Urban Design: A Quick Overview 09
The Market Square, the Town, and the Planet
Published in the Stratford Gazette, 6 September 2012.
Urban design … urban planning. The two terms overlap, but they don’t mean exactly the same thing. Urban design is the visualizing, designing, and shaping of cities and towns. Urban planning has more to do with political and technological processes of land use, transportation planning, infrastructure, and so on. The one can’t exist without the other – nor can they exist without other disciplines like architecture, landscape architecture, engineering, and the social sciences.
However much overlapping there is, however, it’s possible to look at urban design separately and think about its importance in the shaping of cities like Stratford.
Ken Greenberg is an urban designer who is based in Toronto but has worked in cities in half a dozen countries. His book Walking Home: the Life and Lessons of a City Builder (2011) takes you inside the thinking and the work of the urban designer. He helps to redesign cities that have been hit by urban blight or natural disaster. He works on areas in need of redevelopment (like Toronto’s waterfront lands). He works in cities that want to develop more sustainably.
Urban design is always about more than just one building, because buildings exist in contexts, environments, neighbourhoods. In fact, urban design involves analyzing how neighbourhoods work and then redesigning ones that don’t work, or designing new ones that will.
It involves not only buildings – existing, or to be built, or to be repurposed – but traffic patterns, the width of streets and sidewalks, the design of parks and squares and other open spaces, the visual appearance of (especially) the ground floors of buildings. It is, crucially, about how places work – whether it is easy for people to get around, whether residents will be living near workplaces, shopping, schools, and recreational facilities, how to avoid nasty micro-climates like wind tunnels. Urban designers look at how an area can be designed to be as safe as possible for playing children and after-dark pedestrians. Urban designers work closely with developers and public officials.
Today’s urban designers have seen that the city of high-rise towers surrounded by grass and parking lots, and of streets crowded with traffic, is no longer a desirable environment: it has not worked.
So urban designers invent solutions for the problems of these unworkable cities. They create multi-use neighbourhoods with viable, lively open spaces and with shopping and schools and workplaces nearby. They create streets where pedestrians and cyclists – and children, and seniors on foot or on motorized scooters – can have at least as much space and as many comfortable arrangements as cars do. They pay attention to natural systems – air, water, soil – in the city, including managing waste water and planning for beneficial features like green roofs and the shady areas that, with climate change happening, will become increasingly important.
The reuse and repurposing of old buildings is one of their central interests. Existing buildings and infrastructure have been, in part, already paid for, so repurposing a building is often less expensive than building a new one. It also preserves the character – if it is an attractive one – of a street and an area. In Cambridge, Ontario, an old silk factory has recently been repurposed as the University of Waterloo’s School of Architecture because repurposing was more economical than building a new one, and the building was in a better location than a new one would have been.
When Ken Greenberg works on a particular project, he examines the existing strengths of the buildings and the area. Describing a major project in Saint Paul, Minnesota, he writes: “By bringing new attention to the city’s inherent strengths, the framework vision has fostered investor confidence in adaptive reuse of heritage structures in the downtown area, and it has provided broad direction for integrated private, public, and community projects.”
For urban designers, “the common starting point has to be the shared culture of the city, and an awareness of the neighbouring properties and neighbourhoods. All new design and renovation has to include open space and design that makes for a lively interaction between the ground floors of the buildings and the open spaces around them.” Since streets, lanes, squares, parks, and other open spaces typically occupy about half the land area of any city, designers pay a lot of attention to open spaces. Such spaces enhance the attractiveness and commercial profitability of existing properties and are part of the “quality-of-life” aspects that attract both new businesses and their employees to a city.
What this means for Stratford is that the revitalizing of the Market Square has to be part of a larger vision, and since Stratford is a small city that vision has to include pretty well the whole urban area. The vision has to look at how the whole city works, and how a revitalized Market Square will integrate with all the other areas. Most of us are not trained to think in such terms, but it’s good to try.
Brandis has lived in Stratford since 1996 and is a full-time writer. She is the author of a number of books – visit Marianne's website
Published in the Stratford Gazette, 6 September 2012.
Urban design … urban planning. The two terms overlap, but they don’t mean exactly the same thing. Urban design is the visualizing, designing, and shaping of cities and towns. Urban planning has more to do with political and technological processes of land use, transportation planning, infrastructure, and so on. The one can’t exist without the other – nor can they exist without other disciplines like architecture, landscape architecture, engineering, and the social sciences.
However much overlapping there is, however, it’s possible to look at urban design separately and think about its importance in the shaping of cities like Stratford.
Ken Greenberg is an urban designer who is based in Toronto but has worked in cities in half a dozen countries. His book Walking Home: the Life and Lessons of a City Builder (2011) takes you inside the thinking and the work of the urban designer. He helps to redesign cities that have been hit by urban blight or natural disaster. He works on areas in need of redevelopment (like Toronto’s waterfront lands). He works in cities that want to develop more sustainably.
Urban design is always about more than just one building, because buildings exist in contexts, environments, neighbourhoods. In fact, urban design involves analyzing how neighbourhoods work and then redesigning ones that don’t work, or designing new ones that will.
It involves not only buildings – existing, or to be built, or to be repurposed – but traffic patterns, the width of streets and sidewalks, the design of parks and squares and other open spaces, the visual appearance of (especially) the ground floors of buildings. It is, crucially, about how places work – whether it is easy for people to get around, whether residents will be living near workplaces, shopping, schools, and recreational facilities, how to avoid nasty micro-climates like wind tunnels. Urban designers look at how an area can be designed to be as safe as possible for playing children and after-dark pedestrians. Urban designers work closely with developers and public officials.
Today’s urban designers have seen that the city of high-rise towers surrounded by grass and parking lots, and of streets crowded with traffic, is no longer a desirable environment: it has not worked.
So urban designers invent solutions for the problems of these unworkable cities. They create multi-use neighbourhoods with viable, lively open spaces and with shopping and schools and workplaces nearby. They create streets where pedestrians and cyclists – and children, and seniors on foot or on motorized scooters – can have at least as much space and as many comfortable arrangements as cars do. They pay attention to natural systems – air, water, soil – in the city, including managing waste water and planning for beneficial features like green roofs and the shady areas that, with climate change happening, will become increasingly important.
The reuse and repurposing of old buildings is one of their central interests. Existing buildings and infrastructure have been, in part, already paid for, so repurposing a building is often less expensive than building a new one. It also preserves the character – if it is an attractive one – of a street and an area. In Cambridge, Ontario, an old silk factory has recently been repurposed as the University of Waterloo’s School of Architecture because repurposing was more economical than building a new one, and the building was in a better location than a new one would have been.
When Ken Greenberg works on a particular project, he examines the existing strengths of the buildings and the area. Describing a major project in Saint Paul, Minnesota, he writes: “By bringing new attention to the city’s inherent strengths, the framework vision has fostered investor confidence in adaptive reuse of heritage structures in the downtown area, and it has provided broad direction for integrated private, public, and community projects.”
For urban designers, “the common starting point has to be the shared culture of the city, and an awareness of the neighbouring properties and neighbourhoods. All new design and renovation has to include open space and design that makes for a lively interaction between the ground floors of the buildings and the open spaces around them.” Since streets, lanes, squares, parks, and other open spaces typically occupy about half the land area of any city, designers pay a lot of attention to open spaces. Such spaces enhance the attractiveness and commercial profitability of existing properties and are part of the “quality-of-life” aspects that attract both new businesses and their employees to a city.
What this means for Stratford is that the revitalizing of the Market Square has to be part of a larger vision, and since Stratford is a small city that vision has to include pretty well the whole urban area. The vision has to look at how the whole city works, and how a revitalized Market Square will integrate with all the other areas. Most of us are not trained to think in such terms, but it’s good to try.
Brandis has lived in Stratford since 1996 and is a full-time writer. She is the author of a number of books – visit Marianne's website