From the earliest attempts to structure and organize human
settlements in the image of divine, cosmic, or an ideal social
order, the notion of urban design has deep historical roots. Down
the ages, the design of cities has reflected edicts prescribed by
the highest authorities, including priests, rulers, philosophers,
and visionary thinkers. Many dynasties sought glory and fame in the
design of their cities and-even in modern times-new cities have
been designed and built as icons of independence and as symbols of
progress. Thus, city design has played a crucial role in the
construction of new capitals like Brasilia, Chandigarh, and
Islamabad, and-more recently-in the dizzying new urban developments
of Dubai and Shanghai. In common parlance, urban design means the
appearance, layout, and organization of the built form of
large-scale urban environments. Urban design also implies a
deliberate process to create functional, efficient, just, and
aesthetically appealing urban spaces. Accordingly, as the editor of
this new Routledge collection explains, 'design' is used
simultaneously as both noun and verb, and the literature on urban
design reflects this parallel possibility. As a noun, urban design
is an object of historical, critical, comparative commentaries on
the circumstances, values, and processes that lead to a particular
urban design outcome and its human consequences. Scholarship here
is critical and reflective of the past outcomes, and normative
about future possibilities. The other literature that focuses on
design as a process tends to emphasize the practice, methods, and
the institutional frameworks that guide urban design and influence
its outcome. While the former includes writings from social
sciences and the humanities, the latter are drawn primarily from
the disciplines of architecture, landscape architecture, and urban
planning. In the realm of practice, these three
professions-architecture, landscape architecture, and urban
planning-claim expertise and authority over the scope of urban
design. While architects tend to focus on the design of the
collective architectural forms of the built environment, landscape
architects are apt to emphasize the form and processes of the
natural environment, and nature more generally, in the design of
large-scale built environments. Urban planners typically consider
themselves responsible for defining the social, economic, and
political imperatives of city design. Although the professional
identity of urban design by and large remains a shared enterprise,
there is a growing sense that urban design has established an
autonomous identity as body of knowledge. The scholarship
pertaining to the appearance and design of cities, and the human
consequences of the built environment has proliferated in recent
years, not only within the professions but also in the disciplines
of the social sciences, the humanities, and the environmental
science and health fields. This scholarly enterprise includes
critical, interpretive, and reflective work on the one hand, but
also empirical findings about the nature of practice and human
consequences of the built environment, on the other. This new
collection from Routledge's Critical Concepts in Urban Studies
series answers the urgent need for an authoritative reference work
to help researchers and students navigate and make sense of this
huge, rapidly growing, and complex corpus of literature. Moreover,
the compilation reflects the many and varied sources of knowledge
and influence: these expertly compiled major works chart, organize,
and order not only the best output of academics and practitioners
of urban design, but also include key writings on cities and
urbanism from thinkers across the social sciences and humanities,
and from other allied disciplinary traditions. With a full index,
together with a comprehensive introduction, newly written by the
editor, which places the collected material in its historical and
intellectual context, Urban Design is an essential work of
reference. The collection will be particularly useful as an
essential database allowing scattered and often fugitive material
to be easily located. It will also facilitate rapid access to less
familiar-and sometimes overlooked-texts. For researchers, students,
practitioners, and policy-makers, it is an indispensable one-stop
research and pedagogic resource.
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