TEACHING URBAN DESIGN in that same specific space may reduce the clarity of products. Or, the other way round, a design may look good and offer the perfect solution to create, for example, a beautiful public square but nevertheless the square will remain barren because it doesn’t relate to conditions on a bigger scale or take into account the complex relations that make a square a good public space - a space where people want to hang out. If urban design provides the spectrum of services referred to above, it does so because of the evolution of relations between architecture and planning. In this course, urban planning has incidentally retreated from substantial areas of engagement during the last half century. In the shift from substantial to procedural urban planning - these terms are used here in the Faludian sense - urban design partly occupied the void that planning left on the substantial side. There was a time, now commonly remembered as Post-modernism - the
Berlin wall was still intact then - when urban design was hailed as a great promise. And to some extent this is true because this was the time when urban design established itself as a proper and accepted academic (sub-?) discipline - even though, through the legacy of the likes of Camillo Sitte and Joseph StĂźbben, critical mass existed well before that. What limits urban design as a discipline is again related to the substitute effect described above: urban planning did not retreat from substantial planning because it could not provide solutions for substantial spaces but because of the increasing rejection of the underlying normative and ideological objective of its rational and abstract spaces which was derived from an industrial production of social space. Urban design filled this void by advancing concepts like genius loci and the analysis of existing conditions and unlocking the true potential of sites. It therefore
Final design based on the Urban Framework Big Box Urbanism. Image credit: Boxymoron, WS 2015/16
144 CITY OBSERVER | June 2016