Picking Up Stones: Design Research and Urban Settlement

Abstract

Introduction What is relationship of design research to methodology of urban design? This paper analyses methodologies of planning and design, and their assumptions about power and value and place of urban dwellers; it introduces critical framework of French cultural theorist Henri Lefebvre1 and refers to a Cartesian subjectivity taken as definitive of modemity. Secondly, four cases of design research-two concerning UK, Williamson2 and Robbins,3 one from Netherlands, ter Heide and Wijnbelt,4 and one from USA, Loukaitou-Sideris5-are examined. paper asks whether research replicates or challenges assumptions derived from conventional methodologies of disciplines such as urban planning and architectural design. Thirdly, alternative models of urban settlement are noted and alternative possibilities sketched. It is helpful to investigate this today because a majority of human inhabitants of earth will soon dwell in large urban concentrations, many in informal settlements which surround cities of southern hemisphere,6 and because history of Western (white, modern) exhibits an increasing dysfunctionality; its replication throughout world is a form of economic colonialism. Although literature of urbanism has equivalents of war stories for a masculine sensibility,' violence on which they are based is neither a fantasy nor an anomaly in post-war history of urban development, as demonstrated by Marshall Berman' '8 account of road building in New York in 1950s. This institutionalized brutality is more than marginalization of publics by enclaved urban development. It begins in a methodology which splits dwellers' experiences of urban living from conceptualization of the city in minds and graphic representations of planners, architects, and designers-which allows a disparity between representation and reality. While representation may be Utopian, experience can be chaotic. Berman writes of Robert Moses, who as City and Parks Commissioner redefined New York as a network of fast roads, that he seemed to glory in devastation 9 but that he genuinely loved New York. 10 This contradiction requires explanation. Do methodologies of urban planning and architectural design facilitate it? 1 Henri Lefebvre, Production Of Space (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991). 2 C. Williamson, Design in Central Milton Keynes: 25 Years on from Masterplan, Urban Design Intemational 1:4 (December, 1996): 335-356. 3 E. Robbins, Thinking Space/Seeing Space: Thamesmead Revisited, Urban Design Intemational 1:3 (September 1 996): 283-91. 4 H. ter Heide and D. Wijnbelt, To Know and to Make: Link Between Research and Urban Design, Joumal of Urban Design 1:1 (February, 1996): 75-90. 5 A. Loukatia-Sideris, Cracks in City: Addressing Constraints and Potentials of Urban Design, Joumal of Urban Design 1:1 (February, 1996): 91-102. 6 E. Wilson, Sphinx in City (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 128; and T. Angotti, Metropolis 200(London: Routledge, 1993), 28; A. Goldberg, The Birds Have Nested: Design Direction for Informal Settlements, Urban Design Intemational 1:1 (March, 1996): 3-15. Also J. Beall, A City forAll(London: Zed Books, 1997), 39. 7 M. Davis, City of Ouartz(London: Verso, 1990); L. Woods, Everyday War in P. Lang, ed., Mortal City(New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1995), 46-53. 8 M. Berman, All That /s Solid Melts Into Air(London: Verso, 1983). 9 Ibid., 293. 10 Ibid., 307.