The Immature Arts of City Design

Kevin A. Lynch

Professor, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Keywords: places, architecture, environment, landscape, urban design, planning, arts

Few Americans think that city-making is a fine art. Most professionals agree, if judged by their actions rather than by their words. We may at rimes enjoy a city, but only as a fact of nature— just there, like a mountain or the sea. But, of course, we are mistaken; cities are created objects, and at times in history they were managed and experienced as if they were works of art. However misshapen, a city is an intended landscape.

This view of art as something isolated from other life concerns runs deep in our culture. Arty is a term of contempt, while artless means something genuine or natural. Inartistic and unscientific have very different connotations.

Even if we lay those prejudices aside, the judgment that modern cities cannot be works of art may be quite correct. There seems to be a universal division in the planning field, a division between those engaged with social, economic, and locational policy at the urban level, and those concerned with physical form at the project level. Schools, professional roles, clients, and institutions are all divided in that way. Those academic departments of urban design that try to throw a bridge across the gap are subject to the constant temptation to devote themselves to the architectural design of large-scale, unified development projects. Students with talents for the design of sensuous form drift to the established profession of architecture. Our schools of urban design depend primarily on foreign students, coming from countries in which there are greater opportunities for the design of large-scale projects— whether because of the stage of the country's development, or the presence of a more authoritarian regime. This surge of foreign students will recede in time, as urban design begins to be taught in the schools abroad (or it should recede, since urban design is rightly tied to the particularity of place and society). Few U. S. cities have an urban design division. Is urban design un-American?

In any art, someone creates an object or event to convey meanings and feelings to a critical audience. The various arts may be more or less complex and ponderous, but they all involve an intentional creation, and the conveyance, intentional or not, of a personal experience through the sensuous form of the thing created. The artist has precedents, a transmitted skill, and works within a style. He makes inventions. In part, at least, his creations are enjoyed for themselves, and not solely as means to other ends.

If it exists, city design is thought to be a branch of architecture. But it must manipulate things and activities that are connected over extensive spans of space and time, and that are formed and managed by numbers of actors. It operates through intervening abstractions: policies, programs, guidelines, specifications, reviews, incentives, institutions, prototypes, regulations, spatial allotments, and the like. Through all this clutter, it seeks to influence the daily experience of a bewildering variety of people. As a process, it is as far removed from the immediacy of direct handwork as one could possibly imagine, but in its effects, it is just as immediate, and far more encompassing and powerful.

City forms are more resistant to design than architectural forms, for the city has a ponderous inertia. It is the accumulated product of many historic actions, and will surely undergo as much again. Just to attain a well- known form—an axis, arcade, cluster, or greenbelt—can be a notable success. While innumerable precedents and images run through the head of any architectural designer (grand staircases, serpentine walls, tent structures, broken arcs—who could not go on and on?), the repertoire of the city designer is far more limited.

 If we think of a fine landscape, we usually think of a rural one, or of some historic city center. Those places evolved gradually, and within the confines of custom, site, purpose, and technology, they emerged coherent. Or, when we remember some deliberate act of city design—Paris, Rome, or Beijing—we also remember it as a demonstration of dominant power. If we abhor tyranny, perhaps we should not look for an art of city design. If we live in a pluralistic, changing high-technology society, perhaps we cannot hope for one? Art (or design: the two terms are confounded) is something soft, irrational, concerned solely with appearance. At the scale of the city, it can only be a matter of decoration. It has no appreciable connection with the fundamental issues of city policy, which are economic and social. City planning is quantitative, rational, analytic. It speaks in words and numbers, not merely in pictures. It is oriented to policy, wrestles with administrative detail, skirts the political mine fields. Although it may appreciate the luxuries of design, it does not have time for them. Other things are too pressing. 

References

1 Kevin Lynch, “Managing the Sense of a Region,” MIT press, Cambridge, MA 1976.The Boston Redevelopment Authority, “Boston Tomorrow” New York City Planning Commission, “Midtown Zoning.” San Francisco Department of City Planning, “Downtown”

2 Philip Thiel, “A Sequence—Experience Notation,” Town Planning Review, Vol.32, #1, April,1961

3 Donald Appleyard, Kevin Lynch & John R. Myer, “The View from the Road”, MIT press, Cambridge, MA 1964.

4 Gordon Cullen, “The Concise Townscape,” Van Nostrand, New York City,1971.

（Source：Places Magazine #1(3)）