From Capacity to Agency: Urban Design Research

Abstract

Urban design research is today more pivotal for the rapidly developing and transitioning economies of the non-Western world. The contemporary architectural academy must be able to respond to this global urgency and reactivate the discipline of architecture to its social agency. Architecture as profession and discipline was profoundly shaped by the onset of Western modernity. With paradigmatic technological advances, rapid industrialization, and large-scale urbanization in Western European cities, architecture as discipline consciously took on previously unprecedented social responsibilities. The realm of the public and the role of architectural design to shape the spaces of the public in the city expanded under the modern political economy. The city took on new significance as the spatial manifestation of modernity, as attested to by the concerns of the likes of Engels, Simmel, Weber, and others. The formation of the architect in modernized academies and then newly founded polytechnics responded also to the social transformations taking place, aspiring beyond the Beaux Arts and Arts and Crafts and increasingly engaged in broader socio-economic issues taking place in the city. The active understanding and engagement of the city and its public realms became a self-understood capacity of the architect. Urban design research, in fundamentally describing, analyzing, evaluating and culminating in design propositions, constitutes an important savoir of architecture, honed in the modern institutions for architectural education. In the nearly two centuries since Western modernity, urban design research has spanned the early 19th century development of town planning to contemporary concerns with the impacts of globalization, migrations, demographic shifts, material flows, the digital revolution, and more. Today, when rapid urbanization is taking place in the developing economies of the Global South, in parts of the world where spatial transformations are taking place at a pace and scale unprecedented in human history, urban design research is even more pivotal to the social agency of the architect, beyond that of design capacity. From the existing catalogue of urban rules, accumulated since Western modernity, the place-specific transformations in the developing economies require intensive urban design research that can formulate new and site-specific frameworks for understanding their developments. Even though the tools of scale, massing, tectonic, space, remain fundamental, the essentials of the savoir of urban design goes beyond that of the formal. Knowledge of urban economics, and the potentials of public and civic spaces are crucial for the design of a site-specific open city for socio-cultural diversity, not only in developed economies with mature institutional structures. Knowledge of energy, infrastructure and ecology go beyond the branding for “green” and “smart” cities to realize built environments that are resilient and sustainable, also in transitioning economies with embedded political economic uncertainty and ambiguous institutions. The contemporary architectural academy must again respond to the urgency of global urbanization in updating the discipline of architecture to its agency.