Public Places Urban Spaces, 2nd Edition: The Dimensions of Urban Design

1136 Pages·2010·16.95 MB·English

by  Matthew Carmona

Table of Contents

Cover Image
Front Matter
Copyright
Preface
Chapter 1. Urban Design Today
Chapter 2. Urban Change
Chapter 3. Contexts for Urban Design
Chapter 4. The Morphological Dimension
Chapter 5. The Perceptual Dimension
Chapter 6. The Social Dimension
Chapter 7. The Visual Dimension
Chapter 8. The Functional Dimension
Chapter 9. The Temporal Dimension
Chapter 10. The Development Process
Chapter 11. The Control Process
Chapter 12. The Communication Process
Chapter 13. Holistic Urban Design
Bibliography
Index
Front Matter
Public Places - Urban Spaces
The Dimensions of Urban Design

Second Edition

Mathew Carmona

Steven Tiesdell

Tim Heath

Tanner Oc

AMSTERDAM • BOSTOn • hEIDELBERG • LONDON • NEW
YORK • OXFORD PARIS • SAN DIEGO • SAN FRANCISCO •
SINGAPORE • SYDNEY • TOKYO

Architectural Press is an Imprint of Elsevier
Copyright © 2010 Matthew Carmona, Steve Tiesdell, Tim Heath & Taner Oc.
All rights reserved.

Copyright
Architectural Press is an imprint of Elsevier

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First edition 2003

Second edition 2010

Copyright © 2010, Matthew Carmona, Steve Tiesdell, Tim Heath &
Taner Oc. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved

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Preface
An exposition of the different, but intimately related, dimensions of
urban design, this book is an updated and revised version of a book
originally published in 2003. Focusing neither on a limited checklist
of urban design qualities nor, it is hoped, excluding important areas, it
takes a holistic approach to urban design and placemaking and thus
provides a comprehensive overview of the subject both for those new
to the subject and for those requiring a general guide. To facilitate
this, it has an easily accessible structure, with self-contained and
cross-referenced sections and chapters, enabling readers to dip in for
specific information. The incremental layering of concepts aids those
reading the book cover to cover.

Urban design is also seen as a design process, in which, as in any
design process, there are no ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ answers, only ‘better’
and ‘worse’ answers, the quality of which may only be known in time.
It is, thus, necessary to have a continually questioning and inquisitive
approach to urban design rather than a dogmatic view. The book does
not seek to produce a ‘new’ theory of urban design in a prescriptive
fashion. Instead it expounds a broad belief in – and attitude to – urban
design and placemaking as important parts of urban development,
renewal, management, planning and conservation processes.

Synthesising and integrating ideas and theories from a wide range of
sources, the book derives from a comprehensive review and reading
of existing literature and research. It also draws on the authors'
experience teaching, researching and writing about urban design in
schools of urban studies, planning, architecture and surveying.

Motivation
This book comes from two distinct sources. First, from a period
during the 1990s when the authors worked together at the University
of Nottingham on an innovative undergraduate urban planning
programme. Its primary motivation was a belief that teaching urban
design at the core of an interdisciplinary, creative, problem-solving
discipline, planning (and other) professionals would have a more
valuable learning experience and a better foundation for their future
careers. Although in many schools of planning, urban design is still
figuratively put into a ‘box’ and taught by the school's single urban
design ‘specialist’, our contention was that an urban design awareness
and sensibility should inform all parts of the curriculum. The same is
true of schools of architecture, property, real estate and landscape.

Second, a need to prepare undergraduate lecture modules presenting
ideas, principles and concepts of urban design to support the
programme's design studio teaching. Although many excellent urban
design books existed, it soon became apparent that none drew from
the full range of urban design thought. The writing of these modules
generated the idea for the book and provided its overall structure.

The Book’s Structure
The book is in three main parts. It begins with a broad exposition of
what is meant by ‘urban design’. In Chapter 1, the challenge for
‘urban design’ and for the ‘urban designer’ is made explicit.

The chapter deliberately adopts a broad understanding of urban
design, which sees urban design as more than simply the physical or
visual appearance of development and as integrative (i.e. joined-up)
and integrating activity. While urban design's scope may be broad and
its boundaries often fuzzy, the heart of its concern is about making
places for people – this idea forms the kernel of this book.

More precisely, it is about making better places than would otherwise
be produced. This is – unashamedly and unapologetically – a
normative contention about what we believe urban design should be
about rather than necessarily what at any point in time it is about. We
therefore regard urban design as an ethical activity – first, in an
axiological sense (because it is intimately concerned with issues of
values) and, second, because it is, or should be, concerned with
particular values such as social justice, equity and environmental
sustainability.

Chapter 2 outlines and discusses issues of change in the contemporary
urban context. Chapter 3 presents a number of overarching contexts
that provide the background for urban design action – the local,
global, market and regulatory. These contexts underpin and inform the
discussions of the individual dimensions of urban design principles
and practice in Part II.

Part II consists of Chapters 4–9, each of which reviews a substantive
dimension of urban design – ‘morphological’, ‘perceptual’, ‘social’,
‘visual’, ‘functional’ and ‘temporal’. As urban design is a joined-up
activity, this separation is for the purpose of clarity in exposition and
analysis only. These six overlapping dimensions of urban design are
the everyday substance of urban design, while the cross-cutting
contexts outlined in Chapter 3 relate to and inform all the dimensions.
The six dimensions and four contexts are linked and related by the
conception of design as a process of problem solving. The chapters
are not intended to delimit boundaries around particular areas of urban
design and, instead, highlight the breadth of the subject area, with the
connections between the different broad areas being made explicit.
Urban design is only holistic if all areas of action – morphological,
perceptual, social, visual, functional and time – are considered
together.

In Part III – Chapters 10–12 – implementation and delivery
mechanisms for urban design are explored – that is, how urban design