Unleashing the true power of urban design

While the design of cities has a millennial history, the emergence of urban design as a contemporary practice can, in many respects, be traced back to 1956, when Harvard Dean Josep Lluís Sert organised the first urban design conference at the Graduate School of Design. The goal was to re-assert the physicality of the city and bridge the gap between the design disciplines and policy-oriented planners. While it rightly defined urban design as a collaborative process, it missed the roles of many who contribute to shaping the city. Jane Jacobs was present and famously admonished the participants for their high level of formal abstraction, ignoring the social dimensions of actual urban life.

Still, this opening (and other related initiatives) led to a revival of urban design as a discipline across the US, and eventually Canada, and the emergence of urban designers within the municipal staff of many cities, led by New York Mayor John Lindsay’s “Urban Design Group” in the 1960s. This re-emergence of city-scale design thinking coincided with a moment when cities themselves began a transformation from mid-20th century land-use segregation and auto-dependency to a more sustainable, compact, mixed, walkable urban form.

Canadian cities were at the forefront. In 1977, I was recruited by Mayor David Crombie to set up an urban design group within the Planning and Development Department of the City of Toronto to support the city’s groundbreaking Central Area Plan, proposing to repopulate the city’s downtown. Over a 10-year period, we built up what became the Division of Architecture and Urban Design, which became an integral part of the city’s planning function. I chronicle the story of how this came about in my book Walking Home: The Life and Lessons of a City Builder.

By now, most large and medium-size Canadian cities have a group of urban designers in City Hall as well as connections to cohorts of urban designers in consulting firms. In Montreal, the urban design services are integrated within larger city departments such as Urban Infrastructure, Circulation, and ‘Aménagement urbain,’ with the city realizing such notable projects as the transformation of la Rue Sainte- Catherine, La Place Vauquelin, and the Square Dorchester Nord.

The transformation of Rue Sainte-Catherine into a major spine of pedestrian life and activity in the heart of the city. Concept: Provencher Roy Architectes. Image courtesy of City of Montreal.

Vancouver has a Division of Planning, Urban Design and Sustainability. I have worked with the in-house group in Edmonton, which has built a team of architects, landscape architects, and planners. This group provides people-centred and place-based urban design leadership on city-building initiatives such as The City Plan (the City’s new Municipal Development Plan) and the recently completed Downtown Streetscape Design Manual. The Urban Design Unit also routinely collaborates with other professionals in the ‘Plan’ phase of the City’s Plan-Design-Build-Deliver-Operate value chain for high profile infrastructure projects, such as Jasper Avenue, Edmonton’s premier main street. Halifax’s Urban Design team – initially created to help author the plan and regulations for the downtown area – has expanded to include a Streetscaping function, responsibility for heritage regulations and policy, and the lead in updating decades-old planning documents for the developed areas of the region.

In some ways this practice has gotten easier with time. The city is changing daily in front of our eyes, struggling to become more compact, mixed, multi-faceted, dense, active, and, ultimately, more viable and productive. At a very high level, politicians, city and agency staff, the general public, and business people ‘get it.' Likewise, many developers are convinced of the value of integrated design, incorporating the full range of ingredients that go into making successful urban places.

The key questions are now increasingly less about what to do and more about how to bridge the gap between reality and aspiration, while putting into practice our better understanding of what the city is capable of being. The pulse in this new sense of becoming is palpable, but we still haven’t quite grasped the full import of this dynamic collective process of transformation. There is a serious time lag. Intellectually, we grasp that the phenomena of urban life are interconnected, but our inherited civic machinery often still functions as if these concepts occupied separate spheres both inside and outside of City Hall.

We are still working with a basic tool kit that was designed to impose and secure a vastly different kind of world from the one in which we are living. City government is still for the most part organized into ‘functional’ silos. The traditional departmental structure, set up to deal with specific problems in isolation, too often remains intact. Planners deal with land use, transportation engineers with moving vehicles, designers with buildings and landscapes, municipal engineers with the arrangement of services, and so on.

The dilemma is that that we can no longer afford to solve one problem at a time in isolation; the key to unlocking our true potential as a city is convergence: moving away from compartmentalizing things; blending public and private initiatives; and working across disciplinary lines. Only by embracing the perspective of convergence and pulling these issues out of their assigned silos does it become possible to achieve multiple goals by aligning priorities. The core mission of urban design is now centred on overcoming barriers and making connections.

We have discovered that only by making the city dense, walkable, and compact, can we reduce our heavy environmental footprint and address the devastating progress of climate change. When we make expensive investments in transit infrastructure, we have to also make the corridors and stops into active ‘hubs,’ not just with planning permissions, but also with proactive design initiatives to achieve connectivity. Otherwise, these investments will seriously under- perform. Cross-sector collaboration and strategic partnerships are essential, as we expand affordable housing options for a diverse population, re-invent our economic base, and retool our infrastructure to improve mobility. It is here that I believe the true potential of urban design lies, not just as a formal ordering of space or an aesthetic overlay, but also as synthetic problem-solving in addressing these big picture issues.

Methodologies and working styles are needed that are much less fragmented, supported by an explosion in communications technology that permits and facilitates rapid information sharing and the layering in of many complex variables. More and more different kinds of knowledge and skill sets – which all have urban design implications – are needed in the upstream creative process to expand our understanding of situations of increasing complexity. These encompass engineering specialties such as civil, municipal, transportation, and marine engineering; economists and market specialists in different sectors, including community development; environmental scientists, ecologists, and hydrologists; sociologists and community service providers; artists and arts organizations, along with civil society actors, the business community and community groups. This broad fusion of expertise and knowledge is not compromising; it enables richer and better outcomes.

We need a technique for visualizing overlapping constraints and opportunities ‘on the same page’ as well as places of ‘convergence,’ where design insights can be pooled. When there is an opportunity to kick the tires, pitch new ideas, and react to one another, we expand the collective ‘brain’ of the team and, in a sense, simulate the complexity of real-world conditions. Often we discover that the “solution” we thought was in one area actually resides in another.

Building on my early experiences with such a model in Toronto, we set up a ‘Design Center’ when I worked with the City of St. Paul, Minnesota. With its own director and a small staff, the design center had a core membership of individuals who worked within City Hall as “city designers” in various capacities, plus a larger ancillary group of staff from the county and other agencies. This Design Center provided a forum where design and city-building concepts were explored at the same time by city planners and architects in Planning and Economic Development, landscape architects in the Parks Department, Building Department officials, and transportation and civil engineers in Public Works.

As we enlarge the table to include more actors in the collective act of city building, urban design can point the way to new approaches for working with the real city not an imagined, more orderly surrogate. Experience is teaching us that prescriptive templates do not hold up well when market forces, changing programs, and new needs come into play. We need flexible planning and design tools that are different in nature, often described as ‘strategic planning,’ ‘action strategies,’ ‘open-ended frameworks,’ or – a term I like – ‘unofficial plans.’ These terms express a more forward-looking, innovative, entrepreneurial, and flexible approach. These frameworks are no longer just about the regulation of the height, use, and density of development projects. While this shift is challenging to planning that aspires to illusory end-state predictability, its inherent pragmatism has the potential to liberate design and to harness many kinds of creativity coming from many places, over time.

We are getting closer to the ‘spontaneous city.’ There are certain basic things for which the city will always have to be responsible, such as the coherence, adequacy, and longevity of the public realm and infrastructure, as opposed to more temporal and changeable forms of use and occupancy. But in terms of planning and design, I think the big lesson is that we don’t have to know everything in advance. We don’t have to be able to quantify and locate everything – to know exactly how much of this, that or the other use will be there or there. In a climate that allows for testing and experimentation, there has to be room for the formal and the informal, the permanent and the temporary, in the form of pop-ups and pilots as new ideas emerge and are tested out. Those responsible must be able to respond and make judgments as opportunities come forward to the different kind of changes that are occurring. They must be flexible in welcoming desirable change, even when unanticipated.

Most fundamentally, the critical leap we have to make is the acceptance of a certain level of indeterminacy. It’s all about relationships, rather than precisely-determined outcomes. We can describe these desired relationships – but then leave space for design creativity to achieve the desired outcomes. We need to allow for innovation, hybridization, organic growth, change, and surprise. Rather than thwarting added layers of programmatic and design creativity, we need to enlarge the current gene pool of built form solutions.

Seen in this light, urban design becomes more like improvisational jazz. In Stuart Brand’s terminology, we are learning “how cities learn.” Rather than producing finite products, urban design is increasingly about the anticipation and guidance of long-term transformations, without fixed destinations, contributing synthetic city-scale design thinking that mediates between values, goals, and actual outcomes.