Urban design in the realm of urban studies

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Urban design/urban studies Draft Do not cite without author consent

Pushpa Arabindoo 1 26/06/2013

Urban design in the realm of urban studies

Forthcoming (2013) in Carmona, M. (Ed.), Urban design primer: Explorations in

urban design. Aldershot: Ashgate.

ABSTRACT

Most urban design debates of the twentieth-century have questioned its endurance

as a coherent discipline choosing instead to located it rather conveniently in the

interstices of architecture and planning. But given its continued preoccupation

with aesthetic formalism triggering a general dissolution of the idea of the social,

scholars are increasingly making a plea for an alternative social imagination of

urban design by reorienting it towards social sciences. While the central argument

of this chapter to situate urban design and urban studies together as cognatedisciplines might seem to endorse this trend, there is a departure here, as the

attempt is to generate an urban knowledge that can offer a counter-narrative of

contemporary cities, mobilisinga new space of critical intervention. Their

interactions help to decipher the rapidly urbanising, boundless landscape where,

by shifting the attention from design to a focus on the urban, the resulting

recombinant urbanism emphasises not only the rescaling of the urban but also

rethink its postmetropolitanform through the emergent landscape of regional

urbanism. Using examples from pedagogy as well as practice including the most

recent example ofLe Grand Paris, this chapter finds that the tools and techniques

of this recombinant urbanism facilitates a never seen before spatial imagination,

where the flavour of the urban is retained even when it is being reformulated as

something that is flexibly held between the local and the regional. It also

generates space for new theories of visualisation where the core epistemological

focus of urban design emphasising typological and morphological understandings

of the city, which are frequently considered as methodological toolkitscan be

restored as a genealogy of practice rather than mere representation.

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Urban design in the realm of urban studies

Despite Cuthberts (2010: 444)timely reminder that urban design is a trans-

historical process as old as cities and civilisation, and if anything, urban design

invented itself, recent urban design debates have ironically been dominated by

scepticism over its endurance as a coherent disciplinegenerating its own

knowledge (Schurch 1999). Jettisoned by doubts over its ability to function as a

field, practice or profession, many scholars have commonly argued for its

repositioning where it can be informed by other disciplines beyond the bravado of

just design (Verma 2011). Notwithstanding the risk of fracture from the diverse

knowledges, it seems that the only way out for urban design is to borrow from

other primate disciplines, an approach that has pretty much sealed the fate of

contemporary urban design. Thus, much of twentieth-century urban design found

itself convenientlylocated at the interstices of architecture and planning, coming

across either as a weak extension of architectural imagination or the physical

consequences of state planning policies. They hardly proved to be fruitful

encounters as, by the beginning of the twenty-first century, urban design wasreduced to a largely postmodern preoccupation whose commodified version of

aesthetic formalism triggered a general dissolution of the idea of the social.

Responding to the need for an alternative social imagination of urban design,

scholars such as Cuthbert (2007) and Verma (2011) have emphasised the need to

disentangle it from the traditional confines of architecture and planning,

specifically recommending its reorientation to social science.

In this sense, at first glance, the crux of this chapter in making an

argument for situating urban design alongside the cognate discipline of urban

studies might seem to be similar to such convictions that an engagement with the

social sciences is central to legitimising urban design. While this might be the

starting point of the chapter, it signals a departure as well. For, such a

repositioning is not just about redeeming urban design but also about generating a

new urban knowledge that can offer a critical counter-narrative of contemporary


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cities. This chapter argues that by repositioning urban design alongside the allied

discipline of urban studies, the push is not merely for a socially defined

understanding of urban designbut a more meaningful recognition of the urban

condition as both a social production of form and an inherently spatial process. At

a moment when social sciences, particularly urban studies, are taking a spatial

turn, it seems that there is some use for urban design, which fundamentally is

about the production of space. This way, one does not reduce urban designs

preoccupation with space to one of determinism or fetish but allows it to partake

in the socio-spatial dialectic in a more useful manner (Soja 2003).

On the other hand, in spite of the decidedly spatial imagery of the urban

studies narratives, the focus of such texts have been on subjectivities defined by

class, race, gender, language, ethnicity, religion, identity, and nationality with

little influence of the broader trends in architecture, urban design and planning. As

two closely related realms of studying the city, what is being offered here is the

forging of a productive working interface between two fields where urban

design and urban studies resonate together to mobilise new spaces of critical

intervention though a new genre of interactionisturbanists (Lin 1995). There are

epistemological and methodological challenges attached to the production of this

proposed recombinant urbanism,and these are explored in this chapter.1 Such a

gesture shifts attention from design to a focus on the urban emphasising the need

to rethink and rescale the urban in a more challenging manner between the local

and the regional/global. The application of recombinant urbanism tools to this

postmetropolitan phenomenon is illustrated through an examination of the

emergent landscape of regional urbanism, briefly considering examples frompedagogy and practice.They help set up a critically effective framework, avoiding

the placeless generalisations normally associated with the design and planning of

regions.

1Shane (2005) describes a different kind of recombinant urbanism where he splices together

varying strands of urban design identifying urban actors who recombine elements to create

conceptual models of the city at various scales to strengthen its position as an emerging field ofenquiry.


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RETHINKING THE URBAN

Although academic concern for the city is as old as the city itself, urban studies as

a specific intellectual endeavour emerged in the early twentieth century when a

variety of disciplines from the social sciences came together to outline powerful

theories explaining the trends of urban society. Most of them were beguilingly

simple models underlining not so useful paradigmatic pervasiveness that deflected

attention away from the project of analyzing the full diversity of urban forms,

generating instead a series of unproductive debates regarding the intellectual

significance of particular cities (Brenner 2003: 206). The problem also lies in the

fact that by being both the where and the what of study, the city is marked by

ambiguities which undermines the endeavour of urban studies. Bogged by simple

dualisms that remain rigidly fixed on either/or dichotomies or binary logic, urban

studies finds itself constrained by simplistic invocations of theorising the city with

much of this work remaining uncritical and impractical (Soja 2003).

Widely seen as a restless discipline, urban studies, in contrast to

thesupposedly narrow focus of urban design on the design aspect of cities, seems

to be caught in the trap of studying almost everything in society under the rubric

of the urban, not to mention the extraordinary slipperiness of the urban

phenomenon itself (Brenner et al. 2011: 226). As urban studies has come to

imply an all-embracing ubiquitous research on cities, the need for a new form of

critical engagement becomes obvious, through which urban studies and urban

design can become more relevant to the larger project of critical urban theory. The

kind of critical urbanism that is being called is not just about addressing questions

concerning the articulation and possible disarticulation between capitalism and

urbanism (Goonawardene 2011). Instead it is one that doesnt remain

criticaltheory but overcomes it in practice (Brenner 2009). To achieve this, it is

essential to rethink our basic assumptions regarding the object and site of our

research, the urban. It begs a move away from the city as a bounded and

homogenous entity to a focus on the urban as a point of formulation for widely

divergent and dispersed processes (Rutland 2008). In the case of urban design,

this requires a specific shift in thinking in terms of the urban rather than design as


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the urban has remained a passive backdrop instead of something that is

constitutive of subjectivities and socialities (ibid.).But as Keil (2003) reminds us

what we refer to as the urban is a complex, multiscale and multidimensional

process where the general and specific aspects of the human condition meet the

city/urban as a distinct object of critical urban research. And this is perhaps where

urban design and urban studies together can play a pivotal role in clarifying the

complex yet ambivalent relationship between social relations and the production

of space as they engage (theoretically and empirically) with the plurality of the

urban in acknowledging the multiple spatialities that define the essence of the

city.

RESCALING THE URBAN

The interaction of urban design and urban studies produces a new kind of

recombinant urbanism that can potentially not only restore the hard won

objectivity of urban social science, but also decipher the rapidly urbanising,

boundless landscape. To gain a precise understanding of what the urban is today,

how it manifests itself and what it could become, first of all, this recombinant

urbanism needs to reconceptualise the urban question as a the scale question

(Lefebvre 1976 cited in Brenner 2000), one that is still a challenge within urban

studies. Most Marxist scholars view the urban as an entirely accidental and

random choice of geographical scale. Moreover, everyday scalar terms such as

local, urban, regional, national, and global are considered as static entities

representing distinctive socioterritorial processes (localisation, urbanisation,

regionalisation, nationalisation, and globalisation) (Brenner 2000). On the

contrary, these scales cannot be understood in isolation from one another, as

mutually exclusive or additive containers; rather they constitute deeply

intertwined moments and levels of single worldwide sociospatial totality (ibid.:

369). In this context, it would be too simplistic to understand the urban as a self-

defined scalar entity. Instead, we need to allow a multiscalar articulation of the

urban. Thus, the local, regional, national or global are not distinct spatial fixes but

a scalar flux where the urban is continuously rescaled from the local to the global

in a condition of planetary urbanisation (Brenner and Schmid 2011). Specifically,


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regional re-territorialisation stands out actively as a crucial geographical arena

illustrating this process of rescaling. This is where urban design offers an

extraordinary opportunity for spatialising urban studies, providing exemplars in

terms of rethinking the forms of the urban, particularly through the new emergent

landscape of regional urbanism.

Regional urbanism

To many, regionalism is an ambiguous term which at best means thinking bigger.

Decades of association with the planning discourse has led to a narrow

understanding of the region as something that is simply larger than the city, ascalar expansion from the urban. However, a body of urban studies scholars

(primarily from the LA School) have recognised an ongoing radical reorganisation

of regional space, referred to generally as a city-region and more specifically as

the postmetropolis (Soja2000). The resulting new regionalism is not an alternative

to a focus on cities but a radical reshaping of the urban in what is now clearly a

process of regional urbanisation. While metropolitan urbanisation occupied a

singular scale, regional urbanisation is definable at multiple scales, from the local

to the global through a peculiar scalar convergence occurring in the growth of

regional cities (Soja 2011). As concepts of city and region merge and blur

challenging conventional views of what constitutes the urban and the non-urban,

there is uncertainty regarding its empirical reality. Urban studies scholars (at least

some of them) acknowledge this new regionalism as a specific cognitive interest,

but struggle to provide a more concrete understanding of its spatiality. For, even

though the region can be a true life space (Lynch 1976), in general, major

elements of the urban are not clearly legible to most people at this scale, thereby

leading to a misconstrued understanding that it cannot constitute part of the urban

experience. But, contrary to Sojas (2009) assertion that urban design is trapped in

a scalar warp, this chapter contends that the much needed clarity of regional

urbanisation comes from an urban design embedded spatial imagination where the

urban as both form and scale is deconstructed and reconstituted to reveal the

social geography and changing built environment of the postmetropolis, an aspect


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that has been well explored by urban design, both pedagogically and through

practice.

Lynch (1976) is perhaps one of the earliest scholars to set a precedent as

he outlined suggestions for experiencing the sensory quality of the region through

a glossary of different tools including a spatio-temporal mapping of sub-landscape

typologies, detailing its ambient characteristics through the use of images and

indices. In spite of these clear-cut recommendations, it must be acknowledged that

as managing the sense of a region fell into the remit of planning, it has been

bogged down by techniques that do not go beyond the lamentations, artistic

conceptions, exhortations, and overblown, unrealistic site plans (ibid.). As a

result, the region has often been perceived as a coarse-grain extended version of

the urban, producing inexpressive, fuzzy renderings of the regional habitat. Over

the years, several urban design studios in different North American universities

have addressed the challenges of the American metropolis and metropolitan

regions. Kelbaugh (1997) provides a good overview of a decade of urban design

based studio charrettesconducted by the University of Washington to bring greater

coherence to the Seattle region. Emphasising the use of three-dimensional graphic

tools of urban design to understanding, designing, planning and developing the

region, these workshops have tried to develop a typological understanding of

critical regionalism by reinstating the neighbourhood as a unit of the region. More

recently, the urban design programme at Graduate School of Design, Harvard

University has introduced a three-year studio exercise speculating about

alternative futures for the Mumbai Metropolitan Region. This isquite different

from the landmark Project on the City studios lead by the Dutch architect RemKoolhaas which sought to rethink the urban scale through a blatant architecture

of bigness discourse.Thepedagogical thrust of the current studio is towards a

collaborative approach with other (non-architecture) programmes including the

Harvard Business School, Harvard Kennedy School and Harvard Law School

whereby urban design is employed to provide a more nuanced inter-disciplinary

understanding of the socio-ecological dimensions of the Mumbai Metropolitan

Region (Figure 1).


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FIGURE 1 HERE

From a practice-based perspective, a good illustration of this effort is the

Le Grand Paris project, a state-led initiative to rethink Paris not as a city but a

region using approaches that neither seem like bland planning strategies nor can

be seen simply as large-scale urban design. Initiated in 2007 by the then French

President Nicolas Sarkozy to produce a new political vision for Paris, Le Grand

Paris was also meant to create a new paradigm for urbanism. What is notable is

the characteristic urban design approach adopted in this restructuring of the

relations between the city and its region. Ten teams of international architects

were commissioned to create an imagined community, a set of social relations, an

economy and an institutional framework thatoperates in and through a multiscalar

reorganisation of the postmetropolitan condition. They demonstrate a profound

shift in methodologies that clearly suggest the kind of recombinant urbanism that

this chapter has been proposing by bringing together epistemological and

methodological aspects from the two realms of urban design and urban studies.

The resulting new consensus of urbanism is not without challenges. It highlights a

complex, changing, non-local and mixed socio-spatial reality that is the urban,

even as concerns of hierarchisation of spaces and intensified polarisation at all

levels cannot be ignored (Enright 2012).

Nevertheless, this approach has facilitated a renewed spatial imagination

of the region, exploring issues in the form (literally) of the social, economic,

cultural and political. It not only revamps the inherited cartographies that havelong underpinned urban investigations but also radically reconfigures the urban as

they clarify the topological and typological characteristics of regional urbanisation

(Figure 2). Urban design is used effectively to redraw the morphology of the

region, not merely as a pattern-making exercise but to grasp in the same object the

micro-scale detail of everyday situations as well as the strategic territorial scale of

the metropolitan region as a whole. While it risks exposing the ground for

territorial reappropriation and speculation, these schemes to a large extent recast


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design for failing to reveal the truth of the landscape. For, the alternative of the

social sciences to seek refuge in a positivistic domain like GIS can prove to be

equally situated and value-laden as urban design mapping exercises.

This is perhaps why it might be useful for urban studies to take a closer,

less critical view of projects like Le Grand Paris if only to better understand the

urban design led process involving the production of maps and diagrams as not

mere graphic representations of the urban plan based on a limited sense of a

pattern language.Instead, it would be helpful to acknowledge its approach to city-

making where its suggested typological and morphological intensification of the

region can provide a useful epistemological framing for urban studies. As lAUC,

one of the ten teams involved in the project clarify, the use of typological (and

morphological) diagrams is not to reinforce the old formula of a classificatory

order but to generate an urbanism of substance, maximising the intensity

between local, metropolitan and global conditions (2011: 105-9). Its

preoccupation extends beyond the formal to the sociocultural addressing the scale

of the post-metropolis as not just a mere plan but grasping simultaneously the

micro-scale detail of everyday situations as well as the territorial scale of the

region as a whole. While the ten urban design schemes envisioning Le Grand

Paris could be criticised as a state-sanctioned, commercial cartographic initiative,

urban design in the past has shown certain sensitivity in accommodating

alternative viewpoints through counter mapping, challenging equally well the self-

referential nature of such proposals claiming accuracy of the urban condition. This

compels one to rethink the typological and morphological exercises of urban

design as not only methodological but as epistemological and ontologicalpractices that allow to address quite effectively the more complex question of

what is the urban scale by literally reassembling the urban. Empirically, the kind

of mapping employed by urban design is a good alternative to what is popularly

employed in urban studies GIS, setting up a practice which Kitchin and Dodge

(2007) recognise as not just a narrow understanding of spatial representation but

also the pursuit of representational solutions (not necessarily pictorial) to solve

relational, spatial problems.


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Implications for research

Reflecting on what he considers as the existential problem of urban studies, Katz

(2010) recounts how a persistent, depressing narrative of urban crisis poses a

dilemma for urban studies as a field. He calls urgently for a viable counter-

narrative that does not naturalise public failure as the master narrative of urban

history. Desperate for success stories that could be assembled into a coherent tale

of progress and hope, he is at the same time aware that one cannot completely

ignore the challenge of urban decline and failed urban policies. It is in the pursuit

of this impossible space that this chapter suggests the development of a

recombinant urbanism that brings together the essential elements of urban studies

and urban design. The enthusiasm of the latter to do good and solve urban

problems can be infectious and a good antidote to the cynicism of the former. For

instance, urban design optimistically relies on best practices to provide a trenchant

critique of current practice and develop better systems which, on the other hand, is

considered with scorn by urban studies as something that is saddled with

normative assumptions stunting creative expression, alternative visioning, debateand, ultimately perhaps, innovation in the built environment (Moore 2013). Thus,

it is quickly dismissed as an instrument of urban entrepreneurialism and

competitiveness abetting the creation of suspect imaginaries and the production of

global relational geographies (McCann 2008; Peck and Tickell 2002). While this

is harsh and a tad unfair, urban designs conviction in stories about best places can

seem romanticised and even privileging the city of superlatives (Beauregard

2003). Developing the hybrid space of recombinant urbanism proves useful in this

context where applying urban studies critically reflective lens of comparative

urbanism effectively tempers urban designs boisterous search for excellence and

helps avoid the narrow paradigmatic circumscription of best-practice driven

initiatives (Figure 3).

FIGURE 3 HERE


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URBAN DESIGN IN URBAN STUDIES

If urban design is criticised today for being atheoretical (see Chapter 1), it is in

large part because its intellectual modesty is frequently mistaken for insubstantial

theory. Critics are unreasonably mercurial in owning or disowning it, fixated as

they are on a transient and superficial understanding centred around its aesthetic

currency. Many believe that if it is to develop a guiding sensibility in explaining

the wide array of urban transformations, it needs to be rooted in a deeper

ideological reflection borrowed from other disciplines, particularly the social

sciences as the latters counter-influence could possibly offer impressive insights

into understanding the city (Verma 2011). Socialising urban design, however, is

not as easy as it seems. Most social scientists outright condemn urban design as a

particular form of capitalist urbanisation (Hubbard 1996). Rattled by the

discomfort of urban design in dealing with the intense socio-political critique

inherent in theories derived from Marxist analysis, they are uncertain as to

whether urban design can deepen, extend and transform our understanding of

capitalist structurations of urbanisation. Even though their suspicions are justified,

their confident positioning within the realm of urban studies to seek answers to

the still unresolved urban question is not reassuring either. The broad field of

urban studies might provide the much-needed theoretical thrust in understanding

our cities, but most of it tends to polarise itself in potentially unproductive ways.

It seems that social theory of cities alone can never be a chimeric search for the

essence of the urban (Keith 2000). Given that the production of space has

important materialities, it might therefore be useful to bring a distinctively

architectural understanding of form, type and spatial configuration into the theory

of social space (Lehtuvuori 2012).

This chapter provides this critical injection through a recombinant

urbanism produced by situating urban design and urban studies together. Urban

design here is not a mere applied dimension of urban studies, but one that can re-

examine the forms of the urban in a Lefebvrian sense as we ask what is urban

about cities and rethink the genealogy of the urban as a complex, multiscalar

condition. As the urban question is redefined as a scale question, we find that this


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is something urban design undertakes quite comfortably as recent engagements

reveal its uncanny ability to rescale deftly from the local to the global to address

postmetropolitan challenges. In the case of urban studies, this simultaneous

turning inside out and outside in of the urban meddles with its traditional

understandings of what is urban, suburban, exurban, not urban, etc. Urban design,

on the other hand, has adapted more successfully in reconstituting the urban as

seen in recent examples to rescale major metropolitan cities such as Le Grand

Paris. This is achieved by including aspects of social analysis into the design

process alongside conventional urban design techniques involving a visual array

of representation. In fact, typological and morphological emphasis of urban design

clarifies the regional scale in what could otherwise have remained as mere

outlines of an abstract plan. While these proposals are not without challenges,

they exemplify well useful aspects of a recombinant urbanism produced at the

interface of urban design and urban studies. They are also a belated reminder of

something that both urban designers and urban studies scholars have ignored for

quite some time now Lynchs (1976) seminal observation that our senses are

local but our experience is regional.

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