Source Book Urban Design

Source Book Urban Design

For the urban designer today, the question arises of how to engage in the increasingly complex design process. One possible first response: urban designers ought to acknowledge that the familiar sphere of their profession is changing rapidly. Urban implementations are nowadays steered by a wide variety of specialised planners, each guided by their own value assumptions. The result is a diverse matrix of (claimed) truths. The design process therefore increasingly takes on a guiding role within the larger process of knowledge transfer. Another possible response: urban designers ought to acknowledge that planning has proven to be an inappropriate tool to guide urban transformations today, when a city’s growth is likely to accelerate or decelerate rapidly. Because of this narrow bandwidth allowed for planning, the design process must shift its attention instead towards the city’s inherent capacity to self-organise its complex and nonlinear processes.

ISBN 978-3-9819269-0-3 (ebook) forthcoming
https://issuu.com/urbanisationhealthandenvironment/