Goals for Urban Design

Anastasia Loukaitou-Sideris, "Addressing the Challenges of Urban Landscapes: Normative Goals for Urban Design," Journal of Urban Design 17 (2012): 4

Some take-aways: This article articulates some goals for urban design in light of prevailing issues in urban environments. These goals include: 1) “Expanding urban design’s scope and perspective” to include not just the grand civic settings of the city, but also “the ordinary and residual spaces of everyday life—the streets and sidewalks, bus stops, transit terminals, parking lots and pocket parks” (476). 2) “Contextualizing and embedding” the idiosyncrasies of different neighborhoods and their needs into design itself. And finally, 3) “Stitching and repurposing,” meaning, “urban design has to find ways to promote nodal- and discourage leapfrog development, and unify disparate districts by ‘stitching’ them together through open space systems, river networks and waterfronts, and transit and roadway lines that cut across the metropolitan landscape” (478). The emphasis of the article, then, is to view urban design not merely as “an aesthetic exercise of urban form manipulation,” but rather as “situated in a social, economic, cultural, technological and environmental context”. 

Abstract: Despite the flourishing of the urban design field over the last quarter of a century, many of the issues and problems haunting urban environments have not been resolved. Forces such as globalization, immigration, the explosion of digital technologies, and the rise of a service economy centred on consumption have important spatial and design implications, while how we design our cities may have repercussions on a variety of concerns ranging from climate change to the epidemic of obesity. The paper traces some of the spatial implications of socio-economic shifts during the last decades, and explores the role and responsibility of urban design in addressing the outlined challenges.

Full article (requires access)