horizon line

Part 1: The Context for Urban Design

1. Urban design today

2. Urban change

3. Contexts for urban design

Part II: The Dimensions of Urban Design

4. The morphological dimension

Environmental Perception

• sensation: vision, hearing, smell, touch
• Ittelson's 4 dimesions of perception:
  • cognitive: involves thinking about, organizing and keeping information. In essence, it enables us to make sense of the environment
  • affective: involves our feelings, which influence perception of the environment - equally, perception of the environment influences our feelings.
  • interpretative: encompasses meaning or associations derived from the environment. In interpreting information, we rely on memeory for points of comparison with newly experienced stimuli.
  • evaluative: incorporates values and preferences and the determination of 'good' or 'bad',
• p.88 Pocock and Hudson suggest that the overall mental image of an urban environment will be: partial, simplified, and distrorted
• perception is learned
• reference to Lynch's workable environmental images require: identity, structure, and meaning
• Lynch also identified 5 key physical elements: paths, edges, districts, nodes, and landmarks

Beyond the Image of the City

• Criticisms of Lynch: observer variation, legibility and imageability, meaning and symbolism

Environmental Meaning and Symbolism

• Eco's types of signs: iconic, indexical, and symbolic
• Semiotic layers of meaning: first-order denotation, second-order connotation
• p. 93 mimesis - the belief that an image, word, or object (or work of architecture) carries a fixed message determined by the author (architect, sponsor). For Barthes, the reader inexorably constructs a new text in the act of reading.
• p. 95 All manmande environments symbolize the power to make or change the environment. Knox (1984, p.107) argues that the built environment is not simply an expression of the power exerted at different times by individuals, groups and governments, but also a means by which the prevailing system of power is maintained.
• DPZ's three ways to express building's function/meaning: "Las Vegas Way," "decorated shed," and the "duck"

The Construction of Place

• Relph's types of identity of place: existential insideness, empathetic insideness, behavioral insideness, incidental outsideness, objective outsider, mass identity of place, existential outsideness
• Sense of place - draws on phenomenology
• Territoriality and personalisation
• p. 98Von Meiss's 3 design strategies to aid sense of identity:
  • Creation of an environment responsive to, and based on, desgner's deep understanding of the values and behaviour of the people and groups concerned, and the environmental features crucial to their identity . . .
  • Participation of future users in the design of their environment. . . *
  • Creation of environments that users can modify and adapt. . . *
• p. 100 Montogmery's indivators of vitality (see book for more detail)

Placelessness

• Globalisation
• Mass culture
• Loss of (attachment to) territory

Invented Places

• Disney is imagineering the world
• p. 103 Hannigan from Fantasy City describing the fantasy city as: theme-o-center, aggressively branded, open day and night, modular, solipsistic, postmodern
• Superficiality
• Dovey (1999, p.34) notes how the 'detachment of form from social life' allows a 'commodification of meaning under the aesthetic guise of a revival of meaning.'
• Other directedness - created from without rather than from within
• Lacking authenticity - Baudrillard argues:
  • First-order simulations are obvious copies of reality.
  • Second-order simulations are copie that blur the boundaries between reality and representation.
  • Third-order simulations - 'simulacra' - are imitations of things that never actually existed.

5. The perceptual dimension

6. The social diension

7. The visual dimension

8. The functional dimension

9. The temporal dimension

Part III: Implementing Urban Design

10. The development process

11. The control process

12. The communication process 13. Holistic urban design