Where and How Does Urban Design Happen?

Alex Krieger

In 1956, José Luis Sert convened an international conference at the

Harvard University Graduate School of Design with a determina-
tion to assemble evidence on behalf of a desired discipline he called
urban design. An impressive number of people then engaged in think-
ing about the future of cities participated. Among them were a not-
yet-famous Jane Jacobs, an already prominent Edmund Bacon, the
Olympian figure of Lewis Mumford, several leaders of the soon-to-be-
formed Team 10, prominent landscape architects such as Hideo Sasaki
and Garrett Eckbo, urban renewal–empowered mayors such as David
Lawrence of Pittsburgh, and innovators such as Victor Gruen, “the
creator of the shopping mall.”
The participants seemed to concur that the widening midcentury
intellectual split between the “art of building” and the “systemic na-
ture of planning” was not helpful to city building or the rebuilding
that the post–World War II era still demanded. Hopes and ideas for
a new discipline dedicated to city design were in the air, both in the
United States and in Europe, with CIAM (Congrès Internationaux
d’Architecture Moderne), since the early 1940s, focusing more at-
tention on urbanization. Conference participants were determined to
share and further such thinking, hopeful that a new discipline could
stem this perceived split between design and planning. Indeed, within
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several years Harvard would begin one of the fi rst formal degree-
Alex Krieger

granting curricula focused on urban design, and, through that in-

stitution’s prestige, lend weight to the idea that educating a design
professional to become an urban designer was essential for a rapidly
urbanizing world.
The proceedings of the 1956 conference reveal two working defi-
nitions for urban design, both articulated by Sert, who organized and
presided over the conference. Urban design, he stated at one point, “is
that part of city planning which deals with the physical form of the
city.” Here is the idea of urban design as a subset of planning, a spe-
cialization that he described as “the most creative phase of city plan-
ning, in which imagination and artistic capacities play the important
part.” At the beginning of the conference he identified a yet more
ambitious goal: “to fi nd the common basis for the joint work of the
Architect, the Landscape Architect, and the City Planner . . . Urban
Design [being] wider than the scope of these three professions.” Here
is the notion of a new overarching design discipline to be practiced by
all those who were, in Sert’s phrase, “urban-minded.”
Half a century later, these two conceptualizations are still very
much in play, and a precise defi nition for urban design has not been
broadly accepted. Whether urban design has become a distinct pro-
fessional specialization or a general outlook that can be embodied in
the work of several of the design disciplines dedicated to city making
remains unsettled. Nevertheless, few argue about the need for some-
thing called urban design.
In a world producing unprecedented kinds, numbers, and sizes of
settlements, urban design is an increasingly sought-after (though not
always well-recognized) expertise. Expectations are many and myriad
for those presuming to know how to design cities, yet there is skepti-
cism about how much such know-how exists. At the same time, it
seems presumptuous for any one person to claim overarching knowl-
edge of something as immensely complex as urbanism. It therefore
seems prudent to track several territories— spatial and conceptual—
in and through which urban designers operate. Indeed, scanning the
definitions of the word territory in a dictionary eventually gets you
past geography to “sphere of action.” This I find a particularly use-
ful way of thinking about urban design— as spheres of urbanistic ac-
tion to promote the vitality, livability, and physical character of cities.
There are several such spheres of action rather than a singular, over-
arching way to describe what constitutes the urban design enterprise.
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While urban design is a phrase fi rst popularized during the twen-

Where and How Does Urban Design Happen?

tieth century, cities have, of course, been the subject of design theory
and action for centuries. It is the notion of urban design as an activity
distinct from architecture, planning, or even military and civil engi-
neering that is relatively new— as is the label urban designer.
Though Pope Sixtus V’s impact on the physicality of sixteenth-
century Rome was profound, contemporaries would not have thought
of him as an urban designer. Spain’s Philip II, who promulgated one of
the most precise codes for laying out cities—the Laws of the Indies—
was, well, king. Baron Haussmann was Napoleon III’s Prefect of the
Seine, an administrator, closer in point of view and responsibilities
to Robert Moses, an engineer and civil servant, than to Raymond
Unwin or Daniel Burnham, both architects acting as city planners.
Ebenezer Howard, who truly had a new theory for urbanism, was
an economist. Camillo Sitte was an art historian. Frederick Law
Olmsted, who influenced American cities more than anyone in the
nineteenth century, was a landscape architect and earlier still a social
activist. Lewis Mumford was an urban historian and social critic.
The foremost Renaissance urban theorists were architects and art-
ists, as was Le Corbusier. During much of the history of city making,
an architect’s expertise was assumed to extend to matters of town
layout, and popes, prefects, and utopian economists quite naturally
turned to architects to realize their urban visions. Many of the 1956
conference participants were also architects, and an architectural
point of view has tended to prevail in most efforts to describe what
urban design is—prevail but not encapsulate.
So I will describe ten spheres of urbanistic action that people call-
ing themselves “urban designers” have assumed to be their profes-
sional domain, though obviously not all at once nor even with una-
nimity about the list overall. The list begins with a foundational idea
of urban design, at least as identified at the 1956 Harvard conference:
urban design occupies a hypothetical intersection between planning
and architecture and thus fills any perceived gaps between them. Urban
design, many continue to believe, is necessarily and unavoidably:

The Bridge Connecting Planning and Architecture

The most frequent answer to “What do urban designers do?” is that
they mediate between plans and projects. Their role is to somehow
translate the objectives of planning for space, settlement patterns,
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and even the allocation of resources into (mostly) physical strategies

Alex Krieger

to guide the work of architects, developers, and other implementers.

For example, many public planning agencies now incorporate one or
more staffers titled urban designers, whose role is to establish design
criteria for development projects beyond basic zoning and then help
review, evaluate, and approve the work of project proponents as they
advance their projects through design and into construction. Such a
design review process is an increasingly common component of regu-
latory frameworks especially in larger cities and facilitates discussion
of traditionally controversial issues like aesthetics. It is the urban de-
signer’s presumed insights about good or appropriate urban form that
are seen as crucial to translate public policy or programmatic objec-
tives into architectural concepts, or to recognize the urban potential
in an emerging architectural design and advocate for its realization.
However, a subtlety within this process is often misunderstood.
The translation of general or framework plans into designs is not
meant to be a sequential process— always emanating from planning
to affect design—but instead an interactive one. The urban designer’s
own expertise in architectural thinking should inform the formulation
of planning concepts so that these are not fixed prior to consideration
of physical implications. This design version of shuttle diplomacy be-
tween planner-formulators and design-translators is important, to be
sure, but it cannot rely only on mediation or persuasion to be effec-
tive. Urban designers must help others see the desired effects of plan-
ning. This requires various visualization and programmatic narrative
techniques by which goals and policies are converted into useful de-
sign guidelines and sometimes specific design ideas. It leads to the idea
of urban design as a special category of public policy, an improvement
on traditional land-use regulations that shy away from qualitative as-
sessments of form. So urban design should then be considered:

A Form- Based Category of Public Policy

Jonathan Barnett’s 1974 Urban Design as Public Policy argued this
very point and became highly influential. If one could agree on spe-
cific attributes of good urbanism (at least in a particular setting, as
Barnett tried to with New York City), then one should be able to
mandate or encourage these through regulatory requirements. The
radicalism embedded in this self- described pragmatic approach was
to incorporate many more formal and aesthetic judgments—indeed
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much more judgment, period— into a standard zoning ordinance,

Where and How Does Urban Design Happen?

and especially into the permitting and evaluative process. Restrictions
on height or massing that in pioneering zoning codes (such as New
York’s own landmark 1916 code) were ostensibly determined through
measurable criteria, such as access to sunlight, could now be introduced
as commonly held good form-based values. The mandating of continu-
ous block-length cornice heights, for example, gained the status of a
lot- coverage restriction, though the former could not as easily be con-
sidered a matter of “health, safety and public welfare” as the latter.
But why shouldn’t public policy as it pertains to the settled envi-
ronment not aspire to quality and even beauty? More recently, a New
York disciple of Barnett, Michael Kwartler, expressed this via the po-
etic notion of “regulating the good that you can’t think of,” or, one
may infer, seeking to achieve through regulation what is not normally
provided by conventional real estate practices. Since American plan-
ning is often accused of being reactive to real estate interests, interests
that do not always prioritize public benefit, here would be a way to
push developer-initiated projects to higher qualitative standards. So
again, given the presumption that what constitutes good urban form
(or desirable uses, or amenities such as ground-level retail, or open
space) can be agreed upon by a community, these should be legislated.
And the natural champions for this are those individuals identified as
urban designers. The appeal behind this interpretation of urban de-
sign is twofold. It maintains lofty ideals by arguing on behalf of codifi-
able design qualities, while operating at the pragmatic level of the real
estate industry, facilitating better development. New York’s Battery
Park project is generally acknowledged as a successful example.
This may all be well and good, but such mediating and regulating
are not sufficiently rewarding for those who believe that less crea-
tivity is involved in establishing guidelines for others to interpret then
to design oneself. It seems too administrative and passive a role for
urban design. Is not urban design about giving shape to urbanism?
Is it not about:

The Architecture of the City

This conception of urban design is at once more ambitious yet nar-
rower than the idea of urban design as public policy. The roots of this
view may be traced earlier in the twentieth century to the American
City Beautiful movement, and further into the nineteenth century to
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the European Beaux Arts tradition. Its proponents seek above all to
Alex Krieger

control the shaping of those areas of the city that are public and,
therefore, of common concern. It is a sphere populated by mainly
architect-urbanists, but it makes kindred spirits of diverse figures
such as Colin Rowe, Camillo Sitte, and William H. Whyte.
Shaping public space is considered the fi rst order of urbanism by
the architect/urbanist. Thus, the primary role of urban design is to
develop methods and mechanisms for doing this. Done with author-
ity and artistry (and proper programming and furnishings—Whyte’s
contribution), it allows the rest of the city, all that is private, to dis-
tribute itself logically and properly in relationship to this public realm.
During the 1970s and 1980s, particularly in Europe, a related theory
of the “Urban Project” emerged. This entailed the programming, fi-
nancing, and design of a catalytic development, often a joint public/
private venture, that would stimulate or revive an urban district. This
notion of urban design is best embodied by a stable and stabilizing
form, one that anchors its part of the city with unique characteris-
tics that are expected to endure and influence future neighbors. The
1980s “Grand Projects” of Paris are generally regarded as such valu-
able catalysts for urban reinvestment.
The idea of urban design as the architecture of the city is often
conceptualized in terms of the ideality of Rome as portrayed in the
Nolli map, or in Piranesi’s more fantastical description of imperial
Rome in his Compo Marzio engraving. Or it is simply absorbed via
our touristic encounters with the preindustrial portions of the Euro-
pean city in which the emphasis on the public realm— at least in the
places we regularly visit— seems so clear. It is a small conceptual leap
from this formulation of urban design to the idea of:

Urban Design as Restorative Urbanism

The form of the preindustrial western city— compact, dense, layered,
and slow-changing—holds immense power over city dreaming among
both urbanists and the public. The traditional city seems at once
clearly organized, humanely sized, manageable, and beautiful. Such
virtues seem absent in the modern metropolis. Why not mobilize to
regain these? At present the New Urbanists are most closely associ-
ated with this effort but are part of a long tradition of those guarding
or extolling the advantages of traditional urban typologies. As did
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Where and How Does Urban Design Happen?

Pudong, Shanghai, China. A clash among epochs: intruding skyscrapers and disappearing
bicycles. Shanghai, but characteristic of most Chinese cities today. Courtesy of Alex Krieger.

the polemicists of the City Beautiful movement in America a century

earlier and Christopher Alexander in his 1977 A Pattern Language,
the New Urbanists advocate a return to what they consider time-
tested principles of urbanism, now as appealing to a disillusioned
suburban culture as to those still facing the onslaught of urban
modernization.
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Americans today seem particularly sympathetic to restorative ur-

Alex Krieger

banism for two reasons. They hunger for a “taste” of urbanity, preas-
sembled and sanitized perhaps—“lite urbanism” in Rem Koolhaas’s
wry phrase—having for several generations disengaged from (and still
unsure about) the real thing. Assaulted by the new, they seek comfort
in the familiar. Traditionally, homes and neighborhoods have offered
respite from the anxieties of change. Thus, it is understandable how
an era of seemingly unending innovation in business, technology, and
lifestyle marketing engenders sentimental nostalgia for the places we
used to (or think we used to) live in. Though we may demand the
conveniences of modern kitchens and attached garages, many prefer
to package these in shapes and facades reminiscent of earlier (assumed
to be) slower and pleasanter paces of life. Many a New Urbanist en-
deavor from Seaside to Kentlands to Crocker Park, Ohio, exhibit such
a hybridization of modern lifestyles in traditional building forms.
The walkable city, the city of public streets and public squares,
the low-rise, high- density city, the city of defi ned neighborhoods
gathered around valued institutions, the city of intricate layers of
uses free of auto-induced congestion— of course these remain ap-
pealing. Americans are not alone in pining for such qualities. In to-
day’s Berlin, to refer to one European example, the city planning ad-
ministration’s highly conservative architectural design guidelines for
the reunified center are but another manifestation of this instinct to
slow the pace of change— at least as it pertains to the physical, if not
the social or political, environment. Many urban designers believe
that it is their discipline’s responsibility to slow excess change, resist
unwarranted newness, or at least advocate for such old-fashioned
notions as “human scale” and “place-making.” Then we should
think of:

Urban Design as an Art of “Place- Making”

A corollary to restorative urbanism is an increasing commitment to
“place-making,” the provision of distinctive, lively, appealing centers
for congregation to alleviate the perceived homogeneity of many and
large contemporary urban areas. There are architecture and urban
design fi rms in the United States that advertise themselves as “place-
makers,” as the ads in any issue of the Urban Land illustrate. It is
easy to succumb to cynicism. So many ordinary developments adver-
tise their placeless character with catchy names ending in “place”
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Where and How Does Urban Design Happen?
The Community Builders, The Villages of Park DuValle revitalization, Hope VI government
housing program, Louisville, Kentucky, 1999. Courtesy of Urban Design Associates, Pittsburgh.

Park DuValle before revitalization, Louisville, Kentucky, ca. 1994. Courtesy of Urban Design
Associates, Pittsburgh.

(among the most common of these being “Center Place,” a moniker

promising precisely what is missing in new subdivisions).
Yet, creating exceptional places to serve human purposes has al-
ways been central to the design professions. We have just never called
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ourselves place-makers before or have been so self- conscious about the

Alex Krieger

task. Economists often remind society that it is the rare commodity

that gains value over time. As more contemporary urban develop-
ment acquires generic qualities or is merely repetitive, the distinctive
urban place, old or new, is harder to fi nd. This alone will continue to
fuel preservation movements across the urban world. But in a world
that adds sixty million people to urban populations each year, preser-
vation and restoration cannot be the answers to place-making. More
urban designers should devote their attention to making new places
as worthy as those made by their time-honored predecessors. Again,
it is the American New Urbanists who have articulated this goal most
clearly but with mixed results. Their rhetoric extols intimate scale,
texture, the mixing of uses, connectivity, continuity, the privileg-
ing of what is shared, and other such characteristics of great urban
places, but their designs tend to employ familiar old forms and tradi-
tional aesthetic detailing that usually seem forced and phony, out of
key with how we now live.
The obvious merits of preserving venerable old urban places or
the wisdom of treading lightly in the midst of historic districts aside,
doubts remain about how successfully we might organize and clothe
the complexities of modern life in traditional iconography. What if

Three consecutive generations of housing, Shanghai, China. Courtesy of Alex Krieger.

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we place less faith in dressing up new development with emblems of

Where and How Does Urban Design Happen?

urbanity and devote more effort to wiser distribution of resources or
better land management? We then call for:

Urban Design as Smart Growth

While there has been a strong association of urban design with
“downtowns,” demand for suburban growth management and re-
investment strategies for the older rings around city centers has gath-
ered many advocates. Indeed, to protect urbanism, not to mention
minimize environmental harm and needless land consumption, it is
imperative, many argue, to control sprawl and make environmental
stewardship a more overt part of urban thinking. Expressed oppor-
tunistically, it is also where the action is. Since 90 percent of devel-
opment takes place at the periphery of existing urbanization, the
urban designer should be operating there and, if present, advocating
“smarter” planning and design. Conversely, ignoring the metropoli-
tan periphery as if it were unworthy of a true urbanist or limiting
one’s efforts to urban “infi ll” may simply be forms of problem avoid-
ance. As social observers have long pointed out, suburban and ex-
urban areas, where most Americans live, are not nonurban, merely
providing different, certainly less traditional degrees of urban expe-
rience or intensity.
That the twenty-fi rst century will be more conservation-minded is
not in doubt. That the world overall must be smarter about managing
resources and land is also clear. Therefore, the traditional close alle-
giance of urban design to an architectural and development perspec-
tive must be broadened. Exposure to the natural sciences, to ecol-
ogy, to energy management, to systems analysis, to the economics of
land development, to land-use law, and to issues of public health has
not been but should become fundamental to an urbanist’s training.
Urban designers advocating a “smart growth” agenda today gener-
ally do so out of an ideological conviction that sprawl abatement or
open-space conservation are necessary. But as they enter this terri-
tory, they quickly realize that acquiring additional skills and partners
in planning is equally necessary.
To actually manage metropolitan growth requires dealing with
needs—like land conservation, water management, and transporta-
tion—that cut across jurisdictional boundaries. Therefore, and in-
creasingly for many, urban design must be about:
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Alex Krieger

Frank Gehry, Millennium Park, pedestrian bridge, Chicago, Illinois. Infrastructure for the pleasure
of movement, not an optimization of motion. Courtesy of Alex Krieger.

The Infrastructure of the City

The arrangement of streets and blocks, the distribution of open and
public spaces, the alignment of transit and highway corridors, and
the provision of municipal services certainly constitute essential com-
ponents of city design. Indeed, to focus on just one category of urban
infrastructure, few things are more important to cities or virtually
any form of contemporary settlement than well-functioning trans-
portation systems. Yet, the optimization of mobility pursued as an in-
dependent variable, separate from the complex and overlapping web
of other urban systems, ultimately works against healthy communi-
ties. Engineering criteria, we have learned, are not by themselves suf-
ficient city-producing tools.
Apart from the occasional efforts to “architecturalize” infrastruc-
ture, as in the various megastructure proposals of the 1960s (a source
of fascination today), neither planners nor designers have played a
significant role in transportation or other urban infrastructure plan-
ning. Thus, it has become another sphere for an urban designer to
attempt to address at both the pragmatic level of calibrating demands
for mobility with other social needs and in advancing new (or reviv-
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ing old) ways in which city form and transportation systems may be

Where and How Does Urban Design Happen?

integrated. At a fairly mundane yet significant level, this is what fuels
the current fascination with Transit- Oriented Development in newer
areas of urbanization, and with dense mixed-use, often joint public-
private development adjacent to multimodal transportation centers
in larger cities.
The twentieth- century love affair with the car— still considered
the ideal personal mobility system—has diminished the range of con-
ceptualizing about urban form and transportation. We were too mes-
merized by the magic of Sant’Elia’s Italian Futurists renderings and
those of Le Corbusier’s Ville Radieuse. An entire century later we
are rediscovering that integrating urban form and mobility depends
on more sophisticated umbilical cords than open roads. This is espe-
cially so since the engineering world is shifting emphasis from hard-
ware to systems design, from adding lanes, for example, to traffic
management technology. It is their acknowledgment that factors such
as livability, sustainability, and economic and cultural growth—in
other words good urban design— are the real goals of infrastructure
optimization.
Agreeing with such a sensibility, some leaders of landscape archi-
tecture, a field that has generally pursued a humanistic perspective on
planning, have recently advanced another perspective on urbanistic
action that they are calling:

Urban Design as “Landscape Urbanism”

In the past few years a new school of thought about cities has emerged:
“landscape urbanism.” Its proponents seek to incorporate ecology,
landscape architecture, and infrastructure into the discourse of ur-
banism. The movement’s intellectual lineage includes Ian McHarg,
Patrick Geddes, and even Frederick Law Olmsted, though its polemi-
cal point of departure seems to be that landscape space, not architec-
ture any longer, is the generative force in the modern metropolis.
To return to the 1956 conference for a moment: it produced a
good deal of rhetoric about how landscape architecture was to be an
integral part of urban design. But this aspect was quickly subsumed
under the architecture/planning spectrum in which urban design
would occupy the mediating middle. Momentarily there was no con-
ceptual space left for landscape architecture. Ironically, more areas
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of settlement in North America have been designed by landscape ar-

Alex Krieger

chitects than any other professionals. However, an accusation (some-

times accurate) has persisted that landscape architect–directed urban
design favors low densities, exhibits little formal sensibility, and con-
tains too much open space— in other words, it produces sub- or non-
urban environments.
Proponents of landscape urbanism, such as James Corner, chal-
lenge such a cliché, instead insisting that the conception of the solid,
“man-made” city of historic imagination perpetuates the no longer
pertinent view that nature and human artifice are opposites. Land-
scape urbanism projects purport to overcome this opposition, hold-
ing neither a narrow ecological agenda nor mainstream (read archi-
tectural) city-making techniques as primary. Valuable urban design,
landscape urbanists insist, is to be found at the intersection of ecol-
ogy, engineering, design, careful programming, and social policy.
Largely a set of values rather than a mature practice to date, land-
scape urbanism may prove its utility as endeavors such as the Fresh
Kills landfill reuse project on Staten Island proceed.
In one regard the movement may be a reaction to the Nolli map
view of urbanism, the binary conception of cities as made up of build-
ings and the absence of buildings, where the white of the map— the
voids—is the result of built form, the black of the map. Maybe this
was a useful interpretation of the preindustrial city— of the Italian
piazza as space carved out of the solidity of built fabric. Outside the
preindustrial walled city were certainly landscapes and undesignated
space, but within the city, space resulted from built form. But any
careful perusal of a preindustrial-era city map proves this assertion
false: surely the “white” of the Nolli plan comes in many hues and
nuances of meaning. Besides, the landscape urbanist asks, isn’t the
landscape the glue that now holds the contemporary, low-density,
sprawling metropolis together?
The radicalism inherent in thinking of the landscape as determin-
ing or organizing urban patterns, a radicalism in which Nolli’s white,
today colored green, becomes the central component of urban design,
brings us at last to the territory of:

Urban Design as Visionary Urbanism

I have saved, nearly for the end, this long- standing expectation of
urban design: that its practitioners— or rather, in this instance, its
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theorists— provide insight and models about the way we ought to

Where and How Does Urban Design Happen?

organize spatially in communities and not simply accept the ways
we do. The prospect of hypothesizing about the future of urbanism
surely attracts more students to urban design programs than any
other lure. Being engaged in transforming urbanism is a sphere of ac-
tion associated with the great figures of modern urban change, from
Baron Haussmann to Daniel Burnham, Ebenezer Howard, Raymond
Unwin, Le Corbusier, and maybe even Rem Koolhaas and Andres
Duany. But such deliverers of bold saber strokes (to borrow a phrase
from Giedion) are rarer today than they were at the turn of the twen-
tieth century, or we act on their visions less often. A new generation
of visionary designers may emerge out of China or other parts of the
world rapidly urbanizing today, but they have yet to do so.
In the relative absence of contemporary visionaries, others have
stepped forward to explore the nature of urban culture today. The
urban sociologist/theorist—from Louis Wirth earlier in the twentieth
century to Henri Lefebvre, Richard Sennett, Edward Soja, and David
Harvey—is not normally considered an urban designer but in a sense
has become so, having supplanted in our own time the great urban
transformers of the past, not in deeds but in understandings of urban
culture.
The heroic form-giving tradition may be in decline. After all, the
twentieth century witnessed immense urban harm caused by those
who offered a singular or universal idea of what a city is, or what
urbanization should produce. But our cultural observers remind us
that pragmatism and technique cannot be a sufficient substitute, nor
can design professionals be mere absorbers of public opinion wait-
ing for consensus to build. One must offer new ideas as well. Still,
there is the perennial conundrum about how directly engaged urban
design must be with the “real world.” Maybe, after all, urban design
is about direct community engagement:

Urban Design as Community Advocacy (or Doing No Harm)

Mostly since 1956 and in academia largely still, “urban design” con-
notes large- scale thinking— either the consideration of substantial
areas of settlement or theorizing at a grand scale about the nature
of urbanism. But among contemporary dwellers of urban neighbor-
hoods—the ostensive beneficiaries of this broad thinking—“urban
design” is increasingly coming to be associated with local, immediate
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concerns such as improving neighborhoods, calming traffic, minimiz-

Alex Krieger

ing negative impacts of new development, expanding housing choices

while keeping housing affordable, maintaining open space, improving
streetscapes, and creating more humane environments in general.
In this newer, almost colloquial use of the term, urban design ap-
proximates what used to be called “community planning.” A young
Jane Jacobs’s prescient comment during the 1956 conference comes
to mind. “A store is also a storekeeper,” she said then, with the impli-
cation that her designer colleagues at the conference better remember
that a storekeeper is also a citizen, and that citizens have a stake in
decisions being made about their environment. Not much follow-up
of her point was recorded in the proceedings. It would take another
generation to bring this view to the foreground.
The association of urban design and citizen participation was fi-
nally the result of the gradual bureaucratization of the planning pro-
fession itself. Sometime following the social unrest of the 1960s and
a growing consensus about the failures of urban renewal, the focus of
planning began to shift dramatically from physical planning to pro-
cess and policy formulation. If the architect and urban designer were
hell-bent on producing visions of a better tomorrow, the theory went,
then the role of the planner must be to determine need and rational
process, not to pursue (the often illusive and sometimes dubious) vi-
sion. Indeed, a fear of producing more top-down, failed plans before
an increasingly demanding, less patient public led the planning pro-
fession to embrace broad participatory techniques and community
advocacy. But ironically the concurrent disengagement from spatial
concerns on the part of the planner began to distance the activities of
planning from the stuff the beneficiaries of planning wish for most:
nicer neighborhoods, access to better places of work and commerce,
and special environments to periodically escape everyday pressures.
As the planning profession continues to operate in the broader
spheres of policy formulation, the focus of planning increasingly ap-
pears to the public as abstract, even indifferent to immediate concerns
or daily needs. The urban design-minded planner who addresses im-
mediate, often spatially related concerns has come to be seen as the
professional most attuned to tangible urban problem-solving, not as
the agent of bold urban transformation. In citizens’ minds, those who
practice urban design are not the “shapers of cities”—in large part
because such shapers, if they exist, are mistrusted. They are instead
custodians of the qualities valued by a community, qualities that the
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urban designer is asked to protect and foster. Today, it is the urban

Where and How Does Urban Design Happen?

designer, not the planner, who has emerged as the place- centered pro-
fessional, with “urban design” often assuming a friendlier, more ac-
cessible popular connotation than “planning.”

Urban Design as a Frame of Mind

The above list is not intended to be exhaustive; other urban design
activities could surely be added. In rapidly modernizing parts of the
world, urban design has emerged as an important component of man-
aging this modernization. An example is the BOT (Build, Operate,
Transfer) transportation and related mixed-use projects common in
both South American and Asian countries. (BOT is a form of proj-
ect fi nancing in which a private entity receives a franchise from the
public sector to fi nance, design, construct, and operate a facility for
a specified period, after which ownership is transferred back to the
public sector.) Nor is the point of identifying— even caricaturing—
the above spheres of urban design to lay claim to vast jurisdictional
territory for the discipline. On the contrary, it is to strongly suggest
that instead of moving toward professional specificity, urban design
has come to represent— and its varied practitioners have come to be
aligned with— distinct avenues for engaging and facilitating urban-
ity. Rodolfo Machado, my colleague at Harvard, offers an appealing
(if somewhat rhetorical) defi nition for urban design: the process of
design (or planning, I would add) that produces or enhances urban-
ity. Is this but an “amiable generality”?
Perhaps Sert would be disappointed that half a century after
his fi rst conference no more precise defi nition for urban design has
emerged. Around the third or fourth of the near-annual urban de-
sign conferences that he hosted at Harvard throughout the 1960s
and early 1970s, he expressed concern about the “fog of amiable
generalities” that the conversations had so far produced. He hoped to
move past them, but they have persisted.
Following a quarter of a century of practicing and teaching urban
design, my own conclusion is the following. Urban design is less a
technical discipline than a mind-set among those of varying disci-
plinary foundations seeking, sharing, and advocating insights about
forms of community. What binds urban designers is their commitment
to improving the livability of cities, to facilitating urban reinvestment
and maintenance, and indeed to enhancing urbanity. The need for
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a narrow defi nition for such a constellation of interests is not self-

Alex Krieger

evident. Because of this commitment to cities, urban designers dis-

tinguish among mandates: they realize that to renew the centers of
cities, build new cities, restore the parts of old cities worthy of pres-
ervation, and construct equitable growth management programs on
the periphery requires vastly different strategies, theories, and design
actions. Indeed, one may rejoice that there are many spheres of ur-
banistic action for those who are passionate lovers of cities.