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URBAN DESIGN TECHNIQUES
In this section we want to outline a vocabulary of
urban design techniques that will build on these basic
concepts described in Chapter 4, and enable non-
design professionals, elected officials and citizens to
enter into a more effective and deeper dialogue with
designers. We also aim to sharpen the awareness of
trained designers about important issues of spatial
enclosure, scale and proportion, and building façade
design. The evidence of our cities shows that these
lessons have not always been well understood during
the last several decades.
The decision on whether or not to recap and
extend some of the ideas we have previously discussed
in Chapter 4 was resolved for us one day in the early
spring of 2003. One of the authors was sitting in a
design review for architecture graduate students at
a multi-university symposium held in Charlotte, and
a visiting student was explaining his final thesis work.
It was a promising project involving the redevelop-
ment of a part of Charleston, South Carolina, that
was being reclaimed for the city by the demolition of
an urban expressway. But despite the student’s
earnestness to do the right thing for the city and its
inhabitants, the scheme was very poor, comprising
out-of-date concepts of raised walkways above streets,
with isolated single-use buildings disposed like
abstract shapes in a first-year basic design exercise. In
short it was the antithesis of everything good about
Charleston and a reprise of all the mistakes of urban
renewal from the 1950s and 1960s.
Of most concern to the author was not a weak stu-
dent project, but the fact that this unfortunate young
man had been led seriously astray by teachers and
experienced professionals who should know better.
The fact that such (well-intentioned but disastrous)
urban vandalism continues to be taught in reputable
American colleges of architecture in the early years of
the twenty-first century demonstrated to us just how
much education the architectural profession still
needs! Hence our decision to go over once more
some key points about urban design.
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CHAPTER SIX
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URBAN DESIGN IN THE REAL WORLD