Urban Design: A Typology of Procedures and Products

Urban Design: A Typology of Procedures and Products by Jon Lang was a very useful resource to read in relating and building upon certain topics of our Urban Design class.

1.         The available budget is a central factor in urban design and in most cases financial limitations will change the design. While all urban designing involves engagement in the situation, developing a brief and building program, finding the finances and seeing the program through to completion. There are four generic types of urban design process that vary according to procedure used or degree of designer control.

2.         Total urban design – the design team carries the scheme through from inception to completion. It involves the design of both public areas and the buildings around it and involves cities as a whole (e.g. Brasilia) or more usually, precincts of cities usually three or four blocks in size (e.g. capital complex and city centre superblock in Chandigarh by Le Corbusier). In democratic societies there is seldom total control (because of elected representatives, direct community action or laws) compared with totalitarian countries.

3.         All-of-a-piece urban design – the design team produces a master plan with developers then working on parts of the project. Because many urban development projects are so large a design team hired by the property developer (public or private) devises a master plan and design brief and then parcels out various parts of the scheme to different developers. The construction period can extend over three or four decades (eg Battery Park City in New York). A program and set of guidelines is developed for each sub-developer. Sometimes the master plan is re-designed.

4.         Piece-by-piece urban design (city planning) - development of a precinct of a city is steered in a specific direction by general policies and procedures. It is neighbourhood based and not site-by-site, building-by-building based. Objectives (based on perceptions of public interest) for an area are created and then policies - design incentives (carrots) and controls (sticks) for achieving them are developed. Incentives are needed where the property developer otherwise sees no financial reward in the type of development. e.g. theatres, crèches, low income housing.

5.         Plug-in urban design – the infrastructure is created and then developments plug into it, or a new piece of infrastructure plugs into and improves the existing urban area in order to encourage further development.

6.         All urban designs are affected by available financing in two ways: (1) capital costs and (2) operating costs. Most financing for urban design schemes in capitalist countries (which is considerable) is a mixture of public and private. Upfront expenses include land purchase, planning, infrastructure, mapping sites, preparation of design guidelines, sale of land, review proposals. Due to lack of public finance, the private sector is increasingly being asked to subsidise urban development in return for building what they want.

7.         In capitalist countries the project must be marketable and the market must be large enough to support the design scheme.

8.         Legal mechanisms used in urban planning includes zoning (land use regulation), generally used at a block by block level.

9.         Incentives used to shape and support urban design objectives cities include Government financial subsidies in conjunction with the relaxation of zoning codes and the transfer of development rights. Specific disincentives used for shaping development include increased taxes, slow approval processes for non-compliant projects, direct payment of fees, and the use of moratoria to halt development for a period. Their use is often subject to legal challenges.

10.       The evaluation of a possible urban design scheme involves predicting the future context in which it will operate, predicting its future workability and evaluating its performance compared to other schemes. Design policies and guidelines must be clear and based on evidence so that the best and most challenge-resistant scheme can be chosen.