The Nature Of Urban Design

This is a book about cities, predominantly New York. Against the complexities of achieving built-out schemes, the former chief city urban designer enthusiastically sets out to show how all of us can help make the ‘individual actions of proposed buildings better for the neighbourhood, more profitable for the developers and more resilient for the city’, balancing political, financial and design interests.

The book’s stated brief is to convince non-urban designers of the benefits of good design. Chapters cover: why we should care about cities, urban design process, the products of urban design, the case study of New York’s High Line park, and strategies for making cities more sustainable and resilient, with flooding being an underlying theme. The book is well illustrated throughout with snapshot style photos and some diagrams.

The case study of the High Line linear park, the abandoned elevated train line running down the west side of mid-town Manhattan, is a good example of process; politics, finance and design coming together to achieve a successful intervention to transform an entire neighbourhood. The zoning solutions employed unlocked the scheme by reversing intractable conflicts of desired outcomes between stakeholders, securing funding and providing much needed residential accommodation, including 20 per cent affordable housing. The clearly stated goals included not only retaining the burgeoning art district, but also augmenting it to maintain and enhance the genuine mixed-use nature of the area.

The final chapter on resilience highlights the increasingly relevant links between scales of intervention and their implications. These range from cleverly simple solutions such as raising street grates to make seats and bicycle parking whilst augmenting the city’s flood defences, to calculating the five-fold benefit of a dense city office tower over its suburban equivalent when including the transit energy of its users.

Whilst the case of greater sustainability for cities has been well made, the connections with the wider environmental agenda need further consideration. It has become a platitude that more than half the world’s population lives in cities. The remaining three thousand million or so people should not be forgotten, nor the importance of those rural areas, for their cumulative effects on the environment or large-scale food production. Doing so would belie important links between rural and urban. The urban of urban design increasingly looks too narrow a term, at least when discussing sustainability in all its breadth.