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SYNOPSIS
This chapter affirms two of our central beliefs: place
matters, and places are best produced through the use
of traditional urban forms. As validation of these
convictions we journey to an unlikely setting, rural
Mississippi, and the Neshoba County Fairgrounds, a
self-made urban jewel in the heart of the countryside.
From this example we can learn some basic concepts
of urban design about the arrangement of buildings
in space and the formation of ‘urban rooms.’
The Fairgrounds also embody all three of the urban
design methodologies we examine in the second sec-
tion of this chapter: typology, picturesque urbanism,
and designing for the social use of space. We place
these concepts in a philosophical triangle of rational-
ism, empiricism, and pragmatism, important pillars
of western thought, and illustrate how design action
can draw inspiration from these philosophical bases.
Finally, we return to address a critique of tradi-
tional urbanism raised briefly in Chapter 1, namely
that the streets and squares we are busy designing are
nothing more than the setting for a shallow con-
sumerist spectacle, a ‘café society.’ We offer a refuta-
tion to this criticism and outline a pragmatic 
modus
operandi
for urban designers in the face of complex
and conflicting realities.
THE AFFIRMATION OF PLACE
All the conversations in Chapter 3 have been predi-
cated upon one fundamental point of view: place
matters. The physical settings that support and
enrich our daily lives matter to the extent they are
functional, beautiful, and special to us in one or more
ways. Richard Florida’s focus on place (in Chapter 1)
as an economic engine of prosperity through the
emergence of a new, place-hungry ‘creative class’
reinforces this perspective. William J. Hudnutt III,
long-time mayor of Indianapolis and now a resident
fellow for public policy at the Urban Land Institute,
confirms Florida’s diagnosis, noting that the younger
generation of wealth producers look for ‘location
first, jobs second’ (Hudnutt, 2002). What count for
the ‘laptop crowd’ and other creative people are the
quality of life and the quality of the places where it’s
lived. These highly skilled young professionals take
the attitude that they can work anywhere, so they
look first for places that are attractive and possess the
active urban lifestyle they are seeking. Generally, this
combination comprises, as we have noted before, a
synergy between venues of entertainment and culture
and cool places to live. This means restaurants, 
bars and pubs, arts and music, walkable neighbor-
hoods and districts with sidewalk cafés, streets with
trees and attractive street furniture, and a variety of
housing choices in a variety of price ranges.
All this energy focuses on public space, the setting
for people’s behavior in the world outside themselves,
and the medium of their personal and community
orientation. Our professional concentration on the
traditional vocabularies of street and square, park and
plaza, Europe’s most coherent forms of public space
and those most supportive of community values, will
be well understood in Britain and its continental
neighbors. However, in America in the early twenty-
first century such spaces are still the exception rather
than the rule. So we hope our British readers will for-
give us if we seek once more to make this essential
point regarding the relevance of traditional urban
spaces. This time we use an example chosen for the
4