Urban Design Compendium
URBAN DESIGN COMPENDIUM
Llewelyn-Davies, for English Partnerships
and The Housing Corporation Published 2000
Available, while stocks last, free of charge from English Partnerships 020 7730 9399.
This reaches me to review second hand; the first reviewer had declined - "a bit like reviewing the telephone directory". And it's a librarians nightmare - no ISBN, no official publisher then. And the "author" is a company, though if you read the small print on the back page it probably should read: Walton,D. Lally, M. Septina, H and Taylor, D, Thorne, R and Cameron, A ,et.al. Urban Design Compendium.......for they are the named teams at Llewelyn Davies and Alan Baxter who along with thirteen who made "substantial contributions" and six more who did the graphics and illustrations actually wrote this officially non existent, but extremely valuable, free book.
Why my colleague really declined I've not pursued, for nearly all the classics of the literature of urban design are similar compendious manuals, handbooks to be used rather than texts to be read from page one in strict sequential order. Responsive Environments, A Pattern Language come to mind but even Townscape is a compendium of Cullen's earlier articles and you could see City Planning according to Artistic Principles as Camillo Sitte's holiday sketches, thematically organised.
Like its worthy predecessors this is very much of its time and will no doubt show its age soon enough, just as the car free streets and long overcoats in Townscape, the almost mystical language of A Pattern Language and the authors' photographs in the frontispiece of Responsive Environments will enable future cultural historians of urban design to place them in their wider contexts. It's not my role to second-guess the future but this will be placed in an era when: the complex urban structure of the status quo is valued over cutting new streets; ecological concerns take precedence over architectural unity; urban camouflage becomes acceptable to disguise the unacceptably large building blocks of modern living; and public art becomes so much meaningless decoration. It's an age too of optimistic diagrams : the path from Hove Station to the beach (p.62) is a nice notion but a beach seeking visitor would do better to get the train to Brighton where you can see the sea from the porte-cochere down the kind of new cut straight street of 1845 (the boldness of the past!)
But as a handbook this is all the things that 'By Design' should have been. It goes infinitely further in offering real and practical advice on the size and shape of things and the space needed for people to go about their everyday business between and around them in pleasant surroundings in safety and comfort.
What you get for the price of a phone call is what it says on the cover. Even at mobile peak rates it's a bargain you can't pass up. Call that number now. #
Bob Jarvis
