The Process of Urban Design
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.
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THE PROCESS OF URBAN DESIGN
he 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. The future dwarfs the past. Urban
Sketching out the process of urban design. When I became chief urban designer, I realized I
growth today is upon us at a scale greater than the world
needed a framework to explain to
has ever experienced, and we need transformation
others how the process of urban
faster than we can produce it.
Washburn)
A. Washburn, The Nature of Urban Design: A New York Perspective on Resilience, DOI 10.5822/978-1-61091-516-8_2, © 2013 Alexandros Washburn
design works. (Credit: Alexandros
51
The process of urban design has responded suc-
gets built; politics takes many forms in the urban de-
cessfully and quickly to threats in the past. When
sign process. It can be top-down authoritarianism, à
the spread of infectious disease through the tubercu-
la Robert Moses, or it can be bottom-up community
lar tenements of the Lower East Side threatened the
activism, à la Jane Jacobs. Whatever the form of the
health of New York City in the 1890s, someone had to
political decision making, nothing can happen un-
ask: how can we change the design of the city to stop
til a decision is made, because politics decides how
the spread of disease? New building and sanitation
public resources will be used, who will benefit from a
codes and new water and transportation systems de-
change, and who will pay the bills. Even withholding
termined through a process of urban design allowed
a decision is a form of political power. A wise old bu-
New York to continue to grow while removing the
reaucrat once told me, “True power is not the power to
threat that one out of every two New Yorkers would
say yes or no; it is the power to say nothing at all.” By
die of infectious disease.
delaying decision, a government can starve a promis-
Today the question for urban designers is what
ing prospect or exact a dreadful concession.
are the specific rules, plans, and projects that will
Likewise if the forces of finance are ignored, there
transform how a city is built and that will allow it to
is no hope of implementation. A successful financial
grow sustainably? The urban design process is the
model is the transformational trigger that allows rep-
path to answering those questions. As with any de-
etition of the elements to form the eventual urban
sign process, urban design features a repetitive cycle
design pattern. Finance is what allows elements to
of ob
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