Deconstructing Urban Design Theory

http://www.gardenvisit.com/history_theory/library_online_ebooks/architecture_city_as_landscape/deconstructing_urban_design_theory

Recommended essay by Tom Turner on design methods.

Notes from essay:

Need for:
recreation space, entertainment space, ecological space, healthy space, sheltered space, market space, spiritual space or defensible space.

Central spaces, with good links and good views, will receive more use than peripheral spaces without good linkage.

Vitality, Sense, Fit, Access, Control, Efficiency and Justice (Lynch, 1981)

each of the panaceas has real merit and continues to suit certain social groups. Warren housing, where it survives in old villages, is treasured. Garden suburbs have always been loved by residents. Stefan Muthesius, Oscar Newman, and many young couples, have sung the praises of the English terraced house. Others love the cell-like isolation and superb views from tower blocks

Geoffrey Broadbent maintains that 70% of building functions can be housed in 70% of building forms (Broadbent, 1988).

embrace roads, rivers, forests and buildings in a myriad of ways

Planners and designers should encourage as much diversity in human habitats as they find in animal habitats. It is not possible to resolve all conflicts or to gain all ends. Choices have to be made. Different aspects of the public good should be stressed in different places. To achieve variety in land use patterns, there should also be a variety of relationships between the professions, not an institutionalized decision-making tree. Relationships between the constructive professions should, therefore, be deconstructed.


Cuba - productive urban landscapes - edible.

Wildflower meadows.

Lack of imagination has been a significant failing of scientific planning.

In particular, at the regional and strategic level, [planning] has been very tentative. Few regional plans or structure plans examine imaginative options for the future, or try to consider in any meaningful way what life in the twenty-first century will be like. (Shepley 1995)

Avoid land-use zones - demarcations of set areas - need multi-purpose areas.

Reverse the hierarchy of planning.