Urban design, an developmental approach

Urban design offers us the opportunity to analyse, evolve and create the contexts in which we live and work.

Urban Design, ‘a developmental approach’
Nathan Ward

RMJM’s role as urban designers is to establish a framework that will support the opportunities for future vitality within new or existing urban environments. We synthesise the social, environmental, and economic factors that form the basis of our cultural identity, in-order to provide vibrant and sustainable urban environments.

The work RMJM carries out in diverse urban contexts often involves a wide cross-section of stakeholders, organisations, politicians, and professionals, all of whom become part of the creative process.

Images below show RMJM's proposals for the redevelopment of Custom House Quay, Glasgow's main frontage to the River Clyde. RMJM's approach is to aim to connect the city back to its river, while giving Glasgow a bold new waterfront image. The top image shows a visualisation of the Clydeside Boardwalk. Below that, an aerial night view, and bottom, sketches showing the urban 'river rooms'.

There are many technical and financial aspects to this process, however it is understanding what generates the unique identity of each environment that is fundamental to successful urban design. Our design proposals provide definition to the form and function of an environment, but we cannot imbue them with a ‘sense of place’. Environments require habitation for that.

Urban Design—architecture of the in-between
It is through perception that a ‘sense of place’ is developed. The process of perception allows us to establish a relationship between ourselves and the things around us. There are two components to this process: the plastic physical world which can be changed and which we as designers readily utilise; the other being the immaterial or non-physical, the ‘perceptual’ component. This is something we can manipulate through design, but which we cannot prescribe.

The immaterial element of an environment provides meaning and identity to a context. If you were to experience an object and bring no background knowledge to it, you would simply experience a three-dimensional form in space isolated from the world around it by a lack of relative meaning. Our work aims to provide proposals that provide for both functional requirements and which are rooted in their cultural context.

Where do the physical and the immaterial sides of our environment meet?

The British philosopher John Locke, 1632 – 1704, held the view that there is nothing in the intellect that was not previously in the senses. This simple statement brings together the physical and the immaterial, and introduces a common ground of human experience between the two, where our knowledge and experience of environments helps us understand the identity of a particular location.

Lev Semenovich Vygotsky, 1896 – 1934, a Soviet psychologist whose work was published after his death and then quickly suppressed, proposed a ‘developmental approach’ to psychology which can provide a useful basis for expanding on Locke’s view. Vygotsky proposed that there are three key elements to this developmental approach:

· Phylogenesis (biological evolution)
· Sociogenesis (cultural history)
· Ontogenesis (individual development).

These describe a way of understanding how we perceive the world around us, through the experiences we encounter, the cultural context in which they are placed, and our physical or biological needs, all of which combine to form a unique set of experiences that colour or perception of environments.

Urban design inhabits a position dualistic between the physical world of things and the immaterial world of perception. It is the processes we employ as urban designers that will affect how we successfully deliver a balanced environment.

Lost in four-dimensional space
In delivering an urban design proposal we are not only required to fully understand the contexts in which work but also to be conversant with the characteristics of our medium. This environmental medium in which human activity takes place, is characterised by a series of components:

· Location (physical—site/internal characteristics)
· Uniqueness (ensemble of particular elements)
· Circulation (interconnection and spatial interactions)
· Locality (context and setting in relation to other places)
· Evolution (historical and cultural change)
· Meaning (beliefs, interpretation and understanding).

The concept of a fourth dimension—time—is implicit here and in Vygotsky’s ‘developmental approach’. The link between time and space provides us with an understanding of how we can deliver environments that are easily inhabited, are able to grow and adapt, to incorporate richness and meaning beyond their physical structure.

This developmental or evolutionary process may be found in planned settlements, such as Edinburgh’s New Town, Inveraray, or the grids of Glasgow’s Merchant City, New York or Chicago. In these places, an underlying structure has remained even though they have evolved and adapted over time, each developing a unique sense of place related to the social, environmental and the economic forces that drive their development.

Richness of cities
Richness is a quality successful urban environments have in abundance; Michel Foucault proposed a theory of Heterogeneity (the quality of being made of many different elements, forms, kinds, or individuals), where space is thoroughly imbued with meaning and richness, and not homogeneous, without variation, or having similar parts throughout. Foucault suggested that heterotopias pervade space, rather as the fourth dimension does, involving multiplicities of scale, linkages and degrees of openness: “In other words, we do not live in a kind of void, inside of which we could place individuals and things. We do not live inside a void that could be coloured with diverse shades of light, we live inside a set of relations that delineates sites which are irreducible to one another and absolutely not superimposable on one another.”

Today there are many effects that limit heterogeneity, under the guise of diversity, for example globalising influences push toward an ‘a-spatial society’, (a term that is used to describe the non-spatial, i.e. the erosion of a link between locality and information seen in the notion of ‘cyber-space’, for example), instead of celebrating uniqueness and richness of a place. It also occurs in the creation of pseudo-public space where there can be an overt underlying control mechanism or a lack of ownership or control. Examples of how dehumanising an imbalance in control is, can be found in the lack of success of mass social housing schemes, such as Hulme Crescents in Manchester.

In considering richness in our work we can foster vibrancy in an urban environment with the potential for the inclusion of various activities—i.e., places to work and homes to live in. However, there is another function apart from home and work, a ‘third place’. This is defined in a book by Ray Oldenburg entitled The Great Good Place: Cafes, Coffee Shops, Bookstores, Bars, Hair Salons, and Other Hangouts at the Heart of a Community.

The ‘third place’, as Oldenburg puts it, is the ‘city’s raison d’être’ and can breath life into the ‘in-between’ times and spaces. The importance of a space apart from work and home is also suggested by architectural writer and teacher Katherine Shonfield, in an influential Demos report published in 1998 entitled The Richness of Cities: urban policy in a new landscape. Among other things this describes the importance of varied spaces that allow a “spatial democracy of shared experience”. The shared experience of our public spaces expresses an important part of who we are and how we define ourselves to others.

The Artwork of Development and Evolution
The definition of environments through the enclosure, manipulation, provision and programming of space can provide opportunities and guide how environments may be inhabited. However, to be successful in the long term, the work we carry out has to foster adaptability, uniqueness, variety, richness, and activity, because without them our urban environments would lack cultural meaning. Complexity in an urban context is something we should celebrate; the understanding of how the processes of perception and place-making works is fundamental to the success of producing new urban environments.

In evolving and creating urban environments our holistic approach is not unlike that of the De Stijl movement’s ‘total art work’ or Gesamtkunstwerk; although our approach is more fluid, site-specific and adaptable, somewhat less deterministic, and could be described as Entwicklungskunstwerk or ‘the artwork of development and evolution’.

Extra info

Book review, Outside in inside out, Black Dog Publishing, 2006