Back Issue Urban Design Now Number 25, Fall 2006/Winter 2007

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Urban Design Now: A Discussion

Margaret Crawford, GSD Professor of Urban Design and Planning Theory
Julia Czerniak, Associate Professor, Syracuse University School of Architecture; Principal, Clear, Syracuse
Paul Goldberger, architecture critic for The New Yorker; Dean, Parsons School of Design
Alex Krieger, GSD Professor in Practice of Urban Design; Principal, Chan Krieger & Associates, Architecture and Urban Design, Cambridge
Rodolfo Machado, GSD Professor in Practice of Architecture and Urban Design; Principal, Machado and Silvetti Associates, Boston
Farshid Moussavi, GSD Professor in Practice of Architecture; Principal, Foreign Office Architects, London
Dennis Pieprz, President, Sasaki, Boston and San Francisco
William S. Saunders, Editor, Harvard Design Magazine
Matthew Urbanski, Principal, Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates, Inc., Landscape Architects, P.C., New York and Cambridge

[Editor's note: Participants in this discussion had read Michael Sorkin's essay—the first item in this issue—beforehand.]

SAUNDERS: The definition of urban design seems up for grabs. The question of how and where and even if urban design happens is a matter of debate.

So that we won’t be too general, I’ll begin by asking you to talk about specific places where urban design has happened. Alex Krieger’s essay in the last Harvard Design Magazine was helpful in defining the great variety of ways that urban design occurs (even though it may not be called urban design)—through planning, through private real-estate development, etc., and so we needn’t just say, “OK, urban design is what happened to Trafalgar Square when Norman Foster got involved.”

Using your own sense of urban design, please talk about places created in the last decade that you find particularly strong or instructively weak, and why.

MOUSSAVI: Some would argue that a decade is not enough to evaluate an urban project. I think there are projects—like Euralille in France and the Forum in Barcelona—that require more than a decade to judge. Second, as architecture’s scale is increasingly growing, the urban is increasingly interior, not just exterior. There are great examples of urban spaces inside buildings. The Turbine Hall of the Tate Modern in London is fantastic urban space. It has changed the way people use their free time in London, and it’s a fantastic venue of urban spectacle. Some airports and resorts are quite urban. There is a wonderful space under Foster’s Hongkong and Shanghai Bank in Hong Kong. The entry to the bank is at a higher level, and on Sunday the belly under the bank becomes a huge picnic area for Filipino women. It’s the kind of event that happens because of the condition of the space provided. Lots of retail interiors are also urban, including a great one in Singapore, Ngee Ann City, where again you find a subterranean square. So the distinction between the urban and the architectural handicaps us in planning or anticipating these interiors that are more urban than architectural.

SAUNDERS: What is the common ground of these places? In other words, what do you mean by urban?

MOUSSAVI: The urban is the space that allows for collective expression, for places where gatherings can happen that wouldn’t otherwise happen, that don’t cater only to the individual.

"We can learn from found situations, and we can engineer designs or even design guidelines that produce conditions closer to those spontaneous ones that fascinate us and everybody else, rather than fix a set of principles that will never be able to trigger unpredictability."

CRAWFORD: I think it’s really important to talk about actual urban circumstances and redefine urban design based on the way it’s working in the world, not the approach of the last HDM, which is a narrowing down to the history of urban design, instead of opening up to the ways people are using urban space, self-consciously designed or not. Farshid is challenging the boundaries between architecture and urban design, putting more emphasis on architecture and the inside, productively challenging the categories of inside and outside, public and private.

SAUNDERS: We’ve started to define urban places as places that draw large numbers of people of diverse kinds into pleasurable proximity and activity.

MOUSSAVI: Lots of spaces designed to be urban are in fact very empty. My examples are less intentionally designed for collective spectacle, but they are highly alluring. What we need to determine is what makes them alluring. Is it because their premises are not as rigidly defined as the premises with which we conventionally design, which may limit their free and creative use? I love the Turbine Hall because the public has free access to it. You can get in all London museums for free. This sets up art and culture in a fundamentally different way than do most museums in America.

PIEPRZ: The interesting thing about the Turbine Hall is what its building, the Tate Modern, has done to that part of London. I was thinking something similar about how buildings can influence the environment, and Guggenheim Bilbao is an obvious example that triggered urban regeneration. The new Tate opened up people’s minds to that part of London. Today that area is thriving. But the danger is that the rough-and-tough diversity there is being gentrified, and only “sophisticates” now use it.

MACHADO: I’ll use the Turbine Hall example and try to answer your first question. Things are looking better for urban design in Europe than in North America — there is more, and it’s done better. I agree about the Turbine Hall. Let’s not forget it was done by very good architects. And I think that the caring and concern of the best architects that the world now offers is centered on urban design. This is a very good thing, because if architects are not directly involved in making urban places, who will be? In America, we have three recent approaches, none of which is providing good urban form. The form produced by New Urbanism is highly limited. It’s usually houses for white people in the South. The form produced by landscape urbanism hasn’t yet fully arrived, but it looks like it will be mostly landscape form and very little urban form or urbanism. And then there is “everyday urbanism,” which is not concerned with the making of form, but with the offshoots of spontaneous urban living.

So, urban design will be recharged by the direct involvement of the best, most forward-thinking architects we have. What makes the Turbine Hall urban? First, it’s an extremely well-defined space. It’s a room with a floor and a roof, two conditions that in their generality are essential to allow things to happen that would contribute to urbanity. Urban form is essential. The city needs attractive, rich, beautiful form. Urban design can be recharged by providing that. When you talk about the architects directly involved with the making of these things, then you are talking about authorship, about work endowed with the vision of an individual, not of the collective, and that accounts for its success.

SAUNDERS: You are raising a big alternative to a set of conventions for urban design that may be dominant in projects like those of Cooper Robertson, Wallace Roberts and Todd, etc. You are talking about the effects of things like OMA’s Seattle Library and Gehry’s Disney Concert Hall. I wanted to follow up with Farshid: About the examples presented, do you have suppositions about what are the magnets for a public gathering of the kind you’re celebrating?

KRIEGER: But we should not equate urbanism with crowding. A park that is empty most of the time is not necessarily un-urban. Another consideration before Farshid answers the question: A group of designers like us think of urban design as projects, but it’s not always projects. Sometimes urban life takes over and acts on projects and places. In the space underneath the Hong Kong bank, the Filipino women were not the point of departure for the design, but they transformed this place. Is urban design inevitably associated with authorship in the way that a book or a piece of architecture is? More often than not it’s actually absent authorship, because it entails a whole range of endeavors, some design-oriented and some process-oriented.

MACHADO: But that doesn’t mean that they are good.

KRIEGER: The results might be good even though they might have been the result of a number of actions, both design and policy.

MACHADO: What I’m proposing is that strong authorship in the forming of place may be the seed for a better urban design once it becomes integrated into city life.

GOLDBERGER: Urban design must be authored, because design implies conscious intent. But urbanism does not have to be authored.

MOUSSAVI: Initially I wanted to challenge the divide between inside and outside, and whether we like it or not, architecture is getting larger and larger and incorporating inside what before would have been outside. Therefore, disciplinary barriers are being broken, and so if our designs are to engage with the contemporary city, we too need to blur those barriers.

It is true that urban spaces don’t always have to be about lots of people, although those that attract lots of people highlight certain conditions that are desirable and that we should try to understand. My examples share a certain project incompleteness. The projects are completed by others, not the designers. For projects to include incompleteness or allow unpredictability, rather than insist on completeness and equilibrium, presents a very interesting design issue.

KRIEGER: That’s why I am thinking about multiple contributions as opposed to authorship. . . .

MACHADO: No, no. Those things are not different. Authorship occurs only in the beginning, and then the work is open to interpretation and public use.

PIEPRZ: I was thinking of that point. In Boston, what is an example of a recently designed urban district? University Park near MIT, master planned by Koetter, Kim & Associates, took ten or fifteen years to evolve. It’s not successful. I always thought it would have to be successful with such a good designer behind it. It’s strangely empty of life, although it’s programmatically rich. Architecturally, most of it is only average. But given its location and presence and investment, it could have been amazing.

SAUNDERS: Why isn’t it working?

PIEPRZ: Half a mile away is Central Square, which is a lot more interesting. It’s boring as a spatial environment — just a street and an intersection, and not even well designed at the intersection.

GOLDBERGER: And it’s neither a square nor central. (laughter)

PIEPRZ: And yet there’s incredible vitality there. It has diversity and life, people of different races. It’s the place to go for dinner, rather than Harvard Square or even downtown. I don’t know how it got to be like that. I don’t know who was involved or what rules operated there. It isn’t the product of a great designer, and it’s one of these places that are more everyday than unique and one-off like the Turbine Hall.

SAUNDERS: So what’s the nature of the failure at University Park, and how did Central Square get to be so successful?

CRAWFORD: Central Square just happened. Whenever we have a design intervention there, it’s usually horrible.

GOLDBERGER: What I am struck by is not the rightness or wrongness of your point, Dennis, but by how extraordinarily similar your words sound to those of Jane Jacobs forty-five years ago. She too juxtaposed designed places with undesigned places to make the same point. It makes me wonder: Does the durability of this point of view prove its rightness, or does it prove that our thinking has not advanced in all those years? I don’t know.

KRIEGER: I hope we don’t spend three hours debating designed versus non-designed environments. Behind the scenes, an awful lot of planning action helps prop up Central Square. Its vitality is partially a result of the people who are using it and partially a result of boring things like street improvements and design guidelines, subsidies for store owners, and other policies. Maybe they don’t create the place and are not the cause for its success, but they help maintain its success and have for some time.

URBANSKI: I think the success of Central Square is and was directly related to the economic success of Harvard Square. The money went to Harvard Square, and that enabled Central Square, a fringe environment, to support low-rent places like the Middle East Café and other things that gave it authenticity and vitality. The more like Harvard Square it gets, the more it will lose those qualities.

MOUSSAVI: Normally we consider design a set of values we deploy in a situation. I think there is another way to generate design: to think of it as part of a process. We can learn from found situations, and we can engineer designs or even design guidelines that produce conditions closer to those spontaneous ones that fascinate us and everybody else, rather than fix a set of principles that will never be able to trigger unpredictability. I would be the last person to say that design is unimportant.

SAUNDERS: Can you think of a situation in which a process has been designed that results in something successful?

MOUSSAVI: Fumihiko Maki’s Hillside Terrace in Tokyo is one — it happened over time and was able to accommodate various wishes, but probably you could have even more diversity over time.

SAUNDERS: What is it about the process of making Hillside Terrace that was fruitful?

MOUSSAVI: It was incremental. It had design guidelines not just about policies but also about a material framework for buildings and the spaces between them.

KRIEGER: But Maki had consistent authorship there. And there was consistent ownership.

MOUSSAVI: I think maybe that’s not necessary. That side of it can be improved on. We all like the designs of that project, but in fact I don’t think you could scale it up. It’s not a huge development. If you scaled it up, you couldn’t really sustain a single designer doing it.

CZERNIAK: Once you start to expand what urban design practice is, its successes can also be measured prior to building. My two examples are Downsview Park in Toronto and Fresh Kills Landfill on Staten Island. And even though their physical realization is just beginning, their urban design had been in the works since 1999 and 2001, respectively. What is successful about Fresh Kills? As a process, its ability to advocate publicly for the design idea. As a scheme, its resiliency. The designers realize that its success is contingent on advocacy: changing people’s perceptions of this place from dump to urban park. It has had an ambitious communications campaign, involving everything from advertisements on buses to business cards to efforts to educate people that a “kill” is a creek. So one clear success is that the public is invited, in very accessible ways, to understand what is happening on Staten Island in order to build support for the project. About its resiliency: although the competition scheme has been subject to an extraordinary amount of public input and design review, it’s been able to use this feedback and still maintain its sensibility — the capacity to handle and process change through its organizational logic.

Downsview Park is the second-largest redevelopment site in Toronto at 620 acres, half slated for park and half for development to support the park. Its promise is to be economically and ecologically sustainable. What matters here in Bruce Mau’s “scheme as logo” is the successful use, over the last seven years, of consumerism in service of environmentalism. So, both examples pertain to urban design as pre-design — representation, advocacy, communication, consensus-building — an extraordinarily important territory for designers.

SAUNDERS: So public participation as a key to urban design success?

CZERNIAK: Not just any form of public participation, but strategic input and feedback orchestrated by a designer.

SAUNDERS: Yes. Shall we continue our journey around the room? Matt?

URBANSKI: First, in the projects that I’ve worked on, success has come only after the passage of lots of time. Second, these projects are more strategy and process than object. Urban designers ignore landscape at their peril. I think they ignore building exteriors at their peril too.

KRIEGER: And you could say the interior too.

URBANSKI: To go back to your Turbine Hall example. I would suggest that it’s not the most recent architects of the Hall that make it a great space. It’s the fact that there was a strategy to reuse an industrial building that happens to be as great on the inside as Grand Central Station and make it into a public space.

KRIEGER: It may not be entirely the architect, but you can’t say the architect had nothing to do with it.

URBANSKI: I’m not saying that. The strategy that focuses around public space, indoor or outdoor, has been proven successful over and over — look at Boston’s Back Bay. They built the Public Garden first, and it led to an urban strategy that created the whole Back Bay. If you haven’t seen good recent urban projects, Rodolfo, you have to get out some more. An example is our Allegheny Riverfront Park in Pittsburgh. We can’t take credit because the strategy to create a public space on a formerly industrial edge was not ours. We just implemented it; we creatively interpreted it. The Pittsburgh Cultural Trust’s idea was that it would inspire people to turn some beautiful, hardly used architecture into used architecture and to tear down gas stations and build housing in downtown Pittsburgh. Ten years later, it’s happened. The strategy worked.

SAUNDERS: What about the question of who these public places are for, and whether there is implicitly, not intentionally, any kind of class exclusion going on. In the case of your Brooklyn Waterfront Park, its maintenance will be supported by income from condominiums built on its back edge, which makes the Park first for those who live there. In Pittsburgh, who is likely to want to take a stroll along the river in Allegheny Park? We want to think of public space as democratic space, but what’s possible to achieve and impossible to achieve despite best intentions?

URBANSKI: Well, the road to hell is paved with good intentions, and fortunately, you don’t have to stay on that road. One of the things that Central Park was criticized for was its class exclusiveness — wealthy people riding around in their carriages and using it as their pleasure ground — despite Olmsted’s intentions. Well, now 150 years later, it functions in tune with its original intention as a public democratic meeting ground. Little things went awry in the beginning, but the basic soundness of the scheme saved it eventually.

CRAWFORD: I really disagree with what Michael Sorkin wrote [in the essay preceeding this discussion] about class in public space. He holds a very old-fashioned, idealized idea of the public as opposed to publics, an idea that there’s somehow an all-encompassing public space that includes everyone in happy interaction. I think this has never happened. In Central Park, all publics were supposed to be welcome, but only under the banner of the elite public who were supposed to teach them how to behave. And so sports, beer gardens, etc., were excluded, leaving only promenading and landscape contemplation.

SAUNDERS: And what about now?

CRAWFORD: Now it’s changed, but through political struggles and demands. The Central Park Conservancy is trying to reimpose an elitist vision, and it’s being resisted. It’s a great example of an ongoing struggle over what “public” means. Different publics are duking it out, as always. Pittsburgh has a changing social composition. If you go to the other side of the river to the former steel mill at Homestead, which is now a very strange lifestyle center, you would find a very different Pittsburgh public in another version of public space.

SAUNDERS: Since a central theme of and the last word in Sorkin’s essay is diversity, I’m not understanding how you differ with him about differences.

CRAWFORD: Well, he’s celebrating a Richard Sennett-like idea of public space. Here’s an example of a public space catering to a specific public: the skateboard park illegally built under the freeway in Oakland by skateboarders, a specific public, who astonishingly carted in large amounts of concrete at night and built a very elaborate landscape. Then through political activism, the park became an official place. The skateboarders are a public who had clear design intentions. You could call their design “authored,” even if it’s authored by an activity. A well-known skateboarder is the designer. Also in Oakland is a park designed by Walter Hood — this relates to the Central Square example since there are people who come to Central Square every day to drink. That’s their activity. Central Square is a positive drinking environment. Hood designed a park in Oakland that acknowledged the people who were there and their drinking. They have nice benches; they’re seen as legitimate users.

SAUNDERS: The city had to decide not to chase them away with police.

CRAWFORD: All these things are political. Oakland has a majority of minorities. The drinkers tend to be minorities, and this is their way of connecting, like it or not. They’re not bothering anybody. Central Square is in a long transition, in a kind of arrested gentrification. It has a really positive balance. I’m not sure it was better before. I know people who went to school here in the ’70s who said you would not want to hang out there — too dangerous. Anarchists tagged The Gap store, when it moved in, as being a horrible sign of gentrification, but it brought in good commercial activity and made the Square a place where lots of different people can come. So I won’t be pigeonholed as just a defender of the vernacular. My other example is the opposite: the IBA Emscher Park in the Ruhr District of Germany. Peter Latz designed part of it, Landscape Park Duisburg Nord, but Emscher was an enormous strategy. It redefined urban design, using it as an agent of economic, regional, landscape, and urban transformation. Lots of designers — Herzog & De Meuron, Richard Serra, etc. — have been working there reconceptualizing the region. It breaks down all the boundaries of what urban design can do.

CZERNIAK: That’s precisely what I’m talking about at a different scale: urban design as an agent of transformation, in the Emscher Park example of a regional ecology and in the Fresh Kills example of perception. I think that’s a real opportunity.

CRAWFORD: And a regional economy.

SAUNDERS: Can you be specific about some of the big design gestures or moves that make it . . . ?

CRAWFORD: To reimagine what deindustrialization can lead to, including not eliminating the old, as we often do here — Emscher Park maintains the old blast furnace plant in a different framework. The port, with a museum by Herzog & De Meuron, is a completely new urban place as a result of this kind of design intervention.

CZERNIAK: But there is all the remediation effort too.

SAUNDERS: So with this case are you expanding the definition of design to include planning?

CRAWFORD: It includes architecture, landscape, planning, economic development . . .

KRIEGER: Especially with this example, the term urban design carries too great a burden. Design was important but so were ecological restoration and economic development, and if you begin to let design mean anything and everything . . .

CRAWFORD: But this is a bounded project, not anything and everything.

KRIEGER: No, I am saying something like, “At Bilbao, the success was not entirely through design. There was a longstanding complex set of political agendas and decisions that led to the Guggenheim Museum as one of the agents of change.”

MOUSSAVI: If design is to be an effective tool, it should not be introduced as a contingency. It has to be tied to the processes that belong to the urban — the social, political, economic, and digital — to produce a condition in which these transversal connections can become part of a design process. In academia, you can isolate landscape, planning, urban design, and architecture to develop expertise, but in reality they are connected, and it’s important to make sure there is a common ground between them so one can bring them together. Architects practice with an operating system — AutoCAD, for example — that links the engineer to the architect to the contractor, etc., so that building is a single process. GSD departments (probably not unlike other schools with departmental divisions) seem to lack a common medium. The disciplines are taught quite differently: There is not enough convergence. So if you get students from landscape coming to study in architecture, it’s difficult to integrate them; they are not fully equipped to understand and work effectively in the other area, yet this ability is very important.

KRIEGER: You’re restating Sert’s objective of bridging the disciplines. His hope was precisely that through urban-minded thinking separated disciplines could be brought together. It does happen sometimes; maybe it happened at Emscher Park. But if you believe that urban design is the singular agent through which the urban is produced, you’re off track. Even the lonely bureaucrat keeping the gentrification of Central Square from tipping the balance to . . .

"In the Pudong area of Shanghai, mediocre architects are producing spectacular structures. Yet urbanistically Pudong is a disastrous failure. It will take decades to undo it through infill and other transformation. You can’t get the best architects in the world to come into this strange capitalism there and make great buildings that relate to each other. It’s an urban design problem; UD could have established a framework, priorities, and the central relationships with a river, with an existing city, and with a new city that’s expanding."

CRAWFORD: It’s more market forces affecting that balance.

KRIEGER: No, you’re discrediting the Cambridge Department of Housing and Urban Development, which is trying hard to not overwhelm Central Square with what happened in Harvard Square. Can we identify a few of the things that people calling themselves “urban designers” can do to produce urbanism?

CRAWFORD: I’ve spent time in the archives looking at the Urban Design Conferences at Harvard in the 1950s and ’60s, and how these formed urban design. I don’t see those as having been useful. The attempt to make urban design an arena in which these disciplines come together to produce urbanism was actually Sert’s territory grab more than his idealistic dream. In the first conferences, Jane Jacobs, Lewis Mumford, and others didn’t like the idea of urban design, then they’re gone. At the next conference, it wasn’t working for landscape architects, then they’re gone. Finally the planners also did not like it, then they’re gone. The conferences tell the story of architects trying to expand their professional territory. After “Let’s come together,” guess who’s in charge? That architectural slant creates a fatal definition of urban design in the world and in academia, where 90% of the students are architects. So the history of the GSD conferences is not a helpful framing device. It restricts the urbanistic endeavor.

MOUSSAVI: I don’t find the divide at the GSD between the departments very productive. We’ve brought to this conversation lots of examples of urban spaces we admire, and they were not segregated by discipline. You could try to produce an academic condition where you mimic these communication conditions. You need lots of overlap and common techniques.

MACHADO: But the common techniques are architectural techniques, the modern knowledge on which . . .

MOUSSAVI: Maybe they can be called design techniques.

MACHADO: Fine.

MOUSSAVI: The GSD is like three or four different schools. I don’t engage anybody in landscape or planning and urban design. The academic context has to be like the Turbine Hall — the mixing has to hit you in the face.

MACHADO: Besides common design knowledge, we need to teach specialized disciplines’ techniques. For instance, if you are going to become an urban designer in America today, you need to know something about real estate. If you’re going to be a successful landscape architect, you must know Grading 101. The architects don’t need that. We still need the specialized knowledge provided through the departmental structure. But the three of them, with exception of planning, are based on design knowledge, which is what provides the commonality of techniques. I do not believe the separation is as drastic as you are experiencing it. There is a lot of coming and going between urban design and landscape and architecture.

MOUSSAVI: But if I ask most of my students to talk about related disciplines, they know nothing. Architects can never think through engineering if they don’t have any education in engineering. My office, Foreign Office Architects, often explores the design potentials of structure, but we are not structural engineers. I think not to give basic understanding of related disciplines to all the agents of design blocks them from interacting. We can have specialization but need to expand from that.

KRIEGER: Margaret’s right that the architectural voice began to dominate the conferences.

MACHADO: Appropriately so.

KRIEGER: But the goal was to find a way to communicate across the disciplines, and that is a goal for people who call themselves urban designers.

PIEPRZ: I would like to cite a circumstance that poses huge dilemmas for me. In the Pudong area of Shanghai, mediocre architects are producing spectacular structures. Yet urbanistically Pudong is a disastrous failure. It will take decades to undo it through infill and other transformation. You can’t get the best architects in the world to come into this strange capitalism there and make great buildings that relate to each other. It’s an urban design problem; UD could have established a framework, priorities, and the central relationships with a river, with an existing city, and with a new city that’s expanding. A design strategy is missing there. Richard Rogers won a competition with a very bad design, a circle, and they built a butchered version of that.

KRIEGER: He would not take credit for it.

PIEPRZ: He was wise not to take credit for it. I was once in SOM’s Jin Mao tower looking down next to the retired chief planner for Shanghai. I was thinking, “What a mess,” but I didn’t want to say that, and he turned to me and said, “Well, there’s a $10 billion mistake.”

GOLDBERGER: Yes, that place could have profited from an urban design strategy. I thought you were going to tell a version of that apocryphal story about a planning director in Houston taking a student to a top floor and showing him everything out there, then putting his arm around his shoulder and saying, “You see that, son? My job is to let it happen.” (laughter)

PIEPRZ: Pudong could prove that poorly designed places need decades before they can be made successful.

GOLDBERGER: What will time do to it? I increasingly wonder whether there are certain forces in particular times that affect urban form more powerfully than anything an urban designer could do. One looks at the commonalities between cities that developed first in this country in the 18th century, those in the 19th, and those in the 20th. These temporal commonalities are much more potent than any geographical connection or any designer’s interventions, which is why Houston and Los Angeles have much in common despite their huge cultural and geographic differences, and why Pudong represents the next generation beyond that, which makes one despair that natural forces will over time significantly mitigate what’s there. I don’t want to be too despairing, but the very distinction you drew between some of what has been designed, not terribly effectively, in Harvard Square and what you find in Central Square is analogous to Pudong and the French Concession or other older parts of Shanghai, and it makes me wonder how much urban design can do outside the margins.

Is urban design just tinkering with the margins? And even very successful examples like Allegheny Riverfront Park are as dependent on larger economic and social forces that were sending young professional people back to the cities and particularly to the riverfront in search of a different kind of life than a previous generation sought. Design served to guide and support that, not to create it. Maybe that is enough.

PIEPRZ: But they were planning to tear down the Turbine Hall in London, and strategic thinking saved that building and set the stage for Herzog & De Meuron to come in. Another architect could have ruined it. Urban design thinking mattered a lot there.

MOUSSAVI: The Tate Modern design resulted from a design competition, and other architects wanted to do things completely differently. I think you cannot give Herzog & De Meuron enough credit.

GOLDBERGER: But larger than different designs are the cultural, social, and economic forces that made it not a bizarre idea but almost an inevitability that that building would be converted from industrial use to a museum.

SAUNDERS: We’re circling around the question of agency, of effective willed action. What, in this venture called urban design, are the possibilities of agency? And we haven’t yet thought about Millennium Park in Chicago and whether it ultimately came about because of Mayor Richard Daley’s willpower.

GOLDBERGER: There must be telepathy here because I was going to cite Millennium Park as a problematic success because it is a collection of star turns in which landscape, along with sculpture and architecture, does one of the star turns. It’s hardly an integrated act of landscape design, but it has been phenomenally successful, even in the way Michael Sorkin might hope for, which is attracting a diverse economic mix that seems to genuinely enjoy being in public and mixing in a democratic Olmstedian way in this design model radically different from Olmsted’s. But part of its success comes not from the specifics of its design but from the fact that it’s poised to take advantage of an enormously vital and powerful adjacent urban center — the best design in the world would not have worked if it had not been adjacent to the Chicago Loop. And a less potent design might have worked there.

Another example is the redesign of Bryant Park in New York, also enormously successful, again in part because of its adjacency on all four sides to an increasingly successful and prosperous city zone. Laurie Olin designed it with the philosopher-king ghost of William H. White. The park was transformed from a hostile, cold void by fairly conventional design tools to something vibrant and in constant use. The third example, Hudson River Park on New York’s West Side, actually still developing, has prospered from (not always literal) adjacencies. It has managed to connect literally and conceptually to the Battery Park City Esplanade without indulging in any of the historic revivalism and sweet, soft New Urbanism that that has.

SAUNDERS: You’ve been talking about projects that opportunistically ride on historical and contextual waves.

GOLDBERGER: They’re opportunistic in that from a design standpoint, they represent different philosophies, and yet the results are quite similar. I’m also trying to connect that to the point that other forces may in the end be more decisive.

KRIEGER: But it seems that adjacency — not to be confused with contextualism — is a very important urban design or urbanistic methodology. At Bryant Park, the edge was there, but it was not profiting as much as it could have because of the void.

"The GSD is like three or four different schools. I don’t engage anybody in landscape or planning and urban design. The academic context has to be like the Turbine Hall — the mixing has to hit you in the face."

GOLDBERGER: Precisely.

KRIEGER: So, the replacement of the void helped the edge, and the edge of course helped the void. And it’s the same with Chicago. So that’s one thing an urban-design-minded individual is adept at — trying to take advantage of and even reenergize adjacencies.

GOLDBERGER: Right. Indeed, urban design is in part about acknowledging connections, whereas architecture historically has not required that one be cognizant of connections, although one of the reasons the relationship between the disciplines is problematic right now is that architects have in part adopted many of the strategies of urban design.

CZERNIAK: And landscape.

GOLDBERGER: And landscape architecture, but they have been far more cognizant of connections than in the days of Sert.

SAUNDERS: I wonder if, in your comments about Bryant Park, you are very close to saying, “It wouldn’t much matter whether it was Laurie Olin or Lawrence Halprin or Martha Schwartz who designed it.” In other words, in urban design the details are insignificant.

GOLDBERGER: No, if I believed that, I should be in another line of work. However, I do mean to offer a cautionary word and not indulge in physical determinism.

SAUNDERS: But, in all this discussion, I hope we can specify what is it that works in the design of any place you consider admirable, say Bryant Park.

PIEPRZ: For me, the brilliance of Laurie’s solution has to do with how he used the grove of trees (creating places for people to sit in shade), the openness and flexibility of the lawn (so many events and things can happen there), the loose chairs, the café, the connections from the sidewalks, and the transition, all beautifully and elegantly detailed.

MACHADO: Yes, but it’s completely formulaic too.

GOLDBERGER: There’s a place for perfectly executed formula.

CZERNIAK: And Bruce Mau and Rem Koolhaas won the Downsview Park competition with an innovative formula without a plan to go along with it.

URBANSKI: It’s OK to be formulaic. The thing that’s important about Bryant Park, besides all the creature comforts and the great programming, is that it offers archetypes that even regular people recognize and enjoy. Maybe you can’t go over to the landscape architecture department and talk about these archetypes, and they can’t talk to you about them, but the general public can. I was wondering about your term common techniques. One of the public process efforts I make in big projects with complex urban issues and urban designers at the table is to say, “Well, we need to talk about landscape types that everyone understands. Let’s start from these, but we’re not going to use them literally.” The types give us a common vocabulary. We went into our professions because they’re the last generalist professions, right? You do need to know a lot about the other guy’s thing, a lot about traffic engineering and real estate, but the fallacy of Sert’s idea was to blur them together. I don’t agree with blurring.

MACHADO: But you’re implying a critique of design education when you regret the lack of understanding among urban designers of your landscape types; it means something is wrong with the way they have been taught. In the last ten or fifteen years, there has been a great deal of emphasis on innovation, which is wonderful, but you have to simultaneously transmit received knowledge, which you need to know in order to become critical of it. Sometimes students have been critical of something that they do not know. Since the GSD is a graduate school, anybody I teach urban design is already an architect with a good dose of received knowledge.

CZERNIAK: Back to Bryant Park. Don’t underestimate the importance of the movable chairs. It represents a huge empowering shift from Central Park because it is what Adriaan Geuze would call a “post-Darwinian landscape”— it’s no longer that the environment makes us but that we as a public are empowered to alter the environment. His Schouwburgplein in Rotterdam is another example of how places can change because of the ways publics use them.

KRIEGER: Whyte is a substantial ghost in those examples. I want to go back to Chicago to add one more notion about its success and relate it to broader cultural forces. The same components in another city might not have proved so successful because Chicago has a tradition of acceptance of innovative environments like Millennium Park. In the end, this was a continuation of Daniel Burnham’s 100-year-old plan. In Chicago, the Buckingham Fountain has always served as a magnet for activity. Chicago designated the lakefront a public environment much before Pittsburgh or Boston. Certain cities seem to more readily accept attempts to make great places, Chicago being one.

GOLDBERGER: I agree. I might even say it was part of a longer tradition of openness to boldness that is in Chicago’s DNA.

KRIEGER: Could urban design as a set of activities over time add to those broader cultural forces that value good collective environments?

GOLDBERGER: The short answer is “Yes.” How and to what extent is less easy to answer.

MACHADO: There is a specific strength coming from the city’s boldness and from the uniqueness of the site — the wall of the city and the lake. But after all, people from Anish Kapoor to Frank Gehry and others made an interpretation of what they found, with the right intuition and design intelligence. They gave form to that, and it can lead to the success of the place itself. If the wonderful Anish Kapoor piece, which reflects the people, had not been there, but instead, say, a Richard Serra piece, the park would not have been so successful.

KRIEGER: One of its charms is that it’s eclectic. There’s also that strange neoclassical exedra that people photograph. And there’s the inevitable ice-skating rink and restaurant. So there are both populism and acts of great creativity.

GOLDBERGER: Some portions, like the cast stone balustrades, are far more retrograde and inferior to anything at Bryant Park, lest we posit Millennium Park as radical design and Battery Park as only reaction and conservatism.

CRAWFORD: Alex draws attention to the important public conversation about urbanism that is particularly active in Chicago — public participation is a huge factor in how these things work and are accepted. It isn’t simply the public place, but the public conversation — a term of Robert Fishman’s. In New York it’s also very loud and active.

GOLDBERGER: Much more so than before.

CRAWFORD: September 11 turned up the volume of the public conversation. In these conversations, urbanistic proposals are very useful in their physicality and materiality, showing a vision or establishing a clear position about what a city can be.

PIEPRZ: You can think of urban design as something that doesn’t have to be built but that puts forward different visions that allow debate about strategy and priorities, so decisions can be made and issues seen before you spend $10 billion, and so you can meet the public who care about what gets done.

CZERNIAK: That’s why competitions have been so successful — they help set up the debate by presenting many visions simultaneously.

PIEPRZ: Often the problem with competitions is the lack of engagement of many local constituents.

CRAWFORD: Usually long annoying conversations with the public make projects better.

CZERNIAK: One innovative example of participation is the Syracuse Connective Corridor, which will link University Hill with downtown Syracuse. Here public input is used to inform both project concepts and the project process. Over the course of its conceptualization, various university departments have offered courses to help envision it. The Department of African American Studies held a public meeting with the community members to ask how they see themselves as subjects of, participants in, and partners in the project. This informs the process and goals of the design competition, which is just beginning.

SAUNDERS: Hubert Murray wrote in Harvard Design Magazine [Spring/Summer 2005, number 22] about the Central Artery project, contrasting it to recent urban design in Chicago, and asserting that the Artery project has been stymied and will produce bland public space because of the pressures of so many voices with no clear leaders, and in Chicago, if it hadn’t been for Mayor Daley, you wouldn’t have had Millennium Park. That applies to many places, like Rome in the 15th century — you may need a tyrant to get big things done.

CZERNIAK: I’m not arguing for design through consensus. Some innovative feedback loops are being proposed, but it is essential that the input is filtered through the right design professionals and the primary advocates for the project.

KRIEGER: The difference between Chicago and Boston for me is not so much whether Mayor Daley was there, but actually the lack of sophistication of the public conversation in Boston all along. That produced banality and conventionalism, even in the selection of designers. It would also have been helpful to have had a strong leader in support of design innovation.

CRAWFORD: I know you were involved, Alex, but the lack of a fuller participation of the GSD in local issues is disappointing. It might have improved the Artery conversation.

URBANSKI: Transportation engineers were in charge of the Artery project, unfortunately. The trend that Millennium Park climaxes, which is over, is that of the candy sampler: Here’s a chocolate with a cherry, and here’s one with coconut, and so on. It was a technique developed in the 1980s and brought to its apogee in New York and other places as a response to not being able to reach consensus. All the constituents would be asked, “Well, what do you want?” Millennium Park is a candy sampler, a collection of gardens or follies.

GOLDBERGER: What examples are there in New York?

URBANSKI: Thomas Balsley Associates likes to do that, as in Chelsea Waterside Park. And Battery Park City is a little bit that. Jennifer Bartlett’s design for South Park originally was that.

CZERNIAK: Where that can work is when it’s built into the design’s systemic logic. Think of the “cinematic promenade” in Tschumi’s Parc de La Villette, which designs in the possibility for adaptability, flexibility, and difference. And yet the design remains coherent. Field Operations’ projects are also noteworthy for their strong organizational structures. Fresh Kills’ design is like a pixilated field. It can adapt to changes because its initial configuration is robust.

KRIEGER: Although Rodolfo said this conversation was about architecture, we have talked mainly about parks, not housing or streets. We’ve talked about the transformative project that requires great design and is in the right place. But there’s contrasting role for urban design in the maintenance of urbanism. A majority of urban designers are engaged on behalf of neighborhood groups in small-scale, local improvements with streets or neighborhood facilities. It makes them seem invisible or less essential. But the sum of all their small-scale work may be quite large, larger than the sum of high-profile public projects.

MACHADO: You’re talking about landscape beautification, aren’t you?

KRIEGER: No, advocacy for housing, affordability, social services, mixed uses, and transit, the stuff that’s important to people at a grassroots level. It used to be called planning; now people refer to it as urban design.

CRAWFORD: The public loves the idea of urban design as working with something physical instead of something more abstract like zoning.

SAUNDERS: Has everyone had a chance to present his or her compelling example of successful or unsuccessful urban design?

PIEPRZ: Maybe ten years ago I would have said Battery Park City — it was a breakthrough project that did a lot of things quite well. But it’s getting worse and worse. So I can’t think of a recent project or a place or district where urban design has been a great creative force.

MACHADO: A few years ago we had West 8’s Borneo Sporenburg, and it was wonderful.

PIEPRZ: But that’s just a sea of housing. Maybe it needs to mature.

KRIEGER: In the postwar period the discussion about urbanism shifted to America, and most of the Europeans were supportive of this. Europeans still seem to appreciate more of the particular new characteristics of malls or suburbia than we do. I wonder if there a comparable shift under way now toward a new conception based on Dubai or Pudong.

PIEPRZ: The only good recent project I can think of is South Bay in San Francisco, where they built the new stadium and infill buildings. I can’t tell where this area begins and where it ends. It just merges into the grids. There’s a really interesting mix of things and beautiful streets with complicated geometry. A transit line is coming in, and a new university is going up. The AT&T baseball stadium is spectacular, and there’s a waterfront. All this is actually more interesting than Battery Park City has ever been.

CZERNIAK: Implicit in the South Bay example is a shift from downtown infill to peripheral sites like decommissioned military bases and capped landfills, some of the largest development parcels in emerging cities. You won’t find a Battery Park City example in most contemporary North American cities.

PIEPRZ: But there are also the redeveloping areas around universities. With less powerful city planning departments, universities are doing interesting planning. Look at Columbia, Penn, Yale, and Harvard.

CZERNIAK: And Syracuse University has a two-mile project.

SAUNDERS: I have a question about the default mode of mainstream urban design in this country in which there is a mom-and-apple-pie set of principles that, rightly, no one takes exception to, things like mixed-uses, pedestrian scale, banishing automobiles as much as possible, good public transportation, retail open to streets, street trees, etc. We do want to spend our time on streets like this rather than on streets like those I saw thirty years ago in downtown Dayton, Ohio — empty parking lots, vast seas of concrete. We would rather be in Portland than that old Dayton. But Sorkin points out that all this offers a rather pathetic form of public life centered around a comfortable, hedonistic lifestyle mainly for shoppers enjoying their cappuccinos and their chance to buy Gap clothes, and if that’s urbanism, we’re screwed, because it doesn’t have anything to do with political life or with social integration. It has to do with passive pleasures: The idea that sitting under a street tree sipping a cappuccino is the great city experience. Sorkin says that every damn city in America has these “lifestyle” streets, and they are deadly.

GOLDBERGER: This comes down to the question: Is the glass of urbanism half empty or half full? An urban impulse is alive that was not visible a generation ago. But it is expressing itself — and in this sense Sorkin is right — significantly through the consumer culture and aspirations for a comfortable middle-class existence. The things wrong with that model are easy to see — it’s part of the increasing homogenization of culture. We may be rescued from the coldness and the banality of the cityscape you remember from Dayton, but at a price: Public life and consumerism have become conflated.

Sorkin idealizes a certain prior public existence — I’m not sure there was ever a golden age of the public realm in this country. I doubt that public issues were ever debated in Union Square in New York or even Hyde Park in London. Decisions were made in a far less democratic way than they seem to be made today, and the public life that we romanticize so much existed in large part because for most people the private realm was awful and made you want to get outside. This realm offered not a comfortable, ample residence with lots of bathrooms, heat, and air-conditioning but a couple of mean cold rooms without a bathroom. Remember what city life was like for most people in New York or Boston or Chicago in the late 19th century, the “golden age of the public realm.” The private realm was crappy unless you were really rich, and so what we have seen is a gradual movement toward the middle as the middle class has grown. Its bourgeois values have become urban values, values of the public realm. And that’s why the glass of urbanism is both half empty and half full.

CRAWFORD: Sorkin’s attitude is typical among certain leftists who haven’t examined real behavior in the city — there are now lots of paradoxes about what is public and what is private. In Los Angeles, one of the most Richard Sennett – like public spaces is the highly artificial space of Jon Jerde’s City Walk.

GOLDBERGER: You don’t really know if it’s a theme park masquerading as a street or a street masquerading as a theme park.

CRAWFORD: It’s totally inauthentic and yet it has Hasidic families and gang members in the same space, as does The Grove shopping center, even more paradoxically because it is under heavy surveillance. Sorkin’s view is old school.

CZERNIAK: But you’re unlikely to have gang members and Hasidic families together in The Grove. It’s homogenous.

CRAWFORD: The idea that only the raw city is authentic expresses a kind of Puritanism about pleasure: What people want in public space is pleasure.

MACHADO: Sorkin’s position seems very ’60s.

CRAWFORD: It is so ’60s.

GOLDBERGER: It is as retro as the New Urbanism.

CZERNIAK: But it does care about the planet. . . .

SAUNDERS: Are you saying anything more about City Walk than that very different people are near each other there? Is the mere juxtaposition of diverse people somehow extremely important? What does it achieve? Are you saying City Walk is somehow a political space?

CRAWFORD: No, because there are two kinds of public space: the agora, the very small public space of democratic interaction, and the cosmopolis, where difference is visible. Sorkin is conflating the two, imagining that somehow a diverse public equals a public of democratic interaction. They’re quite different, although they are not mutually exclusive. And now we have electronic media that allow you to be in several places at once. Things are changing — there’s a complex rearticulation of public and private.

GOLDBERGER: I agree. I don’t accept Sorkin’s negativity about public realm as a place for pleasure and his belief that it used to be a place for noble civic engagement, when in fact, even long ago, the small town with the little square and band shell was as much a piece of the public realm as anything in Hyde Park or Union Square.

SAUNDERS: I think it’s unfair to Sorkin to imply that he looks down on pleasure. After all, “Sixties people” revel in sensual excess. Focusing more on consumerism and “lifestyle” would be a better way of spinning what he’s saying. Then too pleasure comes in many forms, some of which you would find revolting or hollow.

CRAWFORD: There’s a kind of upper-middle-class bias against consumers by the very people who shop at The Gap.

GOLDBERGER: The Gap was the very first thing to arrive during the transformation of Times Square in the ’90s. Then Disney came. These jump-started the whole new stage.

CRAWFORD: In Central Square, The Gap is a social condenser that mixes publics under the sign of consumption.

SAUNDERS: I’ll just say that if I’m in a city, and my only option is to shop and not go to museums or anything like that, then I want to go home.

MOUSSAVI: The Tate Modern sells more per second than the Selfridges department store in London. And it’s getting an extension, where there will be a lot of retail. So, I don’t think that you can differentiate museums and retail so much anymore. Your approach to urban design is too idealistic. At least in Europe the public sector can no longer pay for urban design.

KRIEGER: That’s just as true here, maybe more.

MOUSSAVI: In the UK, all cities that are being redeveloped from industry to leisure — Bristol, Birmingham, Manchester, Leeds, Leicester — are being redeveloped through retail. The clients are developers, and the public-sector councils can only influence the composition to make sure that there is mixed-use, etc., but they cannot enforce how they are designed. And so one of the settings of the city is shifting from work to leisure. In many other cities in Europe the degree of control that we are talking about actually doesn’t exist. The question is, how can we interest those with power? Are we to say retail is bad? One of the most exciting moments in the city is to be on the escalator of the department store. In Europe, developers have realized that design adds value. Maybe we should discuss designing the urbanism in huge retail spaces.

URBANSKI: I’ve come across a developer in DUMBO, the area in Brooklyn near the waterfront, who has no plans to make money on retail. He assumes that places like Central Square became interesting before retail could be very profitable. Since the rents were low for retail, it supported funky stuff. Cities become boring when they all have the same high-end retail like Abercrombie & Fitch. This New York developer’s brilliant idea is to support only cheap retail where he’s trying to sell expensive residences above the first floor. So there are all these one-off coffee shops and little businesses and art galleries.

CRAWFORD: They know it would be completely devalued if chain retailers moved in, so it’s really smart.

MOUSSAVI: There are lots of enlightened urban-minded developers — Urban Splash in the UK, for instance. There is not such a division any longer between the private and the public sectors.

KRIEGER: And the homogenization we fear provokes resistances, and through those other models emerge.

MACHADO: I am interested in the new dispersed city like Phoenix and the need to surrender the wish for a civic center. Phoenix is trying to create a center, but it’s doomed to fail, to be empty. We should recognize the multiplicity of centers and the agglomeration of different types of towns. Civic centers worked nicely only in the 19th century.

CRAWFORD: That brings up the Frank Gehry Grand Street project in Los Angeles.

GOLDBERGER: Downtown L.A. is in continual existential angst about whether it should have a conventional downtown center.

CRAWFORD: It has developed on its own into a place, but not downtown as we know it. It offers more choices to people who want to live in different environments, but it’s never going to be a real downtown.

KRIEGER: Let’s extend the question slightly because there are other social, political, and sentimental forces still saying, “Let’s make the center the center.” But let’s say there are many centers. We still have to ask how to make each of them more vital and distinctive. I run a studio on Tyson’s Corner. That’s a center.

GOLDBERGER: The problem with places like Tyson’s Corner is the critical urban design problem of this moment.

KRIEGER: And where we have fewer formulaic, methodological, or even political strategies for addressing it.

MACHADO: Those places do need invention. No old typologies can be deployed there, because the conditions are so brutally different. The peripheral block, for instance, is not the answer.

CRAWFORD: In response to your comment about everyday urbanism, these are the very conditions it’s designed to address by retrofitting suburban conditions such as strip malls.

MACHADO: New Urbanists will say that they want to do that too. They do it everyday.

CZERNIAK: With Rodolfo at Princeton around 1990, I had a studio in which we made a city in a cornfield. The challenge wasn’t to create a civic center, but instead create urban moments. We did this through the unprecedented juxtapositions of programs and activities. “Moments of urbanity” is an interesting way to think about urbanism in a dispersed condition.

GOLDBERGER: Yes, that’s the challenge we face. The other thing that interests and frustrates me is the belief I share that in the 18th and 19th centuries natural economic conditions rather than design interventions created reasonably viable urban forms like Greenwich Village, but laissez-faire urbanism today yields Tyson’s Corner. We certainly don’t want to go with the reflexive New Urbanist position of “Let’s recreate the old model.” Sorkin should get credit for his deft comparisons between New Urbanism and religious fundamentalism.

PIEPRZ: What explains places like Tyson’s Corner is a lack of new models, of any understanding of what’s possible. The New Urbanists show developers one “new” way, but they are doing things at a “village” scale. So these big office and commercial developers haven’t seen other models and just repeat their formulas and commission the same old architects and urban designers.

" Are you saying anything more about City Walk than that very different people are near each other there? Is the mere juxtaposition of diverse people somehow extremely important? What does it achieve?"

GOLDBERGER: My point was more that Beacon Hill was formula driven, too. It was just putting up an easy, quick thing to make money based on what people had done before without conscious design intervention, and that act today brings us Tyson’s Corner.

SAUNDERS: This seems like a crucial issue: What do guidelines and regulations and zoning enable, what do they force, and what do they forbid? What went on in 19th-century Boston that doesn’t go on in 20th-century Houston because of those things? Can we say that good urban design is at least partly dependent on good regulations and guidelines?

CRAWFORD: It’s not correct that these conditions are unplanned because they’re hugely regulated, down to the size of the grass verge dividing the four-lane street, and so on. Maybe urban design has to change its name, and maybe urban and suburban aren’t valid terms anymore, because we have a new urban condition. The way to go is to engage with developers and come up with ideas they can buy into. A “lifestyle center,” however simplistic and ill-conceived it is, shows a yearning for urbanity. If you take some of those pieces and recombine them, you might not have something so bad.

GOLDBERGER: I’d rather be at a lifestyle center than at Tyson’s Corner.

KRIEGER: Tyson’s Corner is trying to become a lifestyle center. You know, there is something to be said about the nature of the regulations that existed for either political, scale, or transportation reasons in the 19th century versus those that exist today. I think scale can’t be ignored. You can say Tyson’s Corner was planned, but you’d also have to say no second step was anticipated. In fact, there was no planning except for roadways. And therefore somebody put something there, and the next guy put something there, and so forth, but that sense of what might produce a collective organism still doesn’t exist at Tyson’s Corner, and whether it existed due to constraints in the preindustrial era, I don’t know. You wish it were true.

GOLDBERGER: Which goes back to a point made earlier that urban design in part is about connections rather than isolated objects, whether streets or the environment of Tyson’s Corner or a landscape.

CRAWFORD: Another urban condition that architects or urban designers aren’t dealing with is the dominance of the automobile, and dealing with it not just by offering pedestrian alternatives, but also by thinking about things like the design quality of garages and their relationship to entering a building.

"We agree about what is valuable and not valuable in New Urbanism. We agree that, to produce new models, we need to reconceptualize and work with things like gentrification, shopping, automobile culture, the parking lot, the corporate tower, the five-star hotel, and certain unavoidable cultural forces — things we merely condemned a few years ago."

URBANSKI: Give the devil his due for a second. New Urbanists are right that you need a roadway plan that facilitates urbanism. Beacon Hill came out of a roadway plan; the rest followed. The second thing is this crazy academic dismissal of gentrification. People in a hellish place would like to live in a gentrified place. The consumerist urban space we’re making is a phase. If there’s an Abercrombie & Fitch in all these fake urban centers, then they’ll go out of business. Then the rent will drop and maybe. . . .

GOLDBERGER: They would not turn into soup kitchens, however. But you’re right.

SAUNDERS: If you wish to sum up what you are taking away from this session, please do. I think we weren’t able to come up with promising new models for designed urban districts that could be brought to developers for, say, a mixed-use urban development. I suspect there are good European models we didn’t hear about today.

MACHADO: There are few good new models; that’s what makes this time so difficult and fascinating. And anyway we no longer buy into universal models. In the end it’s very much going back to being uniquely responsive to individual places, as Borneo Sporenburg is. I do not think we can be helped by any kind of ideology.

SAUNDERS: So in your view the answer to the developer is “hire the right architect.”

MACHADO: We agree about what is valuable and not valuable in New Urbanism. We agree that, to produce new models, we need to reconceptualize and work with things like gentrification, shopping, automobile culture, the parking lot, the corporate tower, the five-star hotel, and certain unavoidable cultural forces — things we merely condemned a few years ago.

URBANSKI: What the New Urbanists have wrong is trying to make all streets nice. GOLDBERGER: The reality of any urban condition is everything is imperfect. The absence of something wrong is what’s totally wrong.

URBANSKI: Go to the park if you have to get away from it.

SAUNDERS: Or enjoy the wrong.

CZERNIAK: There is clearly a consensus today that landscape is an important component of the contemporary city, but we didn’t get to discuss Landscape Urbanism. I don’t agree that landscape replaces architecture as the building block of contemporary urbanism. But Landscape Urbanism advances a strong argument because: (1) Landscape is everywhere in the decentralized city, part of some of the biggest development parcels available, and it needs to be thought about opportunistically. (2) Landscapes often need to be remediated, and this requires a certain technical and creative ingenuity. (3) Landscape has proven a helpful analogue to think about the way cities grow and change over time. We’ve talked today about the incremental, about contingency, about diversity, about constant change. These characterize landscape. So landscape is very important now.

CRAWFORD: We need to have a new public conversation about the suburban condition, and designers have to take a leading role. The discussion on the suburban condition is focused around the unhelpful concept of sprawl. “Landscape suburbanism” could have a huge role to play in reconceptualizing large-scale issues including the automobile. The sprawl discussion covers important environmental issues, but also mere taste culture concerns: “Ooh, cars are horrible.” The suburban condition is that great terra incognita that everybody needs to study.

CZERNIAK: You should look at Sébastien Marot’s work on sub-urbanism.

PIEPRZ: For me urban design is a way of thinking that can be taken up by architects, landscape architects, and planners. But urban design professionals can get paid to do things and think about things at many scales that individual architects or landscape architects can’t — pulling things together, framework, connectivity, diversity, not singly authored totalized places, maybe like Grand Avenue in L.A. will be.

KRIEGER: I agree. I think the problem is trying to provide a definitive definition for urban design; it’s many things. Working in downtown Boston is very different from trying to improve Tyson’s Corner. Robert Hughes’s book, The Shock of the New, describes how art produces things that culture is slow to respond to, and there has to be time to overcoming the shock of the new. At the moment, designers seem to be suffering from the shock of the new more than the public. We’ve not yet come to terms with things like virtual culture or megamalls or sprawl, and therefore we resort to traditional urban models. We need to move beyond this shock. Those who think urban design doesn’t exist are wrong. It exists in many ways, including as a colloquial term for better planning and urban quality of life. I’m glad we’ve talked about some of them today.