QUANTUM CITY SAMPLE: URBAN DESIGN & THE QUANTUM WORLDVIEW

"There is no single definition of urban design. It is not for Government to dictate what is good urban design."
(Department of the Environment (1995). Quality in Town and Country – The Urban Design Campaign.HMSO.)

‘Urban design’ is a relatively recent occupation, and therefore so is the profession or expertise ‘urban designer’. It is remarkable that the introduction of this new expert class at a time when Urban Design itself has such a loose definition has only added to the confusion facing young graduates at the moment of choosing their professional path. I still have in mind the welcoming speeches of the respective chairpersons when I started studying architecture in Beirut and then urban design in Oxford. The first phrase of each speech is the only thing I remember clearly, probably because in both cases it sent my mind scrambling for implications. The architecture chairman gathered the 50 or so new recruits, and proclaimed: ‘Welcome to the elite’. Several years of boot camp later, armed with a state-of-the-art architecture degree, I went on to the professional battlefield only to realize the absurdity of that phrase. Looking for a new mantra, and for an upgrade of my weapons arsenal another few years later, I was aghast at the urban design Chair’s welcoming speech: ‘Forget all you have learnt before’. He might as well have said ‘Abandon hope all ye who enter here’!

Our educational system is as atomistic as Newtonian physics ... the illogical need to proclaim the supremacy of each discipline only to break with it at the next step creates a sense of unfinished business and wasted time. The five or six years spent in architecture schools have got to be worth something to remember in urban design! And what of the years spent studying and practising landscaping, social sciences, history, geography or planning? Postgraduate urban design courses cater to professionals from all these and more disciplines, not to forget the personal and cultural experiences of each individual, particularly in international courses. Is forgetting everything and replacing it by monothematic, brainwashed ‘urban designers’ the right attitude? We shall return to defining a better mode of interaction between multicultural design teams in the coming pages, but let us ponder first just who the urban designer is.

We propose to examine the proposition ‘the urban designer is the designer of the urban realm’. Let us quickly define ‘design’ as the act of ‘initiating change in manmade things’ (Jones, 1980) and extend it to ‘change in any environment’, whether physical, mental or virtual. ‘Urban’ throughout this book is considered ...