Urbanism: the dialectic of architecture and urban design

Urbanism: the dialectic of architecture and urban design is the first article and an introductory article. Urbanism is a word that appeared in many areas of research and professional critic reports. The massive amount of papers, journal articles, and even online articles that addressed urbanism from many fields of specialty and various topics in the same field give hesitation and frustration on how this field contributes to architecture and urban design in practice. In the coming articles, I am going to define the areas of intervention of urbanism between architecture and urban design.

Architect’s and urban designer’s frustration may be cleared out when these two questions are answered, what is urbanism and why urbanism?

John¹ says everyday urbanism is defined as the common, repetitive, or spontaneous actions that take place in the interstitial spaces between well-defined territories of home, work, and institution, as when a yard sale transforms a lawn into a venue for economic exchange. Nan² says good urbanism adds a few instruments to our planning and design toolkits that enhance the health and well-being of places and move beyond sustainability to prosperity. It enhances places by revealing and celebrating these existing gifts, rather than focusing on deficits and problems. The gifts may include natural landscapes, buildings, neighborhoods, businesses, cultural institutions, history, and cultural traditions, as well as talents, ideas, and skills of stakeholders. Jeffrrey³  says about urbanism is the increased importance of the emerging consilience of context local conditions and the global operating systems. He elaborates that in the continuous discourse on the design of cities, urbanism opens avenues of critical inquiry when calling for the integration of theory and action. Jeannette⁴ within the increasing space of discourse of architecture a new field emerged that is landscape urbanism as a set of practices and theories in the last 15 years. During this time, a considerable amount of articles, books, and journals, as well as design projects and academic programs have been dedicated to the project of landscape urbanism. Urbanism in general and landscape urbanism emerged in the late 1990s as a critique of the urban design’s inability to deal with the expanded character of urbanization. From these definitions, it is apparent this frustration about what is urbanism.

Urbanism came to the surface of various fields as practices and theories in the late 25 years because of globalization. Globalization is a term that appeared in politics, economy, sociology, geography, and cultural studies. And because these fields, where some, have a direct impact or indirect impact on architecture and urban design professions are important to consider in nowadays practice. See figure 1 politics effect on informal settlement.

Before getting into the intervention of architecture and urban design within urbanism a quick look at the topics circled in the journals, papers, and reports within urbanism.

In terms of politics, we find Neo-liberal urbanism, new globalization, post-colonialism, global culture, utopianism, moral urbanism & asylum, austerity urbanism, and more. In the economic field, we find occupancy urbanism, circular economy, speculative urbanism, fetishism of global civic society, economic patterns, Entrepreneurial urbanism, and the list continues. Sociology also introduced many topics in urbanism such as urbanism as a way of life, migration and tolerance, suicide cultural studies, subcultural theory, religious pluralism, neighboring, and so on. Geography is one of the main fields that underpin urbanism practices and theories for example urban gentrification, market society, cyberscape and cityscape, mapping diversity, race-insurgency-crisis, city information modeling, and various topics.

Topics of urbanism such as urban space, placemaking, urban density, mobility, urban form, adaptive city, urban regeneration, and intensification, landscape as a system, green landscape, landscape infrastructure, heritage, and place context, all subtopics of sustainability, topics of eco-system and city, townscape, urban metabolism, future city, eco-architecture, type and typology, conservation, housing and development, smart city, gentrification, built environment topics, urban sprawl, public spaces, rural development, dispersal cities, urban pollution, urban ecology,  and more.

Architecture in practice as a process and profession includes many areas of interest, concerns, and relevant topics. Architecture as a building is an important physical object in the city and its integrity is a high concern of designers and architects. Its surrounding space and environment relate directly to the building under design. The space function relates to humans and mobility in terms of its relation to adjacent buildings spaces and automobile movement is one of the major architectural design elements. The building’s character and its relation to the city heritage and cultural context may have a great impact on the building form. Architects around the world have dealt with urban space in a creative way that affected the building architecture and vis-versa see figure 2.

Urban design on the other hand, as well as a process and profession, is concerned about any element in the city whether it is hardscape, softscape, or urban fabric from the design and rehabilitation perspective.

This is a brief introduction to urbanism the dialectic of architecture and urban design. In the coming articles, I will go through assessing the major intervention of architecture and urban design and its dialectic within the urbanism field. The articles will focus on the profession and practice point of view. Assessing the many topics and their contribution and necessity in practice, their involvement in the design process, Major players that could enhance and produce and change the product quality and its location characteristics, in which areas of the architecture or urban design process a defect or ignorance exists that leads to a major or minor failure.

references:

1. Chase, J., Crawford, M. and Kaliski, J. (2009) Everyday urbanism. New York: Monacelli.
2. Nan Ellin (2012) What is good Urbanism?, Journal of Architecture and Urbanism, 36:4, 247-251, DOI: 10.3846/20297955.2012.756216
3. Hou, J. (2015) Now urbanism: The future city is here. London: Routledge.
4. Sordi, Jeannette. (2016) Beyond urbanism. Trento: Listlab Srl.
5. Smith, N. (2017) “‘New globalism, new urbanism: Gentrification as global urban strategy,’” The Globalizing Cities Reader, pp. 251–256. Available at: https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315684871-35.
6. He, S. and Wu, F. (2009) “China’s emerging neoliberal urbanism: Perspectives from urban redevelopment,” Antipode, 41(2), pp. 282–304. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8330.2009.00673.x.
7. Dear, M.J. (2001) “Postmodern urbanism,” International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences, pp. 11856–11860. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1016/b0-08-043076-7/02592-4.
8. Lee, C.C.M. and Jacoby, S. (2011) “Typological urbanism and the idea of the city,” Architectural Design, 81(1), pp. 14–23. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1002/ad.1184.