Urban Design Procedural Types and Product Types

I stated earlier that there are four major procedural types of urban design. They were:

1. total urban design where one team is in control of the whole project;

2. all-of-a-piece urban design where one team creates a master, or conceptual, plan and writes guidelines for the development of individual sites within that plan by different entrepreneurs and their architects;

3. piece-by-piece urban design where proposals to get specific activities into an area are controlled by zoning codes and incentives and penalties;

4. plug-in urban design in which infrastructure elements are used as catalysts for development.

Design professionals, however, most frequently think of urban design in terms of product types and much of the literature deals with urban design in that way.

Urban design product types can be categorized in many ways. It is impossible to devise a fine-toothed categorization system that is exhaustive and in which the types do not overlap. The typology used here is simple. Urban design product types can be:

1. new towns;

2. urban precincts of which there are many types, new and renewed;

3. elements of infrastructure;

4. possibly individual items within the city that add lustre to it: clock towers, monuments, works of art and curiosity objects.

The focus of attention in this book is on the first three types but each has many subcategories. They all encompass planning, landscape architecture, and architectural work in a unique manner that adds up to being urban design.

New Towns

A ‘new town’, to purists, is a settlement that is self-consciously built from scratch, usually on previously unbuilt-on land. To be a new town it has to provide all the amenities of life including employment opportunities. There is no census of new towns designed and built during the second half of the twentieth century but the number is in the thousands. They range in size and importance from small company towns to the capitals of countries. Almost all have been either total or all-of-a-piece urban designs.

A number of countries have had the creation of new towns as part of their political agenda. The policies have resulted in fiat towns, some large enough to be thought of as cities. Between 1950 and 1990, the Soviet Union employed new settlements to extend central control over its constituent republics. The reasons elsewhere have been economic or social. During the latter half of the twentieth century, over 20 new towns were built in the United Kingdom in order to keep London’s population down to a manageable size and to encourage industry to locate outside the southeast corner of the country. Runcorn is an example (see Chapter 4).

In Europe the new towns tend to have been the products of government policy. In North America, in contrast, private companies have built the genuine new towns (rather than simply large suburbs) not the public sector. Columbia in Maryland and Reston, Virginia are probably the best-known examples. Begun in the 1960s, Columbia has a population of 100,000 and employment opportunities approximating the number of workers in the city although many people commute into Columbia to work and many residents in the city commute out. There are few such new towns in the United States because the land acquisition and infrastructure costs are high and the developing company must be capable of considerable investment prior to any return on capital being received. New towns do, however, continue to be built in the country. Las Colinas in Texas has been under construction for almost 20 years now (see Figure 3.1a to see the imagery sought). Elsewhere too they are being built, especially satellite cities. Shongshang Lake in southern China, for instance, is barely underway (see Figure 3.1b).

Many new towns are company towns. Some have a mining or other resource base and others have been manufacturing cities or military settlements. Some of the non-military examples are the products of government policy, particularly in socialist countries, but others have been built by private industrial organizations to suit their own purposes. The towns vary considerably in size and longevity. They have been as small as 500 people while others have over a hundred thousand inhabitants.

The designs of the new towns fall into a number of categories depending on the paradigms prevalent at the time of their creation. The new towns in the Anglo- American world have generally followed Garden City principles while those in continent Europe and East Asia have followed Rationalist principles. Even within the prevailing paradigm there have been differences in designs. British new town designs, all loosely garden cities, fall into four eras depending on contemporary perceptions of the problems to be solved and the patterns required to solve them. Las Colinas is being designed with the automobile in mind. In addition, individual designers strive to stamp their own identity on the designs.

Precincts

Most urban designs do not deal with new towns but with precincts – smaller areas of cities and new, predominantly residential, areas on the edge of cities. They may be designed de novo or be the subject of renewal. The precincts in cities may be for commercial, residential, or for entertainment uses, but many are now mixed types. Some have been built as total designs; others have been all-of-a-piece designs.

There are a number of new precincts of cities that have been called ‘new towns’. The use of this term can be a little misleading. The new towns of the citystate of Singapore, although they contain many of the amenities of a city and are also employment centres, have little industry and the heart of Singapore remains the cultural centre of the city. These new towns are, given the terms used in this book, major precincts of the larger Singapore metropolitan area. There are other similar examples.

During the 1970s the term ‘new-town-in-town’ was used to describe large mixed-use urban design projects on cleared brown-field sites. In New York City, for instance, Roosevelt Island (see Figure 3.2), formerly Welfare Island, and Battery Park City were referred to as such. Welfare Island, the home to a number of aging hospitals and other obsolete institutions has been transformed into a residential precinct with the retail and other institutional facilities required to support it. Surrounded by water, it is indeed a clear entity. So is Battery Park City with the Hudson on one side and the West Side Highway on the other. Neither was considered to be a self-contained entity.

Much urban design in cities consists of relatively small enclaves of like use buildings. They may be commercial or institutional types. Penn Center in Philadelphia, a relatively small enclave of commercial buildings related to a railway station and the new CBD for Beijing, are examples of commercial precincts (see Figure 3.3a). Lincoln Center in New York is an example of a cultural complex (see Figure 7.7). One of the great urban debates is over whether such facilities should indeed be agglomerated into a single unit or distributed throughout the city. This question was also raised about the decision to assemble so many of the facilities that were required for the highly successful 2000 Olympic Games in Sydney, Australia into a single precinct (see Figure 3.3b).

Campuses are a special type of precinct – a unified set of buildings set in a predominantly park-like environment and separated by distance (by the use of a park or roadway) or fences from the remainder of the city or countryside. The university campus is typical. While some universities are merged into the surrounding city: the Sorbonne, Stellenbosch and the University of the District of Columbia, many others, especially recent ones, are separate entities. The same urban design idea appears in the layout of office and business parks. The Denver Technological Center on the periphery of that city clearly falls into this category and it is, in many ways, the city’s new downtown (see Chapter 8).

In cities throughout the world the considerable expansion has taken place at the periphery. While the population of the metropolitan Philadelphia continues to grow, the population of the core city itself declined from over two million in 1950 to a little over a million in 2000. The major growth has been suburban. Vast tracts of housing and accompanying commercial and retail facilities have been built in the suburbs. In countries, such as India, the major developers of such urban designs have been the Public Works Departments of the Central and State governments. In the United States, it has been the private developer who has been responsible for almost all the development although much has been made possible by the federally funded highway system and other federal government subsidies. At best these suburbs have been thoughtfully designed in terms of providing the amenities to enable all segments of the population to lead full lives. At worst, they are simply dormitories.

The new suburbs have generally been built along one of two different lines of thought: the Bauhaus/Le Corbusian model or the Garden City model. The outskirts of many cities in Europe (such as Paris and Madrid) and Latin American cities (such as Caracas; see Figure 3.4) have major developments of tower or slab blocks of housing set in park-like areas on their peripheries. They have been influenced by Le Corbusier. Most of the suburban development in countries such as the United States and Australia have followed the Garden City ideal and still do. More recently the New Urbanist ideology, a Neo-Traditionalist approach to urban design, has had a wide degree of support.

Many precincts do not have clear edges but have strong cores such as a square or a street. The design of streets and squares is generally the purview of landscape architecture but it can be urban design. It is landscape architecture if only the open space is designed; it is urban design if the enclosing elements are included in the design. In the latter case they form a precinct.

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