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The Problem with Thinking about or for

Urban Design
a
Mike Biddulph
a
Cardiff University, School of City and Regional Planning , Cardiff ,
UK
Published online: 02 Feb 2012.

To cite this article: Mike Biddulph (2012) The Problem with Thinking about or for Urban Design,
Journal of Urban Design, 17:1, 1-20, DOI: 10.1080/13574809.2011.646251

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 Journal of Urban Design, Vol. 17. No. 1, 1–20, February 2012

The Problem with Thinking about or for Urban Design

MIKE BIDDULPH
Cardiff University, School of City and Regional Planning, Cardiff, UK

ABSTRACT This paper is concerned with the interface between urban design as a
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practical, applied and ultimately creative activity, and the nature of the knowledge
produced to support urban designers in their work. A distinction is being drawn between
thinking about urban design and its resulting urban forms and normative thinking for
urban design. The paper argues that thinking about urban design might usefully be
informed by social science methods, but that the conclusions from such work must be in
some ways limited to the applied field. Thinking for urban design, however, must embrace
the wicked nature of urban design problems, and the interpretive and political nature of
how we come to judge built form solutions. Research for urban design might therefore
embrace methods and practices employed in the arts and humanities just as legitimately as
those adopted in the social sciences. Similarly, assessments of research outputs produced
within a tradition of urban design must adequately account for the nature of the field and
its practices.

Introduction
Urban design fills the gap created by specialisms which had come to ignore
the role of public space in urban life, and in which a compartmentalized view of
built environment disciplinary concerns had emerged (Bentley, 1976; Jacobs &
Appleyard, 1987; Rowley, 1994; Carmona, 1998a; Madanipour, 2006). Urban design
practice should involve applying thinking or theory about specific built form
qualities, at a range of scales, to design and development problems within a
specific spatial territory, typically with a focus on improving the form and
character of the public realm. This applied nature is critical to the discipline. If you
cannot design then you are not embracing urban design as a field. The design nature
of the field also provides a frame through which the relevance of any idea used to
justify its outputs must be judged. This seems to suggest that urban design has
a foot in the arts and humanities, as well as the social sciences. Sometimes the
implications of this do not always seem evident in thinking for urban design which
is introduced below.
This paper argues that there is a critical tension between urban design and its
relationship in particular with the social sciences. It is concerned with the interface
between urban design as a practical, applied and ultimately creative activity, in
contrast with the view of urban design as it is sometimes discussed within the
Correspondence Address: Mike Biddulph, Cardiff University, School of City and Regional
Planning, Glamorgan Building, King Edward VII Avenue, Cardiff CF10 3WA, UK. Email:
BiddulphMJ@cardiff.ac.uk

1357-4809 Print/1469-9664 Online/12/010001-20 q 2012 Taylor & Francis

http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13574809.2011.646251
 2 M. Biddulph

social sciences. In this respect a clear distinction is being drawn between thinking
about urban design and its resulting urban forms and normative thinking for urban
design (Cuthbert, 2006).
It is interesting to briefly compare this tension with Faludi’s distinction
between theories of and for planning, without drifting too far into planning theory.
Theories of planning concern themselves with how planners understand their
activities and how they operate. It is essentially procedural. Theories for planning
refer to the substantive nature of the activity, referring to what a good plan should
be about or trying to achieve. Faludi is clear when he states that planning theory
should be concerned with theories of planning because they are less problematic
or contested. He also notes that planning theory should draw explicitly on the
methods of the social sciences to substantiate or justify their conclusions (Faludi,
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1973). Such an approach would be untenable for urban designers. We need ideas
about procedures and processes for involving people or embracing vested
interests (see discussions about community involvement, controlling design
through planning systems or the use of charettes for example). We are not much
use to anyone, however, if we do not also have knowledge and ideas about the
types of environments we want to design.
Although thinking about urban design is critical to the development of the
discipline, thinking for urban design needs as much attention. This is despite the
fact that research and thinking cannot always be so readily subjected to social
science tests to ratify their claims. Jacobs & Appleyard (1987) acknowledge this in
their urban design manifesto when Jacobs states that:
. . . after a while one knows and accepts that the research into what
makes good places to live will be endless, often without conclusion, and
always value-laden. There comes a time when one says, “Well, I must
take a leap. All of the experience has taught me something. It may be
unprovable, but I think I know what a good place is”. (p. 112)
If taken seriously, the nature of the problems that urban designers seek to address
should probably result in a more open manner of thinking which acknowledges
the political nature of many design decisions, whilst also embracing the multiple
interpretations to which design work must be subjected as much as, if not more
than any process of verification or testing of discrete qualities of a project. Cross
(2007) helpfully refers to this as a ‘designerly way of knowing’. The sciences
(objective, rational, truthful) can help us with discrete pockets of knowledge
which unfortunately are without context. They are typically derived from research
which has stripped away the variables and irrelevant factors with which practice
and real places must always contend. The humanities must also help urban
designers with their concern for analogy, metaphor and evaluation. Our response
to our environment is always imbued with meaning, culture and riddled with
fascinating subjectivities which even guide the social scientists in choices about
what they think are important. Designers also have the role of creating artificial
objects and in urban design terms, spaces and places, which involve synthesis and
interpretation of everything (or in reality something) that has gone before. They
are confronted by decisions that may be infinitely complex if all possible factors
were embraced. Choices need to be made, and so urban design is political to the
extent that we must try and understand how our decisions might favour some
(people, other species or environments) over others. Buchanan (1992) usefully
notes how designers must overcome the fragmented nature of knowledge created
 The Problem with Thinking about or for Urban Design 3

in discrete disciplinary fields. He says design should “ . . . connect and integrate

useful knowledge from the arts and sciences alike, but in ways that are suited to
the problems and purposes of the present” (p. 6). The same seems firmly true of
urban design as well.

Thinking about Urban Design

Thinking about urban design refers to the body of thinking which attempts to locate
urban design activities within social theory. In this respect the built environment is
the object of inquiry typically being viewed from the outside and judged, for
example, by urbanists, anthropologists, sociologists or geographers. For example
Harvey (1989a, p. 98) judges developments by their surface qualities when he
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refers to “fiction, fragmentation, collage and eclecticism, all suffused with a sense
of ephemerality” as characterizing the work of urban designers and architects
during the 1980s. His chapter on postmodernism in the city resonates through many
subsequent critiques of urban development with its concerns for gentrification,
signification, simulation, commodification and spectacle. This work argues that a
relativist postmodern design condition wraps up and hides the extent to which
space is being shaped and controlled to further both consumption and social
control. Academic careers have been based on providing the empirical and critical
analysis which substantiates Harvey’s discussion of a shift from managerialism to
entrepreneurialism in urban governance (Harvey, 1989b), and urban design and its
products are firmly located as a critical tool (see for example, Hubbard, 1995, 1996).
It is not always called urban design though. Harvey (1989a) interestingly refers to
the process as imaging when he says “imaging a city through the organization of
spectacular urban spaces becomes a means to attract capital and people (of the
right sort) in a period (since 1973) of intensified inter-urban competition and urban
entrepreneurialism” (p. 92). This somewhat deterministic stance (design of image
will result in the correct type of consumers) has been discussed by others such as
Ley & Mills (1993) who criticize the implicit and, in their opinion, mistaken view
that the buildings and environments reproduce mechanically the social relations
imputed to a culture.
Cuthbert (2006) is also keen to locate urban design within the theories and
thinking of spatial political economy, referring explicitly to Castells’ definition of
urban design (Castells, 1977). The definition cannot be extracted from the role of
urban space and therefore urban form within the neo-Marxist conceptualization of
historical materialism. Cuthbert argues that this is theoretically robust because it
embeds urban design as praxis within an understanding of other urban functions
and processes which are driven by a means of production. The consequence for
urban designers is that they are one of a number of agents of change at work within
the urban system. As agents, Bentley (1999) highlights the unique selling proposition of
designers who can align their design ideas with those of developers to create
saleable spaces. Successful designers commodify their skills and design ideas and
also further valorize their products as the developments become precedents to be
visited, consumed and recreated by others. As agents of change urban designers
are relatively powerless, particularly if their design ideas are not bankable
(McGlynn & Murrain, 1994). There is also a certain inevitability about the forms of
development that might emerge in an increasingly globalized economic, design
and development system governed, for example, by the economic rules of neo-
liberalism.
 4 M. Biddulph

Towards Thinking for Urban Design

In contrast to this tradition of thinking about urban design, thinking for urban
design refers to the body of knowledge, ideas and practices which characterize
the applied field. It is the intellectual territory that Cuthbert tries to make sense of,
but ultimately dismisses in his recent writing where he states that: “a new era of
urban design theory has emerged”, and that “the old paradigm has withered
away and the new has not yet taken hold” (Cuthbert, 2006, p. 11). The critical
contributions to this new theory are Ellin’s Postmodern Urbanism (Ellin, 1999) and
King’s Emancipating Space (King, 1996). Both books are very good, but fall firmly
into the category of thinking about urban design. In contrast, Cuthbert asks of the
thinking for urban design “what more can we squeeze out of contextualism,
functionalism, figure ground relationships, design regulations, case studies, serial
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vision, etc?”(Cuthbert, 2007, p. 219).

If we break down the knowledge for urban design we might categorize it in a
number of ways. Epistemologically it seems fair to suggest that some of this
knowledge appears from discrete pieces of research on very particular topics, and
derived from the application of social science based methods. We can simply think
back to Lynch’s somewhat limited field work on mental mapping which helped
identify the paths, edges, districts, nodes or landmarks of many urban design
schemes. By contrast, we might suggest that some ideas emerge from a more
interpretative tradition. At the time that Lynch was writing, Cullen was applying
a form of empiricism to English townscapes, and drawing attention to particular
visual and relational qualities which were unquestionably there in historic towns
and missing from modern schemes, but which some subsequently dismissed as
personal and subjective. In these two very well-known cases we find ideas from
very different sources which designers have subsequently found very useful.
These and similar traditions can create different types of resource for
designers, ranging from what might seem precise quantifiable standards to more
generic design principles or directions. If we focus on standards for a moment,
correlations between standards and social phenomena seem as often as not
selective and only navigable through an interpretive frame. For example, do we
have an idea about the distance between homes that allows for privacy? Between
facing homes in the UK this has, for some time now, been 21 metres. Not 20 or 22. Of
course, such a distance has never been firmly empirically verified, it has emerged
through practice and came originally from government guidance. It has nothing
really to do with either people or design in a broad sense. People will probably
have very varying notions of their need for privacy based on former experiences,
whilst of course privacy can be achieved in any number of ways, including just
putting up screening or net curtains. Such standards help planners and developers
to reach consensus quickly about if a scheme is acceptable. Highway dimensions
can also be equally contested. We have reasonably fixed notions of how wide
vehicles are, and what turning circles they might need, but there are fewer clearer
notions of how these dimensions might be combined in an environment with
metrics for walking, playing, cycling, access for the disabled, distances for privacy
or ideas for character and place making. This is clearly proven by the challenge of
writing guidelines for highway engineers working on British residential streets
where recently there has been a clear acknowledgment of the varying roles that
such environments perform (Department for Transport, 2007). We might also
discuss very reasonably if and how vehicles might be accommodated at all. Whyte
 The Problem with Thinking about or for Urban Design 5

(1980) famously, and very importantly, told us that from his empirical work he
found people will comfortably sit on things that are 16 to 17 inches off the ground.
After watching people sitting for some time the Project for Public Spaces suggested
greater latitude of between 7 and 44 inches, as these were the heights observed onto
which people dropped or pulled themselves to sit (http://www.pps.org/arti
cles/sitwalls/). Such straightforward dimensions do not really help us until they
are combined with more interpretive judgements about where people like to sit, for
how long, what for and even how other people might react. The good intentions of
designers hoping to create sitting spaces in residential home zone streets in the UK
were firmly scuppered by some residents voicing no end of concerns about what
this would mean for their privacy and peace (Biddulph, 2003).
Such standards offer important insights into our priorities and in a somewhat
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reductive sense we can judge how a very particular matter has been dealt with in a
design. Using space syntax we might judge a street to be more or less connected
and infer a consequence for some small part of the life there, such as passing
footfall for shops or some part of a sense of security (Hillier & Hanson, 1984;
Hillier, 1996, 2004). It will not help us understand whether people find the shops
affordable or are selling the right stuff. It also will not help explain the tendency to
drive to the shops these days because of pressure of time or convenience, or the
tendency of retailers to monopolize space in larger car based stores. We need
to look elsewhere for these explanations. We might decide a scheme provides
adequate parking spaces, and ignore the contested notion of adequate. In general
we might conclude that there are some key dimensions which are important and
which provide minimum or maximum quantities, but they may or may not be
relevant in a given situation. Ticking off the meeting of standards does not help
us understand how different people may be affected by the built results, whilst
they also fail to acknowledge the choices about how to live in and with the
environments that are created. Setting out to complete work which ignores an
interpretive frame through which some ideas might be both established or used
seems to be problematic.
Discrete empirical projects or even resulting standards do not necessarily add
up to much for urban designers if they focus on such specific topics or issues. They
might inspire a direction in design, or they might not. Moudon’s (1992) mapping
of the emerging discipline to determine what urban designers should know,
therefore seems important, not just for what she decides urban designers should
know or think about, but also because she recognizes the importance of the
interpretive frame through which design work must emerge and be ultimately
judged. She suggests critically that:
to build up actual knowledge [for] urban design, one should not look for
the correct approach or theory, but instead compile and assess all the
research that adds to what the urban designer must be familiar with.
(p. 363)
She is also clear about drawing a distinction between thinking that is normative
(what should be) and thinking that is substantive or descriptive (what is and
why). Substantive theory is important because “logically one needs to understand
what cities are made of, how they come about and function, what they mean to
people, and so on, in order to design ‘good’ cities” (p. 363), but “the gap between
knowledge and action is not an easy one to bridge (p. 365), whilst the attractive
normative theories providing “ . . . unmitigated guidance for designers in their
 6 M. Biddulph

everyday endeavours . . . ” (p. 364) are partial in light of the “ . . . wholesomeness

and complexity inherent to design” (p. 364).
Moudon ultimately steers clear of normative thinking, choosing instead to
regard substantive work as a firmer grounding upon which to base her knowledge
for urban design. She outlines the range of substantive studies which characterize,
at the time of her writing, what she regards as the epistemology of urban design. If
you want to know something for urban design then read urban history,
picturesque (townscape), image, environment-behaviour, place, material culture,
typo-morphological, space-morphology or nature-ecology studies. Cuthbert has
added spatial political economy to this list, after the work of Harvey and others.
We might also add lessons from forms of spatial analysis like space syntax and
possibly work which understands development processes and for example the
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role of planning procedures (Barnett, 1974; Punter, 1990; Scheer, 1995; see for
example, Carmona, 1996a, 1996b, 1998a, 1998b; Punter, 1999, 2003, 2005, 2008,
2010). If you work on schemes then you must look for the critical conclusions from
these works and determine then how to proceed with your housing or mixed use
development scheme; maybe even question whether housing or mixed use should
be what you are concerned with. These impressive intellectual endeavours should
be wholly embraced, but there remains some ambiguity or greyness between
thinking about the built environment and the drawing of conclusions from such
research or thinking, and insights into how design should be done.
Zeisel (1981) rightly emphasizes the role of research findings in informing
design interventions when he outlined the inquiry by design methods into this
and that situations and scenarios, and in so doing suggested that research can
inform design and that discrete design scenarios also involve forms of research
and the creation and deployment of knowledge. Shaped by such work, Cooper
Marcus established a strong tradition of deriving lessons from post-occupancy
evaluations (Cooper Marcus & Sarkissian, 1986; Cooper Marcus & Francis, 1998)
which presents the lessons from studies from common forms of housing or public
space from the time of her writing. Emerging from this are many rules of thumb and
design directions which might shape the choices that designers of certain types of
schemes might take. Such works embrace empirical and sometimes quantified
thinking, but its application within any given context might not be relevant given
the creative choices designers face or the specific nature of the contexts into which
schemes must sit.
Within the UK and Australia the greyness between discrete and diffuse areas
of empirical work and interpretation has been filled by various sets of urban
design principles, starting with Bentley et al’s Responsive Environments (1985), and
in England mutating into the Commission for Architecture and the Built
Environment’s By Design (CABE /Department of the Environment Transport &
the Regions, 2000) and Building for Life criteria. These principles and criteria have
emerged in order to operationalize the disparate thinking referred to above as the
substantive literature, and in many respects have come to replace them. In other
words many urban designers will know the CABE principles, but they will not
know where they came from or why. Interestingly, following the partial demise of
CABE following a change of government in England, it seems appropriate to
speculate that other vested interests might hope the CABE principles will be given
less weight as well. This is because the theory upon which the principles rest is
merely contingent upon an interpretive, and in this case explicitly political, frame.
The same might be said of New Urbanism’s principles in the US (Congress for the
 The Problem with Thinking about or for Urban Design 7

New Urbanism, 2000). Both traditions start from the same thinkers but are
translated, through the form and language of the principles, to their own
development contexts. Unfortunately, it might be argued that practice has become
divorced from the ideas or theories that it seeks to implement. This is probably
inevitable given the interpretive nature of design work generally and the number
of choices or areas of debate or preference available. We also must, however,
acknowledge the interpretative leap necessary to step from the language of the
design principle to the objective and subjective qualities of a design.
These principles are normative in a discrete sense, in that they offer us insights
into how we might progress our preferred forms of development. Bentley et al. are
clear that their principles, if followed, will lead to the quality of responsiveness,
and a belief that their environments will give more people more choices. This is an
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honest statement of bias informed by how the urban design thinking has been
interpreted and applied. Here the forms and priorities are distinctly British,
although the issues that become translated into forms have more global resonance.
However, they also offer a more vivid account of the possibilities afforded by urban
design than previous attempts to deliver something more discrete, such as, for
example, merely a richer townscape which might have dominated urban design
thinking in the UK during the 1970s. This bias in Responsive Environments reflects
the implicitly political nature of urban design outcomes very directly. Going out to
provide people with choice, rather than reflect the desires of particular groups, is a
strong acknowledgement of the significance of urban form in people’s lives, even if
elsewhere we might note only a probabilistic or possible relationship between
people and how they will live in a given place.
Implicit in these works are ideas about good city form. The principles or
criteria point us towards addressing certain issues or answering certain questions
which are underpinned loosely by a certain type of idealism, or what some might
regard as dogma. Talen & Ellis (2002) are bold in their assertion that planning (and
not just urban design) must have a firm notion of good city form (Lynch, 1981).
They are critical of the gap between planning theorists’ concern to develop ever
more sophisticated models of planning process and the ultimately reductive and
unapplied work of urban or spatial analysts who describe existing urban
structures and functions. In their reaction to North American forms of develop-
ment they note that spatial planning must be spatially prescriptive, and that a
concern for the form of development must occupy the planner’s mind in some
way, as it is one way in which the nature of development is judged and lived in.
Critically they ask, “whose normative vision is to be adopted?” (p. 41). They
decide that the right insights are provided by the very same list of authors that
Moudon and Cuthbert also discuss, although they link them explicitly to the
prescriptions of New Urbanism. Whilst Moudon describes the work of these
authors as substantive, Talen & Ellis claim to see an inevitable link between the
writing of these authors and normative design ideas. This is a judgement or
assertion, albeit an informed one. It implicitly involves, for example, asserting
the aesthetic, experiential, economic, social and environmental preferences of
walkability. Many urban designers would do the same (including this author), but
it remains an argument to which forms of evidence must be applied and weighed
against the benefits and lifestyle choices or dependencies brought to us by car use.
Despite all these informed debates, such views must also be weighed against the
differing preferences and preoccupations of, for example, home buyers, planners,
politicians or house builders.
 8 M. Biddulph

Alexander is distinct and uncompromising in the areas where he is certain

about the nature of good city form and in some respects his body of work runs also
against the grain of the above discussion. He does not refer much to this body of
thinking in his writing, or concern himself with how the existing development
industries might embrace his ideas. A lot of his work might therefore be regarded
as idealistic and oppositional. Some of it might be regarded as insightful. Other
aspects might be regarded as highly idiosyncratic. It is certainly ranged against
reductive and ultimately naive modernist design thinking and the products of
contemporary development processes which he sees as destroying what he calls
the living city (Alexander, 2002, 2004, 2005). He is critical of zoned, artificial,
efficient and ultimately dull cities where interdependencies are overlooked and
the interwoven nature of urban lives seems to collapse (Alexander, 1965). It is
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beyond the scope of this paper to properly review his important contribution but
some points are pertinent. He has posited the need for generative planning and
design processes (see also Mehaffy, 2008) which, adopting the patterns presented
and justified in the Pattern Language (Alexander et al., 1977) for example, would
result in good city form and the living quality sought. The result is actually a form
of anti-design in which a new type of architect facilitates development of
processes that allow people to create the right form of geometry needed to support
life. An exploration of geometry in many forms of living system, guided by
insights from various forms of fractal structure, with interdependencies between
various scales of phenomena, suggests a programme for both understanding how
urban environments work and are lived in. Nature also provides the rules for the
correct forms of life giving geometry which are spelt out and justified in his book
The Phenomenon of Life (Alexander, 2002). Salingaros (2005) gives some impression
of this approach in his own work which is inspired by Alexander:
The laws of form and organization are universal and cannot be made up
arbitrarily. They permit an infinite variety of structures that establish a
human connection, though there is a larger infinity of structures that
thwart it [essentially modernist design principles]. These ideas resonate
in ordinary people’s assessment of what’s good and bad in the built
environment. (p. 12)
These authors seem to argue that if we have the correct geometries then life, or
possibly vitality, will flourish. A wide range of phenomena are embraced and
celebrated: Matisse had it, some rug makers and their rugs have it, favelas have it,
Saint Mark’s Square in Venice evolved and has it, Manhattan Island has it. The
thinking forms or embraces a kind of systems and network analysis which
combines with aesthetic and impressionistic or interpretive judgements. The
urban environment is seen as a process rather than an end product. Ultimately our
urban spaces should evolve to allow us to reach our potential as people: “ . . . the
best environment is one in which each person can become as alive as possible”
(Alexander, 2002, p. 374). There is no shortage of frustration with environments
that do not or the misdirected people who make choices which take us in the
wrong direction:
Once for example I had 3 clients who suddenly wanted to divert money
from common land to the fixtures in their bathrooms and kitchens . . .
I refused to do it . . . Their private greed interfered with their grasp of
their own whole as a group. (Alexander, 2004, p. 526)
 The Problem with Thinking about or for Urban Design 9

Alexander’s work is full of design truths which he feels either might be justified
empirically, as a result of historical longevity or even because of spiritual or
intuitive insights (Alexander, 2004, p. 367). They run through a range of scales
where geometries and patterns can be applied and become interconnected. He
does not prescribe how the patterns might be combined to create the good city
because he does not want to predetermine exactly how it should be done. He
leaves space for the designer, the client, the context (or any of the other plethora of
factors which shape urban design work) to affect the outcome (Alexander et al.,
1977; Alexander, 2002, 2004). Even though we might disagree with some of his
patterns (for example, his notion of the neighbourhood; Madanipour, 2001)
ultimately it is the structure of his work and his attitude towards design which
sets it apart. Whilst some might question the extent to which he embraces intuition
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or his possibly over precious view of life and vitality, it does not seem to be
completely at odds with the more generally interpretive nature of much design
thinking, whilst the quote about bathroom fixings merely highlights a political
point about where resources might be put to work.
If we are to make sense of this contribution then we must turn away from
Alexander’s personal preferences about good or in his case living cities, just as we
must turn away from the expectations of the social sciences to provide a solid
theoretical basis for our actions. Ultimately we must try and understand the
nature of the problems that urban designers seek to address in their work and
more critically the limitations (or possibilities) that we face in seeking (design)
solutions.

The Absence of Theory?

Cuthbert is dismissive of urban design research which tackles discrete this and
that situations and is typically case study driven. He is similarly dismissive of the
work that Moudon claims urban designers should know:
Key players . . . Kevin Lynch, Rob Krier, Christopher Alexander and Bill
Hillier define urban problems in their own manner and share almost
nothing in common. The same is true of attempts at synthesis. In no case
does the synthesis address the same basic object, either real or
theoretical. This is not a plea to discard difference, remove intellectual
conflict or adopt a totalitarian position on ideology. The need here is to
recognize where we are and to work towards an overall framework that
has the capacity both to contextualize and to rationalize urban design
theory. (Cuthbert, 2007, p. 211)
He suggests that the work does not allow for much generalization or theory
building, unlike the explanatory power of political economy which can, seemingly,
tie urban design outputs to explanations rooted in spatial political economy. Is that
a theory that explains everything? If we know and understand spatial political
economy and the relationship between this academic tradition and the design of
the built environment will we be better urban designers? Will it replace the
postmodern relativism that has crept into, or maybe even defined thinking within
urban design? Empowered by the political awareness of social equity and social
justice, and its unclear built form ramifications, will urban designers become a
progressive force shaping urban development and confronting the vagaries of, for
example, neoliberalism and globalization? In contrast to Cuthbert’s view, it might
 10 M. Biddulph

be suggested that the principles of urban design discussed above have combined
these authors and their prescriptions into a successful and reasonably coherent,
albeit discursive, urban design theory which establishes implicitly a notion of the
good city.
Of course, as a practice urban design will always suffer because you cannot
deterministically design society or social relations through the design of urban
space, just as it is self-evident that not everyone will share a view of what a good
city is like. Relationships between the forms of the built environment and how that
environment is lived in are also not reducible to laws or modelling. Consequently,
it seems that the role of designed space within the social sciences has always been
either treated sceptically or ignored. As a factor shaping social relations the design
of urban space has some role to play, whether judged as possible or probabilistic. For
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example, I could design a street that might meet the requirements for cycling or
walking. You might still choose to drive. The relation is too ambiguous for the
certainties required of a science. Combine that street form with some social, fiscal
or cultural measures, however, and maybe the role of the space as a resource
becomes clearer if, in combination, people are nudged or forced to change an
aspect of their lifestyle.

Towards the Normative and the Applied

The normative comes to the fore when confronted by an urban site for which an
urban design response is being expected. Without the normative we cannot
operate as urban designers. Within urban design the normative is embraced by the
principles of urban design discussed above.
Although sometimes characterized as a second order design activity (Lang,
1994; George, 1997), design must happen for urban design to be operationalized,
and the absence of a firm theoretical base in a social scientific sense cannot limit
the activity. Designers must be concerned with the objective (cars per hour,
building heights, measures of density, space syntax metrics etc.), but also the
subjective, interpretive and political. They try to be creative and original, and they
might want to design environments that, for example, either shock and/or
delight. It seems even necessary to accept that we must also be open to the
possibility that schemes might break certain rules, and also that they may actually
work somehow or are appreciated in new or different ways.

The Medium of Drawing

The principal language of urban design—the drawing of (urban) forms in space—
is also at odds with the written and numerical languages employed extensively
within the social sciences to, for example, test, confirm or reject hypotheses. If
drawing is one medium for communicating ideas within urban design then it
must also be a medium for thinking. It is one thing to construct an academic
argument within the social sciences about urban design. It is something completely
different to design, discuss and justify the product of urban design practice. So it is
that urban designers must have the knowledge and skill to draw and interpret
drawings, as well as write and rationally discuss ideas, in order to fully engage
with their field.
The specificity of a line on a site reminds us that thinking for urban design has
consequences if the line becomes something that is actually built, in contrast to the
 The Problem with Thinking about or for Urban Design 11

textual or even numerical nature of thinking about urban design. It might be possible
to ignore the theorizing that locates urban forms or urban design within theories of
urbanism or spatial analysis. It is less possible to ignore a wall if it becomes the
physical manifestation of any relevant idea. The status of drawing within cognate
areas like planning has waned without a commensurate reflection of the impact of
such a trend on the quality of thinking about space (Dühr, 2007). Within urban
design this would not be possible. The consequences of such drawings may often be
overlooked in the apparent inability of the social sciences to engage properly with
drawn or graphic processes or outputs, although there is a growing interest in visual
methods within the social sciences to which urban designers might contribute
(Emmison & Smith, 2000; Banks, 2001; Pink, 2001; Rose, 2007). Much of this work
involves social scientists trying to understand and interpret the visual outputs of
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societies as, for example, visual ethnographies. Of less interest, possibly due to the
lack of skill, is the concern to use drawing as a medium of research and thinking.
One must step closer to the arts to find a fledgling body of academic work which
tries to understand the role drawing makes in the process of formulating and
exchanging ideas (Cross, 2007; Garner, 2008; Treib, 2008) whilst only a few have
attempted to link this to urban design thinking explicitly (Dutoit, 2007). We do not
need to go far into drawing to realize that it can share a lot in common with text to
the extent that drawings can reflect a spectrum of phenomena from the very precise
plan drawing at any scale, through to the impressionistic or the application of
concepts. Urban designers need to know when and how to draw from a long
tradition of graphic work, readily supported by computer technologies, in order to
test, interpret or share their design ideas, but also as a significant realm through
which their knowledge is ultimately shared and tested.
Normative thinking remains an imperative for urban design, and drawing
remains a critical element of the process of applying, conveying and discussing
normative ideas or concepts. There can be no urban design without them. Whilst
thinking about urban design and urban forms has a confirmed place in academic
practices, thinking for urban design seems to be in some kind of limbo due to what
some might perceive to be lack of intellectual status, despite its critical value to the
field. In order to properly judge the value or contribution of ideas or theory to
urban design it is important to reflect a little on the special nature of the problems
that urban designers seek to confront.

Urban Design Addresses Wicked Problems

Rittel & Webber (1973, 1984) discuss the wickedness of certain problems which
planners might be trying to overcome, and it seems useful to reflect on the extent to
which their thinking also helps us in justifying a concern for normative thinking
and ideas within urban design. Written in the 1970s, the work is a reaction against
the nature of planning theory from the time, and it marks a shift towards others
forms of practice which come to embrace, for example, community involvement or
the use of inquiry by design techniques (Zeisel, 1981). It might also be argued that
they start to explain something about the gap between thinking about and thinking
for urban design. They might help us to understand and acknowledge that the
problems which urban designers confront in practice cannot be clearly defined or
circumscribed. Buchanan (1992, p. 15) notes how Rittel, a former design teacher,
was frustrated with the linear view of design which dominated thinking at the
time. In response the two authors, discussing planning in particular, argue that:
 12 M. Biddulph

. . . the social professions were misled somewhere along the line into
assuming they could be applied scientists – that they could solve
problems in the ways scientists can solve their sorts of problems. (Rittell,
1973, p. 160)
Wicked problems, instead, are:
. . . a class of social system problems which are ill formulated, where the
information is confusing, where there are many clients and decision
makers with conflicting values, and where the ramifications in the whole
system are thoroughly confusing . . . (Buchanan, 1992, p. 15)
Such a view at least saw a shift in thinking about the design process as critically
iterative (Zeisel, 1981).
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Rittel & Webber note how scientists and engineers tame problems in order to
establish clear solutions which either prove or disprove a theory, dealing with
variables that can be controlled. Within urban design it might be suggested that it
is not possible to define the problem to which urban design might be a clear
answer, whilst the design solution is only one part of an ongoing discussion about
the nature of the place to which it has been applied.
Because there can be no definitive formulation of an urban design problem,
we subsequently cannot really provide the information or equation we need to
understand or solve it. Design remains an open activity which scans a whole range
of materials applied at different scales to different definitions of the context and
judged by a whole array of participants. This is something that Moudon (1992)
acknowledged and is fundamental to embracing both the interpretive and
political dimensions of urban design. This is not to suggest, however, that what is
left is merely a form of relativism in which anything goes in urban design terms.
There are many conclusions from discrete pieces of research or forms of consensus
which guide the nature of the decisions that might be made. Alexander’s patterns
might be viewed in this way, or the conclusions of Lynch on the features that help
people find their way around, or maybe more tenuously Cullen’s concern for
townscape. The principles of urban design are also a good example, as they set out
a design agenda and point out the issues that need to be addressed without
prescribing, machine-like, particular forms of solution.
If it emerges that there is a problem with some aspect of the built form around
which some form of consensus can be established, then a design might be created
and implemented to meet certain goals, but Rittel & Webber note that wickedness
typically leads to new problems which are thrown up by the consequences
observed from the first solution. Alexander would suggest that generative concepts
and thinking would allow for, and even encourage, constant adjustments which
acknowledge this reality, in contrast to the very static and controlling view of
urbanism embraced in certain regulatory or master planning regimes. Ultimately is
seems fair to suggest, however, that many planning and development regimes
allow individuals to adjust their buildings and spaces to meet their needs, even if
they need approval before the work is done. The suggestion is, however, that you
can design housing, walls, grass and streets; people will live in the result but we
cannot predict exactly how. We might hope that a person will walk in the park; that
kids might play in the play space; that neighbours will look out of their windows or
that people might use the local shop. It is possible. It may even be probable. Given
the range of circumstances that affect any individual, however, we can predict that
 The Problem with Thinking about or for Urban Design 13

the situation will change, but we do not really know how. People can be flexible and
adjust their habits in some way in order to accommodate the norms of a particular
place. We know this because people move from low density suburbs to high density
environments and find new practices necessary and new things to enjoy or be
frustrated by.
Rittel & Webber note that a wicked problem does not lead to solutions that are
true or false, but instead to solutions that might be good or bad. It seems fair to
suggest that urban design solutions are never true or false in any objective sense.
There are many people involved in judging the merits of the solutions, each with
their own perspective, criteria or narrative. Some people will invest in a space,
some will live or work in a space, some will manage the space, and some may be
excluded from the space. Some may see it from inside; others may judge it from
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the outside. The list goes on. The loose notion of what works must embrace clearly
articulated criteria and be understood from the perspective of those making the
judgement. That is why the urban design principles came into existence, why
urban design must embrace an interpretive frame and why we must embrace the
political nature of the built environment and its consequences. However, there can
be no absolute judgement, just as there can be no perfect design.
The impact of a design solution cannot be completely understood because
there will be “ . . . waves of consequences . . . ” (Rittel & Webber, 1973, p. 163)
within an urban environment which is constantly changing. The criteria cannot
also be clearly prescribed because the judgement about the criteria which might be
ultimately applied is controlled by the (more or less powerful) actors and their
mixed perspectives on a scheme. This can provide no absolute judgement, just
competing perspectives against competing criteria. The urban design principles
create a common language, but how they might be applied and interpreted in a
whole range of contexts is uncertain. Certainly the principles (or the design ideas
that they represent) may be unevenly applied.
Although urban environments contain common characteristics, and even
people living common lives, essentially every solution is original, because the
range of factors that affect every site must ultimately be distinctive to that place.
Economies vary within regions. Cultures vary between neighbourhoods. House
prices vary across streets. Car drivers have drunk various amounts of alcohol.
Although one river might flood, another will not. The same designed street will be
lived in and experienced very differently between different locations. Essentially
every design is original, and because it is a built environment it will have long-
term consequences.
Most scientific questions establish something that can be tested to either
refute or reject a hypothesis or suggest when an objective has been met. Within
urban design it is impossible to decide at what scale exactly problems might be
correctly addressed or who needs to be involved. Urban designers might think
design is the solution. Others may not. Even if design is chosen as a possible
solution, there is no absolute way to determine which solution is exactly the best.
As Rittel & Webber (1973) state:
In such fields of ill-defined problems and hence ill-definable solutions,
the set of feasible plans of action relies on realistic judgement, the
capability to appraise ‘exotic’ ideas and on the amount of trust and
credibility between [urban designer] and clientele that will lead to the
conclusion, “OK let’s try that”. (p. 164)
 14 M. Biddulph

When a child gets a rash then it is a symptom of some specific problem which affects
the body’s health. The body, maybe, with a doctor’s help, can return to health,
because there is some consensus of what health is. The same cannot be said of a built
environment. If we see problems in the built environment they may be a symptom
of some higher problem—too much poverty, too much wealth, too much traffic, not
enough traffic, loss of ecology. Because there can be no consensus of what is a healthy
or good built environment, so the analysis and the solution rests on how the problem
is defined. The (poor) quality of the built environment might also be a symptom of
some higher process, but redesigning it will not solve that problem, even if it might
solve other problems that have been more narrowly defined.
Similarly, the extent to which urban design makes a contribution
incrementally to the state of a city must be confronted. At no moment is the
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whole city addressed comprehensively through design and development, unless

we want to live in some form of totalitarian regime obsessed with urban design and
development, and believe firmly that the all powerful have profound insights for
us. Instead, and at various scales, incremental changes are made. Rittel & Webber
note that incremental improvements do not guarantee overall improvement, whilst
changes to improve assessment by one set of criteria might actually negatively
affect others. An example might be the steady implementation of Buchanan’s
environment areas within cities (Ministry of Transport, 1963). This saw the
remodelling of the built environment to accommodate traffic onto more efficient
roads between newly defined neighbourhoods, whilst the neighbourhoods
themselves were isolated to stop through traffic. Whilst engineers could then
happily count the increased quantity of traffic trundling through towns, others saw
the negative impacts on the quality of life of residents who were forced to live near
the new roads or the now fragmented and increasingly auto-dependent nature of
community life (Appleyard, 1981). Are cities better as a result of their efforts to
accommodate traffic? It depends who you ask. Is it necessary to accommodate
traffic and if so how much? The ‘question’ surrounding traffic in towns has never
been answered because ultimately it is a wicked problem. It certainly has urban
design implications.
Rittel & Webber argue that an increase in crime can be explained in a number
of ways: “ . . . not enough police . . . too many criminals . . . inadequate laws . . .
cultural deprivation . . . too many guns” (p. 166). Each explanation offers an
approach to addressing the problem. In scientific terms there is more than one
way to refute the hypothesis. They point out that the modes of reasoning required
to deal with wicked problems must be much richer than those that might be used
in social science research generally. This is because contexts and problems are
unique, and because it is not possible to isolate cause and affect factors to allow the
impact of an explanation to be tested. To Rittel & Webber’s discussion of crime we
could say that in urban design terms there are too many strangers, not enough
strangers, not enough surveillance, too many blind corners, not enough lighting,
too much of a single tenure, not enough connecting streets, too introverted and
gated or not gated enough. Urban designers debate how to solve crime too.
It might be suggested that it is the wicked nature of the problems that urban
designers seek to address that creates the gap between thinking about and for
urban design. We might try to define problems in a bounded way so we can apply
social scientific methods to research and convince ourselves that we are
establishing absolute answers to carefully defined questions. Thinking about
urban design seems to do this, to the relief of Cuthbert (2006). Buchanan (1992,
 The Problem with Thinking about or for Urban Design 15

p. 16) notes Rittel’s view that this means taking out or ignoring the wickedness in
order to contrive determinate or analytic problems, whereas many urban design
problems are merely indeterminate. Buchanan (1992, p. 16) notes “ . . . design
problems are ‘indeterminate’ and ‘wicked’ because design has no special subject
matter of its own apart from what the designer conceives it to be”. It might be
argued that developers, politicians, engineers, architects and planners also do the
same, and it is within space that these conceptualizations or interpretations
become manifest. Academics also have a role. We know this because Moudon
(1992), in the moment that she tried to tell us what we should know about, was
trying to make sense of the indeterminate, and bring a discipline intellectually
under some kind of control for us. She honestly confronted the greyness between
the areas of knowledge by stepping away from telling us what weight to give
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them or advising us in terms of how they should be deployed in design work. The
urban designer concerned with practice, however, has no such luxury as their
problems are rooted in the real world and they must embrace the indeterminacy of
their moment. Urban design must confront the contingent nature of its outputs
and the genuine complexity through which a scheme might be judged.

The Urban Design Academy

These issues should shape the nature of academic work emerging from within the
urban design discipline, and also what might be considered appropriate
methodologies or practices for developing knowledge and thinking. Some work
might quite legitimately adopt social science norms in the development of
research. Some might be about urban design, but from within the discipline a focus
should be upon thinking for urban design. The question is whether academics that
put emphasis on thinking for urban design, and confront honestly the
indeterminate or wicked nature of many problems might be viewed as practical
in a pejorative sense or a bit woolly despite the requirements of the discipline, all
because their work cannot be subjected to the rigors of absolute verification. How
are people being treated who understand that “ . . . research into what makes good
places to live will be endless, often without conclusion, and always value-laden”?
(Jacobs & Appleyard, 1987, p. 112). Would it, for example, compromise their
outputs if they were to try and publish in refereed journals, where referees are
drawn from social scientific academic cultures, or there is a view that academic
writing must subject articles to social scientific norms in relation to research
design? One might see a tendency to prefer thinking about urban design, given the
support to this thinking from other academic fields.
If this became the case, one could anticipate a number of consequences. The
first is that academic outputs might move away from the requirements of practice,
principally because thinking about urban design is of less value to an urban
designer. Second, those academics who commit to embracing the indeterminate
nature of thinking for urban design will become disadvantaged through the
process because their work is not being judged on equivalent terms. Third, the
balance of knowledge and skill required in urban design would shift, within an
academic context, away from practice (for example, drawing and thinking) to
conform to the academic norms of the social sciences despite the partial value of
this to the discipline.
If the wicked nature of urban design problems were to be adequately
acknowledged we might see a move towards more fully embracing the
 16 M. Biddulph

intellectual endeavour and skill involved in the applied nature of this subject.
Studio, for example, is typically the first setting in which the challenges of
drawing and thinking meet, and the relevance of any urban design ideas become
apparent. Students and practitioners are researching and thinking, but not in a
social science sense, so it is odd that others working to create ideas of relevance to
a field might be required to act differently. The relevance of design precedents,
typological and tissues analyses, context analyses and the whole plethora of
potential methods for appraising a place collide with any urban design principles,
the various communities of interest and no less the client’s brief; all of which must
be interpreted and applied to the setting.
What this means for research is unclear. Urban designers might want to
continue to work within the comfort zone of the social sciences and build on the
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substantive knowledge base outlined by Moudon (1992). Some might take these
discrete areas of knowledge and formulate them into relevant principles or rules
of thumb which are useful for the field of practice. Others might be allowed to find
alternative ways of working and thinking to inspire practice.
In the UK we can examine the nature of outputs that urban designers produce
by reviewing the work submitted to the 2008 research assessment exercise
(www.rae.ac.uk). It is then interesting to compare this with the outputs from the
most successful planning, architecture and art and design schools in the UK.
Figure 1 shows the nature of the urban design outputs compared to the outputs for
these schools. As an art urban design has something in common with other areas
of design, and it is insightful to note the currency in art and design schools given
to a wide range of outputs as necessary for both practising and disseminating
ideas within the fields. Good architecture schools have stepped back from design,
and may be dominated by building scientists, although the outputs for the best
schools are still very mixed, as one might hope given the practical nature of the
field. The role of books is interesting, possibly because they are an effective setting
for showing the images associated with the field. Planning, however, is the home
of 90% of urban designers working within the academic sector. The outputs from
the two best schools are wholly dominated by edited journal publications. Urban
designers, to some extent, reflect this trend, although in line with architecture,
they have tried to maintain book publications. Still, both for planning and in
particular urban design, there is no currency for what must be regarded as
unorthodox outputs which might, as one would hope, embrace design more fully.
The conclusion must be that you can be extremely successful at achieving a whole
range of positively judged outputs suitable to art and design, less so but still
significantly for architecture, but not for planning. If thinking for urban design
were to be acknowledged as a critical component of the field, and the wicked
nature of urban design problems ultimately accepted, we must possibly wonder
why urban designers are located in planning schools as part of this assessment
regime, or alternatively wonder why the encouragement and assessment of urban
design thinking is undertaken on such narrow terms.

Conclusion
Urban design is an applied discipline which must confront the normative nature
of design and practice. This does not mean that we must answer Talen & Ellis’
question of which normative theory we must apply. This is simply a wicked
problem to which the answer is contingent. This is also not to suggest that urban
 Downloaded by [Professor Maria DAVILA NETO] at 15:06 26 July 2015

The Problem with Thinking about or for Urban Design

Figure 1. Comparing academic outputs for urban designers and well-performing planning, architecture and art and design schools
17
 18 M. Biddulph

designers are artists. They are not free to do exactly as they want. We cannot
ignore what the social sciences tells about the nature of spaces that people inhabit,
or how they might inhabit space. Many important ideas and theories about how to
design can be learnt from work emerging from within the social sciences.
Ultimately, however, it is the wicked nature of urban design problems which
must be confronted if the relevance of this thinking is to be tested and applied. It is
this wicked nature which Cuthbert seems frustrated by in his search for more
robust theory making. Urban designers must not be misled into assuming they
could be applied scientists. They must remember that there is an art to their work,
that their methods are partly arts (or, for example, studio) based, but also that they
need substantive criteria or principles which need to be debated, updated, tested
and applied. Urban designers must embrace the interpretive and very political
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nature of the context in which they work, and the solutions that they propose. A
tendency to dismiss normative thinking in other related disciplines like planning
merely reflects a perceived need for knowledge to be justified by tests applied
from within, and framed by social science methodologies. Urban design needs to
have no such insecurity. Although research for urban design might usefully
choose to embrace social science methods, ultimately the relevance of any lessons
emerging from any such work might only nudge practice in a particular direction
given the complexity or wickedness of practice.
If research and thinking are to be relevant to the applied nature of urban
design, then the methods and outputs must also be allowed to look towards the
arts or humanities for guidance, inspiration or possibilities. Reviewing the
research outputs from the UK’s best schools of art and design we might consider
for once that maybe a design or an exhibition might show us the future of thinking
in some corner of our field, just as the best precedents or case studies are a
valuable tool for practitioners. Designers must also be confident enough to reject
judgements of their field and its research which merely apply social science tests,
because if urban design is to be taken seriously then the tests do not always apply.

Acknowledgements
The author would sincerely like to thank Marion Roberts, University of
Westminster, and also the anonymous reviewers of an earlier version of this
paper for their very thoughtful, generous and helpful comments.

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