Designing Cities: Critical Readings in Urban Design

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Designing Cities, Critical Readings in Urban Design

Alexander Cuthbert (ed), Blackwell Publishing, 2003

Alexander Cuthbert is Professor of Planning and Urban development at the University of New South Wales and has experience in practice and academia from different parts of the world. In this book he has assembled 28 articles written by authors coming from a variety of disciplines and covering a wide spectrum of issues related to urban design. As he acknowledges in his Preface this is not a book about the practice of urban design but about the theory or theories of urban design. He qualifies this further by saying that “primacy should be given to theories of economic development as formative in the design of cities” (p9). So, readers will not find articles on ‘how to do it’, nor examples of good practice in this volume. What they will find is discussions, often though not exclusively by social scientists, about the position of urban design within the wider fields of urban development. It is not an easy book, nor one that needs to be read sequentially (though the author thinks it should be). Depending on specific interests, readers may choose to consult individual sections and will certainly find intellectual stimulation in them. Practitioners on the other hand will be disappointed by the dearth of illustrations and may find at least some of the articles remote from their experience event though they could help them reflect upon their work or their role.

The articles are organised in ten groups of two or three under such headings as Theory, History, Philosophy, Politics, Culture, Gender, Environment, Aesthetics, Typologies and Pragmatics. Many of the authors are well known to readers of the UDQ and their books have been reviewed in previous issues. The quality of the essays is beyond criticism and they are all interesting and thought provoking. For lack of space, only a few can be mentioned here: Sharon Zukin’s The Postmodern Debate over Urban Form; Dolores Hayden’s Urban Landscape as Public history; A Madanipour’s Why are the Design and Development of Public Spaces Significant for Cities; GJ Ashworth’s Conservation as Preservation or as Heritage; Aldo Rossi’s The Urban Artifact as A Work of Art; Anne Vernez Moudon’s A Catholic Approach to Organizing what Urban Designers Should Know. All have published before and are being reprinted here. Many relate more to the American experience than to the European one.

Nevertheless the debates about conservation versus heritage (Ashworth), about the research fields of concern to urban design so clearly explained by Vernez Moudon, about the historic value of urban landscapes (Hayden) will be of interest to scholars and practitioners on either side of the Atlantic. Some of the other articles may seem difficult to digest.

‘Readers’ have become increasingly popular in the past ten years. They presumably reflect the fact that students – and also academics – do not have the time to read entire books and therefore need someone to pre-select for them. In the past this reviewer has deplored the practice on these pages, but in this case, the pre-selection seems entirely justified as it is unlikely that many people will need to read more than what is on offer here. The editor has carefully selected the articles (and justifies his selection in his introduction) which otherwise may not have been easily discovered. Some are not chapters from books but have appeared in journals not always universally available. And in some cases it may stimulate readers to explore further as the bibliography is comprehensive. Only the limited number of illustrations is to be deplored in a book with Design in its title.(This review was first published in Urban Design Quarterly 90, Spring 2004 and is reproduced with the Editor's kind permission).