Reconsidering Urban Design - Thomas W. Schurch ( 2nd week summary)

RECONSIDERING URBAN DESIGN:

Thoughts about its Definition And Status as a Field or Profession

Thomas W. Schurch especially mentioned about the definion of urban design and the place of it in the proffesional area, on the other hand the other main point that is trying to answer is who are the urban designers.

‘Urban design’ term began after the post second war in the history with the other synonymous terms such as Jon Lang’s “civic design”, it was associated with the American City Beautiful Movement or it was defined as city design which was branch of architecture. Then, to show the history of urban design, the framework is discussed in the literature as;

• Jon Lang(in 1960s) thought that UD is occured or replaced with civic design mean that it deal with designing municipal building, opera house etc. And the relation between boulevards affected of city beautiful movement.
• Kevin Lynch says that UD is similar as architecture,
• David Mackey talking about UD is easy than writing and its placed between planning and architecture.
• Alan Kreditor says that we know what it is not,

After all these different definions of UD literature contains some aggrements on it and they make five categories such as,

- fundamental,Superficial and cursory

- Qualitative and prescriptive,

- Historic

- Propriarietary

- Process

The scale of urban design is mentioned in the article and grouped under five threshold of scale 1) The site specific scale of an individual land parcel2) neighbourhood or district 3) An entire city 4) The region in which a city lies and 5) Corridors and UD practice can be grouped into any one or possibly a combination of five interrelated project scales. With the disscussion of scale, the question of where urban design belongs is tired to be answered is it belon architecture or urban planning or landscape architecture.

To sum up, it is determined that architecture, landscape architecture and urban planning do nat stand alone as professions or fields of import to urban design. Civil engineering, law and real estate are important components of urban design. The most important point is urban design is not be narrowly perceived as an extension of any one profession or area and that it is clearly defined.

Gülnur Vuruşkan - 152002002