American Planning Association Urban Design/Preservation Division: Is Urban Design on the Right Track? [Forum]

Forum Tridib Banerjee, Todd W. Bressi, Philip Enquist, John Rahaim American Planning Association Urban Design/ Preservation Division Is Urban Design on the Right Track? These forum pages are produced under an agreement between Places/Design History Foun- dation and the American Planning Association, Urban Design and Preservation Division. This article reports on a session at the last national APA Conference, held April 14-17 in Chicago. The chair of APA’s Urban Design and Preservation Division is Karen Hundt. For more information about APA membership, upcoming programs and resources, visit www.planning.org. Todd W. Bressi: In the last decade, there seems to have been a growing interest in urban design and physical planning. Cities themselves, and urban ways of living, have seen a remarkable resurgence as well. University programs are proliferat- ing (although some are struggling for enrollment) as are general courses in urbanism. Firms and practitioners are adding urban design to their portfo- lios; cities, developers, civic groups are generating dialogues of all sorts, char- rettes, workshops, civic forums. Even the Congress for the New Urbanism is approaching its tenth anniversary as an organization. It’s an opportune moment, then, to ask, “Is Urban Design on the Right Track?” I would like to preface this discus- sion with remarks related to the con- ference “Urban Design Now,” which was held last April in New York and sponsored by Harvard, Columbia and the Van Alen Institute. The confer- ence focused primarily on what urban design is, but also reflected on where urban design has come from, and that might give us a better context for this discussion. The field of urban design is gener- ally dated back to a seminal confer- ence at Harvard in 1956, at which Harvard’s dean at the time, Josep Lluis Sert, set forth the propositions that would underlie it. According to an article in the conference publica- tion by Margaret Crawford and Andrea Kahn, two things set urban design apart from other types of envi- ronmental design practice at the time. First, Sert thought that urban design would be an alternative arena for architects, planners and landscape designers to work together ina com- mon concern for the physical form of the city—a vehicle for overcoming fragmentation among disciplines. Second, he thought urban design Places 15.1 would be a mode of practice for people who were committed to the idea of the city and the culture of the city. So urban design was fundamen- tally linked to the idea of urbanism, as well. Crawford and Kahn note that a number of changes have occurred in the profession over the past few decades, and that it faces new chal- lenges. For example, they say, by the 1980s, the modernist inclination of most urban designers, which was laid out in the discussions at Harvard and subsequent conferences, yielded to what they call a “post-modern con- textualism,” which has evolved into ideas like New Urbanism and neotra- ditionalism. They note that the urban develop- ment process has been characterized by an increasing number of, and increasingly complex, public–private partnerships, challenging notions of civic responsibility and public access to urban space. They note the increasing impor- tance of aesthetics in city develop- ment, and question whether the focus on the visual character of cities is a “dangerous concealment of social realities.” And they note that the nation has become increasingly suburban, and wonder whether urban design, with a commitment to cities, is losing its relevance. Or, conversely, I might ask, are urban designers prepared to engage the scale, the systems and the kinds of lifestyles that characterize the suburban landscape? I would suggest an additional set of concerns of my own. Is urban design, as practiced and studied, founded on a strong enough research or knowledge basis? Is it overly directed towards formal strategies without strong approaches for under- standing local conditions? Has there been enough evaluation of recent