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Founders Square, Neshoba County Fair
Courthouse Square, Philadelphia, Mississippi
Figure 4.3
Founders’ Square,
Neshoba County Fair
compared with the Courthouse
Square in Neighboring
Philadelphia, Mississippi. Drawn
at the same scale, these two
spaces clearly illustrate
typological similarities. In both
cases, a geometrically formal
space is enclosed around a
focal community building.
(Drawing courtesy of Robert
Craycroft)
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CHAPTER FOUR
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SOURCES OF GOOD URBANISM
79
most important points in the analysis is the way the
Fairgrounds bear witness to three powerful traditions
of urbanism: the typological heritage of past forms
used in a contemporary context; the picturesque
approach to civic design; and designing for the social
use of space, rather than simply its appearance. These
three traditions provide useful methodologies for
contemporary urban designers, and most practition-
ers utilize a personal combination of all three
approaches. Our own design perspective colors the
analysis that follows (it’s a little heavy on the 
picturesque) but the important lesson is to demon-
strate how a clear basis of theory can directly 
inform how we and others work on the ground in
communities.
URBAN DESIGN METHODOLOGIES
Good urban design is important in every neighbor-
hood and every district in every city, and the range of
urban design techniques is extensive. In this section,
we outline some of the most simple, yet potent con-
cepts of urban design and hope that designers and
non-designers alike will find them as useful as we do.
We start with simple ideas and then relate them to a
deeper level of philosophical principles. Later on, in
Chapter 6, we discuss some practical extensions of
these ideas and their application to everyday matters
of urban design and planning.
Urban design can mean different things to differ-
ent people. To architects it can simply mean design-
ing buildings that are responsive to their urban
context. To landscape architects it often means detail-
ing the surfaces of public spaces with hard and soft
landscape elements and materials. To planners, it has
usually connoted some hazy notion of urban beauti-
fication (Lang, 2000). We prefer a more holistic defi-
nition as we have indicated throughout the book. For
us, urban design is no more and no less than the
design in three dimensions of the public infrastruc-
ture of the city and its relationship to the natural
environment. Urban design is the intersection of
architecture and planning, and one of its main foci is
the way buildings relate to each other to create the
public domain of cities, towns and villages.
At its best, urban design is the agent of transfor-
mation from abstract ‘space’ to humanized ‘place’ –
and one of our favorite definitions of place is ‘space
enriched by the assignment of meaning’ (Pocock and
Hudson, 1978). It is the urban designer’s responsibility
to collate and synthesize the historical, physical and
historical factors that help provide such layers of
meaning and emotional richness.
To realize these objectives we use a vocabulary of
straightforward techniques, and the applicability of
these concepts and methods of design to the profes-
sion of planning was reinforced for us when one of
the authors taught a workshop about urban design
for planners in North Carolina in the Spring of 2003.
Over two half days, teams of experienced profession-
als grappled with designing developments on infill
urban sites. We say designing – not planning – for a