Urban Design as Social Benefit: Thinking Beyond Formality and Physicality

While the term 'urban design' is ubiquitous within the realms of planning, architecture, government, and commercial development, it remains a term without a universally-agreed referent, and, perhaps more contentiously, an enterprise without an explicit commitment to societal betterment.In respect of end products, urban design may manifest itself via both concrete and strategic outcomes, may be directed at both public and semi-public spaces, and may operate over a range of scales.In respect of specific determinants, urban design responses may be motivated and driven by formal and/or aesthetic issues, by economics, by statutory or regulatory requirements, by political ideologies, by the dictates and incentives of speculative development, or by a range of specific community requirements.Yet notwithstanding the reasonableness and inevitability of such differences, this paper postulates that all of the above should be construed within a wider social frame, and suggests that the outcomes of the urban design process should confer significant social benefit.And while it is usually taken as read that urban design always has both the intention and the potential to make positive contributions, it is nevertheless the case that, from a social perspective, the determination and fulfilment of specific and contingent outcomes inescapably suggests the likelihood of discrimination against, and thus disbenefit for, some, and the possibility of under-valuing, selectively deforming, or simply ignoring 'big picture' considerations pertaining to infrastructure and transportation, land use, sustainability, social cohesion and inclusivism, place identity, and so forth.Moreover, from a design perspective, the seduction of an over-riding commitment to physicality, to the architectonics of form, and thus to aesthetic and methodological determinism, is an ever-present issue worthy of closer consideration.It is this last feature of contemporary urban design that is explored in this paper.