Abstract
In this paper, I explore connections between two disciplines not typically linked: argumentation theory and urban design. I first trace historical ties between the art of reasoned discourse and the idea of civic virtue. I next analyze discourse norms implicit in three theories of urban design: Jane Jacobs' The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961), Christopher Alexander's A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction (1977), and Peter Katz's The New Urbanism: Toward an Architecture of Community (1994). I then propose a set of ‘settlement’ issues of potential interest to both urban designers and argumentation theorists: size, density, heterogeneity, publicity, security, and identity. I conclude by suggesting that the ‘good city’ be seen as both a spatial and a discursive entity. From such a perspective, good public discourse is dependent, at least in part, on good public space; and good public space is defined, at least in part, as a context conducive to good public discourse.
Similar content being viewed by others
REFERENCES
Ackerman, J. and S. Oates: 1996, 'Image, Text, and Power in Architectural Design and Workplace Writing', in A. H. Duin and C. J. Hansen (eds.), Nonacademic Writing: Social Theory and Technology, Lawrence Erlbaum, Hillsdale, NJ.
Alexander, C., S. Ishikawa and M. Silverstein (with M. Jacobson, I. Fiksdahl-King and S. Angel): 1977, A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction, Oxford UP, NewYork.
Arendt, H.: 1958, The Human Condition, University of Chicago Press, Chicago.
Bellah, R. N., R. Madsen, W. M. Sullivan, A. Swidler and S. M. Tipton: 1985, Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life, Harper & Row, New York.
Bellah, R. N., R. Madsen, W. M. Sullivan, A. Swidler and S. M. Tipton: 1991, The Good Society, Alfred A. Knopf, New York.
Bender, T.: 1984, 'The Erosion of Public Cultures: Cities, Discourses, and Professional Disciplines', in T. L. Haskell (ed.), The Authority of Experts: Studies in History and Theory, Indiana UP, Bloomington, pp. 84-106.
Booth, W. C.: 1974, Modern Dogma and the Rhetoric of Assent, University of Chicago Press, Chicago.
Calthorpe, P.: 1994, 'The Region', in P. Katz (ed.), The New Urbanism: Toward an Architecture of Community, McGraw-Hill, New York, pp. xi-xvi.
Cicero: 1968, De inventione, Trans. H. M. Hubbell, Harvard UP, Cambridge, MA.
Crick, B.: 1962/1992, In Defense of Politics, 4th ed., University of Chicago Press, Chicago.
Cuff, D.: 1985, 'Collaboration and the Ideal of Individualism in Architecture', in P. Heyer and S. Grabow (eds.), Architecture and the Future: Proceedings of the 72nd Annual Meeting of the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture, 1984, ACSA, Washington, DC, pp. 188-195.
Cuff, D.: 1989, 'Mirrors of Power: Reflective Professionals in the Neighborhood', in J. Wolch and M. Dear (eds.), The Power of Geography: How Territory Shapes Social Life, Unwin Hyman, Boston, pp. 331-350.
Cuff, D.: 1991, Architecture: The Story of Practice, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA.
D'Entrèves, M. P.: 1994, The Political Philosophy of Hannah Arendt, Routledge, London.
De Romilly, J.: 1992, The Great Sophists in Periclean Athens, Trans. J. Lloyd, Clarendon Press, Oxford.
Duany, A. and E. Plater-Zyberk: 1994, 'The Neighborhood, the District, and the Corridor', in P. Katz (ed.), The New Urbanism: Toward an Architecture of Community, McGraw-Hill, New York, pp. xvii-xx.
Dunlap, L.: 1992, 'Advocacy and Neutrality: A Contradiction in the Discourse of Urban Planners', in A. Herrington and C. Moran (eds.), Writing, Teaching, and Learning in the Disciplines, Modern Language Association, New York, pp. 213-230.
Elshtain, J. B.: 1995, Democracy on Trial, Basic Books, New York.
Ewing, R.: 1997, 'Is Los Angeles-Style Sprawl Desirable?', Journal of the American Planning Association 63(1), 107-126.
Fischer F. and J. Forester (eds.): 1993, The Argumentative Turn in Policy Analysis and Planning, Duke UP, Durham, NC.
Fleming, D.: 1996, 'Professional-Client Discourse in Design: Variation in Accounts of Social Roles and Material Artifacts by Designers and Their Clients', Text 16(2), 133-160.
Fleming, D.: 1997, 'Learning to Link Artifact and Value: The Arguments of Student Designers', Language and Learning Across the Disciplines 2(1), 58-84.
Forester, J.: 1989, Planning in the Face of Power, University of California Press, Berkeley.
Gaonkar, D. P.: 1990, 'Rhetoric and Its Double: Reflections on the Rhetorical Turn in the Human Sciences', in H. W. Simons (eds.), The Rhetorical Turn: Invention and Persuasion in the Conduct of Inquiry, University of Chicago Press, Chicago.
Gaonkar, D. P.: 1997, 'The Idea of Rhetoric in the Rhetoric of Science', in A. G. Gross and W. M. Keith (eds.), Rhetorical Hermeneutics: Invention and Interpretation the the Age of Science, State University of New York Press, Albany, pp. 25-85.
Garreau, J.: 1991, Edge City: Life on the New Frontier, Doubleday, New York.
Garver, E.: 1994, Aristotle'sRhetoric: An Art of Character, University of Chicago Press, Chicago.
Glendon, M. A.: 1991, Rights Talk: The Impoverishment of Political Discourse, The Free Press, New York.
Gordon, P. and H. W. Richardson: 1997, 'Are Compact Cities a Desirable Planning Goal?', Journal of the American Planning Association 63(1), 95-106.
Gutman, A. and D. Thompson: 1996, Democracy and Disagreement, Belknap Press (Harvard UP), Cambridge, MA.
Habermas, J.: 1970, Toward a Rational Society: Student Protest, Science, and Politics, Trans. J. J. Shapro, Beacon Press, Boston.
Habermas J.: 1962/1989: The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, Trans. T. Burger with F. Lawrence, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA.
Halloran, S. M.: 1982, 'Rhetoric in the American College Curriculum: The Decline of Public Discourse', Pre/Text 3(3), 245-269.
Jacobs, J.: 1961, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Random House, New York.
Katz, P.: 1994, The New Urbanism: Toward an Architecture of Community, McGraw-Hill, New York.
Kay, J. H.: 1997, Asphalt Nation: How the Automobile Took Over America, and How We can Take it Back, Crown, New York.
Kostoff, S.: 1991, The City Shaped: Urban Patterns and Meanings through History, Bullfinch Press (Little Brown), Boston.
Kowinski, W. S.: 1985, The Malling of America: An Inside Look at the Great Consumer Paradise, William Morrow, New York.
Kunstler, J. H.: 1993, The Geography of Nowhere: The Rise and Decline of America's Man-Made Landscape, Simon & Schuster, New York.
Lasch, C.: Spring, 1990, 'Journalism, Publicity, and the Lost Art of Argument', Gannett Center Journal, n.p.
Lynch, K.: 1981, Good City Form, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA.
MacIntyre, A.: 1981, After Virtue, A Study in Moral Theory, Notre Dame, UP, Notre Dame,IN.
Margolin, V. (ed.): 1989, Design Discourse: History, Theory, Criticism, University of Chicago Press, Chicago.
Medway, P.: 1996, 'Virtual and Material Buildings: Construction and Constructivism in Architecture and Writing', Written Communication 13(4), 473-514.
Meier, C.: 1980/1990, The Greek Discovery of Politics, Trans. D. McLintock, Harvard UP, Cambridge, MA.
Miller, C. R.: 1993, 'The Polisas Rhetorical Community', Rhetorica 11(3), 211-240.
Mooney, M.: 1985, Vico in the Tradition of Rhetoric, Princeton UP, Princeton.
Moule, E. and S. Polyzoides: 1994, 'The Street, The Block, and the Building', in P. Katz (ed.), The New Urbanism: Toward an Architecture of Community, McGraw-Hill, NewYork, pp. xxi-xxiv.
Murray, O.: 1990, 'Cities of Reason', in O. Murray and S. Price (eds.), The Greek City from Homer to Alexander, Clarendon Press, Oxford, pp. 1-25.
Neel, J.: 1988, Plato, Derrida, and Writing, Southern Illinois UP, Carbondale.
Nelson, J. S., A. Megill and D. N. McCloskey (eds.): 1987, The Rhetoric of the Human Sciences: Language and Argument in Scholarship and Public Affairs, University of Wisconsin Press, Madison.
Plato: 1956, Protagoras and Meno, Trans. W. K. C. Guthrie, Penguin, London.
Pocock, J. G. A.: 1975, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition, Princeton UP, Princeton.
Rybczynski, W.: 1995, City Life: Urban Expectations in a New World, Scribner, New York.
Schiappa, E.: 1991, Protagoras andLogos: A Study in Greek Philosophy and Rhetoric, University of South Carolina Press, Columbia, SC.
Schön, D. A.: 1983, The Reflective Practitioner: How Professionals Think in Action, Basic Books, New York.
Scully, V.: 1994, 'The Architecture of Community', in P. Katz (ed.), The New Urbanism: Toward an Architecture of Community, McGraw-Hill, New York, pp. 221-230.
Seigel, J. E.: 1968, Rhetoric and Philosophy in Renaissance Humanism: The Union of Eloquence and Wisdom, Petrarch to Valla, Princeton UP, Princeton.
Sennett, R.: 1977, The Fall of Public Man, Alfred A. Knopf, New York.
Simons, H. W. (ed.): 1989, Rhetoric in the Human Sciences, Sage, London.
Simons, H. W. (ed.): 1990, The Rhetorical Turn: Invention and Persuasion in the Conduct of Inquiry, University of Chicago Press, Chicago.
Sorkin, M. (ed.): 1992, Variations on a Theme Park: The New American City and the End of Public Space, Holt, New York.
Stotsky, S.: 1991, Connecting Civic Education and Language Education: The Contemporary Challenge, Teachers College Press, New York.
Toulmin, S.: 1992, 'Logic, Rhetoric & Reason: Redressing the Balance', in F. H. van Eemeren, R. Grootendorst, J. A. Blair and C. A. Willard (eds.), Argumentation Illuminated, SICSAT, Amsterdam, pp. 3-11.
van Eemeren, F. H. and R. Grootendorst: 1992, Argumentation, Communication, and Fallacies: A Pragma-Dialectical Perspective, Lawrence Erlbaum, Hillsdale, NJ.
Vernant, J.-P.: 1962/1982, The Origins of Greek Thought, Cornell UP, Ithaca, NY.
Walton, D. N.: 1989, Informal Logic: A Handbook for Critical Argumentation, Cambridge UP, Cambridge.
'Whatever Became of the Public Square?': 1990, Forum with J. Hitt, R. L. Fleming, E. Plater-Zyberk, R. Sennett, J. Wines, and E. Zimmerman, Harper's(July), pp. 49-60.
Whyte, W. H.: 1988, City: Rediscovering the Center, Doubleday, New York.
Wycherley, R. E.: 1947/1969, How the Greeks Built Cities, 2nd ed. Garden City, Doubleday, NY.
Wirth, L.: 1938, 'Urbanism as a Way of Life', The American Journal of Sociology 44(1), 1-24.
Yunis, H.: 1996, Taming Democracy: Models of Political Rhetoric in Classical Athens, Cornell UP, Ithaca, NY.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Fleming, D. The Space of Argumentation: Urban Design, Civic Discourse, and the Dream of the Good City. Argumentation 12, 147–166 (1998). https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1007735612744
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1007735612744