Abstract
The products of urban design may differ in every era, but the process stays the same. It is a kaleidoscope producing maddeningly complex patterns from the overlap of three not very transparent forces: politics, finance, and design.
When a city’s pattern of growth eventually threatens its well-being, compliance becomes counterproductive, and urban design must come to grips with its own failings, now revealed in the excesses of the previous pattern, and begin anew. Pattern, repetition, flaw—how could it be otherwise? We are human, after all. But there is no time now to brood over past mistakes or to settle old scores.
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Notes
- 1.
Carol Burns and Andrea Kahn, “Introduction,” in Site Matters, Burns and Kahn, ed. (London: Routledge, 2005), xii. I use “influence” to refer to the largest scale because influence is diffuse and difficult to measure. I use “effect” to refer to the intermediate scale because an effect should be measurable and mappable to its cause.
- 2.
The Vertical Farm, http://www.verticalfarm.com/.
- 3.
Nikos Salingaros, Principles of Urban Structure (Amsterdam: Techne Press, 2005), p. 227.
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© 2013 Alexandros Washburn
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Washburn, A. (2013). The Process of Urban Design. In: The Nature of Urban Design. Island Press, Washington, DC. https://doi.org/10.5822/978-1-61091-516-8_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.5822/978-1-61091-516-8_2
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