University in 2014 and he received the Matexi Legacy Award in 2016.

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FOUNDATIONS OF URBAN DESIGN

FOUNDATIONS OF URBAN DESIGN

Distribution Actar D, Inc. New York, Barcelona

Author Marcel Smets

New York 440 Park Avenue South, 17th Floor New York, NY 10016, USA T +1 212 966 22 07 salesnewyork@actar-d.com

Illustrations Heinrich Altenmüller Translation from Dutch Patrick Lennon

Barcelona Roca i Batlle 2 08023 Barcelona, Spain T+34 933 282 183 eurosales@actar-d.com

Graphic design Atelier Sven Beirnaert

Printed in Belgium Publication date: September 2022

Printing and binding die Keure, Bruges

Published by Actar Publishers, New York, Barcelona www.actar.com Public Space, Belgium www.publicspace.be This work is subject to copyright. All rights are reserved, on all or part of the material, specifically translation rights, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilm or other media, and storage in databases. For use of any kind, permission of the copyright owner must be obtained.

ISBN 978-1-63840-033-2 LCCN 2022942359

‘Cities are complex organisms for which we often lack words. With this book, Marcel Smets not only offers an inspiring vocabulary to describe the spatial features of the city but, above all, a unique dictionnaire raisonné to discuss past and future interventions in our largest man-made artefact.’

Tom Avermaete, Chair for the History and Theory of Urban Design, ETH Zürich

‘These foundations are written and drawn with restraint but reveal the great strength of remaining focused on spatiality. Their combination and confrontation, however, entail a profusion of thought that exceeds spatiality. The pairs bring current preoccupations to mind more than an extensive discourse would. This publication has the rare ability to trigger complex thinking and design in the reader’s mind while making use of very simple elements.’

Aglaée Degros, Chair for Urban Planning and Design, TU Graz

‘More than a book on foundations, I suggest this is a founding book for a contemporary culture of re-presenting and projecting, discursively and designerly, post-industrial cities and territories.’

Cristina Purcar, Associate Professor, History of Art and Architecture, TU Cluj-Napoca

‘Yet, what is most intriguing and fascinating in the structure of this book remains the fact that urban design is not portrayed as a transitory phase in the approach of urbanism, a sort of intermission between the bookkeeper’s city of the modern and the nebulous town of the postmodern, but as the core of the urbanistic discipline as an urban science.’

‘Marcel Smets manages to bundle both timeless and contemporary urban design concepts, phenomena and paradigms into a rewarding source of inspiration for designers, policymakers, students and anyone who is concerned with the design and development of our environment. This inspiration is primarily triggered by its clear texts, brimming with historical and current best practices, as well as the equally clear diagrams that capture the essence in an appealing way and, above all, make you want to get to work.’

Maarten Van Acker, Professor of Urbanism and City Development, UAntwerp

‘Marcel Smets’ lexicon of fundamentals offers an operative conceptual framework for urban design, a series of spatial elements, systems and approaches that become a starter toolkit for the contemporary urbanist.

It is an important contribution to the idea of a reflective yet pragmatic form of urbanism that maps the existing urban condition and at the same time rewrites it as a series of spatial figures for a possible or even desired urbanity.

Moreover, the field of tension created in each of the dual concepts implies a political field in which power structures are spatially manifested and immediately encounter resistance that force the urbanist to take position and play an active and engaged role in the everchanging urban field.’

Els Verbakel, Head of the School of Architecture, Bezalel

Ed Taverne, Emeritus Professor, History of Architecture, RU Groningen

53995 9 781638

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