An International Perspective on Urban Design Education

Georgia Butina Watson

School of the Built Environment, Oxford Brookes University, UK

It is now more than five decades since the first urban design courses were established in the USA (Harvard, MIT) and later on in the UK (Joint Centre for Urban Design at Oxford Brookes University, former Oxford Polytechnic) to train Built Environment professionals in urban design. These courses were introduced to solve major problems linked to the lack of quality  in our cities and neighbourhoods that the professions of architecture, planning and landscape architecture could not deliver. Early urban design courses were set up to deliver Diploma and Masters degrees, but today they also include undergraduate pathways and specializations as well as higher degrees such as Doctorates and Masters by research (Zetter and Butina Watson 2006). In the UK today there are some 30 providers of urban design education and many academic institutions delivering architecture, planning and landscapedesign across the globe offer programmes in urban design.

Being located in between different Built Environment professions it is inevitable that there is no single definition of what urban design is, but for the purpose of this short paper it can be defined as the art and the science of ‘placemaking’. It is also a ‘multidisciplinary activity of shaping and managing urban environments interested in both the process of this shaping and the space it helps to shape. Combining technical, social and expressive concerns, urban designers use both visual and verbal means of communication, and engage in all scales of urban socio-spatial continuum’ (Madanipour 1967, cited in Carmona and Tiesdell 2007, 22; Carmona 2014).

The basic structure of the pedagogic delivery of urban design education today at the Masters level is still based on a similar structure as when it was first established, comprising theory and history of urban design, methods and practice. What is significant to note is that the body of urban design theory has grown exponentially over the last two decades, with many book and journal article publications produced by schools from different parts of the world (Zetter and Butina Watson 2006; Carmona 2014). There is also a common theoreticalbasis that includes the morphological, aesthetic, perceptual, responsive, socio-political and cultural dimension of urban design (Carmona and Tiesdell 2007). However, we are also seeing that some schools tend to specialize in particular themes such as sustainable urban design, healthy cities, urban design and property development, as well as resilience and urban design, just to mention a few dominant themes. We are also seeing the emergence of themes such as urban design and informality, temporary urbanism as well as urban design and disaster management that connect urban design with humanitarian and urban resilience

work (Sanderson, Kayden, and Leis 2016).

There are also significant developments in the ways that urban design methods are being taught and used, benefiting from the developments in IT technology. The use of the ITpackages such as Space Syntax, City Cad and other digital tools enable students to be taught in the field using mobile technologies as well as disseminate their projects virtually.

The biggest change in the urban design pedagogy is the way in which the ‘urban design studio’ teaching and the project conceptualizations and execution are now part of a growing ‘living labs’ format. Most programmes of urban design that I am familiar with use cities and neighbourhoods as new types of a ‘studio’ teaching, and we are seeing a rich portfolio of creative interventions. These ‘living labs’ are using London, Oxford, Nottingham and other British cities as a useful laboratory to investigate and provide creative solutions for their regeneration interventions or for managing urban growth.

At the Harvard Graduate School of Design (Boston, MA), urban design academic staff and students work on a variety of challenging ‘live projects’, both in the USA and in many international settings. One such project is the post-hurricane Sandy intervention in New York, where the ‘living lab’ group proposed creative solutions to minimize the negative impacts of the storm. This and other similar projects are firmly underpinned by relevant urban designtheory and practice, delivered through lectures and seminars whilst allowing students to experience real-life professional working. In these projects students are guided, assisted and challenged by the team of experts, including the local community groups. This is very mucha new type of pedagogy based on collaborative learning and co-creation of real-life urban design scenarios. These urban design scenarios are covering a broad range of ‘BIG’ problems, including dealing with the elimination of poverty (Detroit) or dealing with issues such as urban resilience (Sanderson, Kayden, and Leis 2016) or alleviating impacts of large climatic and other types of disasters. There has been a paradigm shift in terms of what is being taught and what type of studio work is now being delivered by major urban design providers of urban design education.

There are also some very interesting ‘living labs’ in some developing countries, such as Mexico, Brazil, China, Malaysia and Taiwan. At the National Autonomous University of Mexico City (Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico-UNAM) staff and students have always engaged in ‘live projects’. Today, Mexico City is one of the largest and most complex urban agglomerations with more than 25 million inhabitants and still continuously growing, creating complex human, environmental and cultural problems. My personal engagement with their programme in Urbanism enabled me to participate in various ‘live’ projects and to understand how they deliver their courses across the Faculty. What is of a particular interest here is the pedagogy of linking architecture, landscape architecture, planning and urban design. Staff and students come together every year during their programme of study to work collaboratively on urban design ‘live projects’. This has proven to be a success and a way to overcome separate professional biases and a very narrow discipline focus. Projects such as the upgrading of housing and improving public open spaces in a self-built local community of Palo Alto were delivered in collaboration with the local residents and the studio projects were located in the local community hall. Even children became young urbanists, debating what type of a neighbourhood they wanted to have. The outcome of the workshops helped the residents to improve their houses, stabilize their local businesses, provide local facilities and improve the overall appearance of the area. Such projects are very important as they avoid demolition of self-built areas and help integrate formality and informality into a unified urban structure.

Equally challenging was an urban regeneration project of the historic La Alameda zone of Mexico City where an integrated ‘live project’ engaged staff and students from UNAM with local traders, residents, city government, private investors and politicians to create a common vision for the area. The results led to the implementation of some of the projects such as the open space improvement strategy for the Chinese neighbourhood as well as the wider open space regeneration strategy. These projects are also underpinned by a strong body of theories produced by local academics who successfully integrate global and local theoretical and practice based explorations in urban design (Rothe 2015). Similar ‘live projects’ can also be found in other Mexican Universities such as Merida’s School of Architecture and Urban Design, where staff and students engage in projects relevant to the promotion

of their local Mayan identity.

In Chung Yuan University in Taiwan the students and staff in urban design from theLandscape Department set up their ‘live studio’ in an empty shop in the city of Chung-Lineighbourhood called Piggy Mews where they have been working in partnership with the local residents, traders and the city planning department. They developed an innovative and creative vision for upgrading the area which is now being implemented. Many Masters’ programmes in urban design are also making strong alliances by delivering joint Summer School programmes between a number of institutions. These are delivered in London, Oxford, Shanghai, Bangkok, Istanbul, Kuala Lumpur, Seoul, Ljubljana and many

other places where they exchange their pedagogy, work on collaborative ‘live projects’ and tackle some crucial issues facing us all: from climate change and resilient cities to delivering healthy cities, towns and neighbourhoods.

What is commonly shared now is a strong theoretical, intellectual and cultural discourse that is both global as well as local and culturally framed. There is also a strong pedagogy of ‘live’ studio culture that has put urban design and urban design education into the forefront of the ‘making better places’ debate as well as engaged with some big climatic, environmental and humanitarian concerns.

（文章来源：Journal of Urban Design excerpted）