History
UDSU – Urban Design Studies Unit at University of Strathclyde (see the Strathclyde website) as set up in 1989 by Hildebrand Frey, to address problems of urban rehabilitation, renewal and restructuring. It research originally focused on city and is origin development and structure and expanded to impact on people and community engagement. It is developed over time within areas of ecological, urban and economic sustainability, the history of urban design, minorities and the built environment. Research within the group has been sponsored by EU, ESRC, AHRC, RTPI and other grants. UDSU has strong expertise on urban analysis, planning and design, street design and traffic calming, community engagement in urban policies and design, identity and sociability of public spaces.
Currently the Unit, led by Professor Sergio Porta and Dr. Ombretta Romice, is expanding further towards interpretation of urban and dynamics layered manifestations of complex relationships of mutual change and evolution at require new ways of interpreting, representing and managing space. This shift towards understanding of urban space changes between different states and of control in time rather that states configured, towards concept of adaptive space, many provoke innovations in Urban Design practice by means of contributions from many disciplines the built environment like urban morphology and geography as well as other sciences like the biology of evolution or the physics of complex networks. UDSU has therefore developed a strong record of international and multidisciplinary research in study of spatial complex networks, with important studies on urban transportation network morphology and to impact on economy and people behavior in cities. It work includes the production of modeling tool based on Geographic Information System (GIS) for spatial network analysis.
Significant efforts to better understand the main challenges looming on urban structures consequence of globalization, economic uncertainty, rapid mobility and migration, in both the western and developing worlds. Dealing with major interrelated dynamics like those posed by massive urbanization processes, informal settlements and instant cities, community revitalization and new place identity in space of flows, social housing estates rehabilitation, street reclaiming and automobile dependency in cities, requires acknowledging cities inherently self-organizing systems.
The Unit has developed International expertise on urban analysis from both a morphological and an experiential angle. Work on Multi Centrality Analysis, urban regeneration, sustainable transport and development, community engagement in design and Post Occupancy Evaluation (POE) is well known and used in both academia and consultancy, thanks to strong theoretical premises as well as widespread and innovative range of analytical tools devised, which tackle all components of urban design process. Recent urban studies at several scales of development in collaboration with Architecture and Design Scotland have been received as significant, refreshing and influential (‘An Comann’ and ‘Under the Microscope’, 2010). The Unit also strong portfolio in masterplanning and street/space design and has widely published in area of sustainable development and area regeneration focusing on both design and management of process.
Mission:
Practicing Urban Seeding: to explore the spatial structures that under certain social, financial and political conditions, will enable processes of self-organization in contemporary cities to flourish and evolve.
Ethos:
1.
On giants’ shoulders
For those interested in urban design and planning these are exciting days. A whole new story is beginning where at many levels the promise of better world is raising from new synergy between the agenda of Sustainability for policy makers and that Place Making for architects and urban scholars in general.
It took while reach is point. More than 10 years ago, influential documents like Towards Urban Renaissance and The Urban Design Compendium inaugurated this new page by summarizing in guidelines wealth of literature the late Eighties which included works by Peter Newman and Jeff Kenworthy in Australia, Peter Calthorpe and Andres Duany in the USA, Ian Bentley, Mike Jenks and Hidebrand Frey in UK, and certainly cannot quote all of them.
To be true, this new wave of urbanism, which took names of New Urbanism in USA and Place Making the UK, proceeded on the shoulders of giants like Jane Jacobs, Christopher Alexander, Oscar Newman, Donald Appleyard, Allan Jacobs. These were protagonists of first sharp criticism to many facets of conventional urbanism in early Sixties, still shrunk between endless sprawl and senseless towers-in-park. Such two models stemmed directly the theories, like Ebenezerd Howard and Le Corbusier, who shaped the new discipline of urban planning and design at very dawn of XXth century.
2.
Sprawl and Towers-in-Park: overcoming the Cultural Problem
A long story indeed. A story dense of intellectual challenges and adventurous human trajectories that sometimes resulted in sharp conflicts with each other. And a story of major failures. The whole culture of Place Making are here interpreting to best future of Scotland can reduced to long and difficult recover from two models, the countless Levittowns and Pruitt-Igoes have permeated our urban culture and shaped both industrial cities and our discipline since their very origins. After much time and many realizations, the environmental challenges posed by global warming and the immense social challenges posed by global urbanization, their shortcomings such two models in front eyes: are simply not sustainable anymore. We should retrofit Suburbia. We should regenerate Futurama. And we should it now.
There are obstacles in front of us. One may think that such obstacles are very hard to overcome because are enrooted in complex financial or political problems, but is not like that. The problem is mainly cultural. And the first thing can move our civilization forward towards better places for our people is to acknowledge that apparently long way to before understand how cities should designed and planned.
Look around the new “urban jewels”; give glance to glamorous architectural journals; listen to taught in best schools of architecture. Generations after generations, we architects still perpetuate the gospel in surreal childish game, where the higher the failure, the greater the honour. Our idea of designing cities you should the job pretty much as you were designing a building, but just a bit larger.
Historically, architects are very young professional figures: in past ages to master builders serve the community just doing the right had always been done before, adopting, preserving and respecting the overall structure of spaces even – especially very special and prominent buildings realized. But the architecture was entirely reconfigured in different and even opposite way. We should pay a lot of attention to passage. With this passage, at beginning of the XXth century, architecture changed its status from being a practical art and an experimental science, in the age of the master-builders, to being just branch of visual arts age of avant-guards. It point dimension of extraordinary prevailed and architects started doing different job. But, in John Habraken’s words: “The demands of everyday environment at vastly different for required to create extraordinary. Nevertheless, the profession’s self image, publications and ways of working still cling to roots in monumental architecture” (Habraken, 2005). So us very clear: by calling for new evidence-based approach to design ordinary city are challenging our mother-discipline of architecture to heart, are questioning it very foundations. We are making big jump into entire new scientific domain and beginning to delineate the foundations of new discipline.
3.
Clues of the new Discipline
Of course we do not know what this new discipline is going to be. But we know something, we know several key aspects of it. Whatever this new discipline will be, it will have to do with:
- Evidence-based analysis [as opposed to image-based analysis]
- An reference to the dimension of the ordinary and a science of the common sense [as opposed to the dimension of the extraordinary and the rhetoric of the stunning]
- A major interest in spatial change and evolution [as opposed to a notion of the intangibility of the art-work]
- A priority interest in processes of informal participation [as complementary to formal processes of community involvement] and a culture of generative citizenship.
- A structural approach that emphasises what is recurrent in space and time (within certain spatial and temporal domains) [as opposed to the analytical approach that privileges what is different in space and time]
- A stylistic neutral attitude [as opposed to style-led urbanism]
As one can see, one major characteristic of this new discipline will be a focus on self-organization in the formation of urban space. This focus, in this specific field, means conceiving the city as the unplanned stratification of billions of projects and plans, some large and some small, some collective and some individual, in mutual tireless interaction in time. It means seeing what has been negated for too long: that self-organization has nothing to do with chaos, it is in fact a higher level of order. And that all the most lively and successful parts of our cities are in fact those less planned, which means – by definition – more complex. And that the secret of all good cities has always been one specific feature, with which a city can good or bad depending on many other factors, but it is alive and kicking, and without which a city can just be bad, because it is dead: adaptability. Adaptability, or the structural disposition of spaces to change by welcoming changing needs in time: that is the key.
Because, according to Panerai, Castex and Deapule: “Building the city today could mean the wish to find again, perhaps with different forms, the qualities of proximity, mixture and the unexpected, i.e. a public space accessible to all, a variety of mixed activities, a built-up area that keeps adapting and transforming itself in unplanned neighbourhoods.” (Panerai et al, 2004).
4.
The oxymoron in practice
Planning for “unplanned neighbourhoods”? An anti-planning planning agenda. In fact, an oxymoron. But we can play the oxymoron even further: we need planning today because we have to re-activate the circulation of blood in our planning system after decades of chill, and this chill is planning itself. We need to achieve by virtue of a conscious and organized effort what once was innate and unconscious knowledge. We need to reactivate the circulation of information between inhabitants and powers through informal processes of participation based not as much on large formal gatherings and structured processes of inclusion as on the daily and direct control of inhabitants over the ordinary modification of their own individual and collective space, at different scales. And because we are no more in the middle age, these very traditional processes of informal participation through ordinary change need to be enabled under conditions that must be carefully identified, organized and planned. The space of self-organization will never come back on its own. It must be re-invented under our days conditions. And here see the programme of the new discipline: we must explore the spatial, social, financial and political structures that will enable once again processes of self-organization in contemporary cities.
And here we can see that, as part of the broader cultural problem, there is a major scientific problem that must be addressed. I cannot find better words to define it than those of Christopher Alexander:
“The character of this minute, step-by-step adaptation is vitally important in the world, and we have been ignoring it, in recent decades, at our peril. […] The planners, building officials, construction companies, and engineers who have redefined everyday processes during the last 100 years, working in a broad context of algorithmic thinking, have, without explicitly intending to, destroyed a far more subtle process. […] All this is hardly more than common sense. Yet the fact remains that this kind of adaptive process does not currently have an acknowledged part in theories of algorithms, in developmental biology, in architecture, or even in system theory. It is not part of the mental models in our current toolkit” (Alexander, in print).
We should not underestimate the magnitude of the challenge: it is this “far more subtle process” that we should reinforce and reanimate in a new contemporary – but timeless in nature – form of city planning. Therefore, to be true, we are not speaking of urban design or planning anymore: we are speaking of this new discipline, under a different name, that of urban seeding.
This term resounds again Christopher Alexander’s words: “This quality in buildings and in towns cannot be made, but only generated, indirectly, by the ordinary actions of the people, just as a flower cannot be made, but only generated from the seed” (Alexander, 1980).
References
Alexander, C. 1980, The Timeless Way of Building, Oxford University Press, Oxford, UK
Alexander, C. in print, Harmony Seeking Computations: a Science of Non-Classical Dynamics based on the Progressive Evolution of the Larger Whole, International Journal of Unconventional Computing
Habraken, J. 2005, Palladio’s children, Taylor & Francis, London, UK
Panerai, P. Castex, J. Depaule, JC. Samuels, I. 2004, Urban Forms. The Death and Life of the Urban Block, Oxford: Architectural Press.