Letter to the Editor

I recently attended the monthly forum of the UDG on education. Contrary to what some speakers contended, the problem is not the divide between theory and practice, but between two fundamentally opposed philosophical positions.

There are those who believe urban design is largely a process of correcting past [almost exclusively post-war] ‘mistakes’, and entails the unlearning of modernist planning, and the recovery of mediaeval and European post-enlightenment models. Proponents of this position proclaim good urban design principles to be timeless, or as common sense.

On the other hand there are those who believe the modern project never ended and that urban design involves a constant striving for innovation in order to respond to a constantly changing world. If we take the latter on, then we can clarify the aims of an urban design education as the same as architecture or any other design education for that matter. New briefs, new sites, new conditions require new solutions, new technologies, new thinking.

If the first misfired clay block led to an abandonment of the project to develop a new building material, we would have been deprived a whole discourse of shelter and architecture. To abandon failed planning experiments only to rely upon pre-modern exemplars for our emerging cities is to undermine our profession and eventually to kill urban design as a practice altogether. This ought to be self-evident.

Our schools need to be equipping urban design students with tools to reason, imagine and develop the 21st century city.