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Why urban design is larger than architecture: the foundational qualities of urban design, examples and practitioners

Urban design in practice is incremental, but architects imagine it as scaled-up architecture-large, ready-to-build pop-up cities. This paradox of urban design is rarely addressed; indeed, urban design as a discipline lacks a theoretical foundation. In The Largest Art , Brent Ryan argues that urban design encompasses more than architecture, and he provides a foundational theory of urban design beyond the architectural scale. In a "declaration of independence" for urban design, Ryan describes urban design as the largest of the building arts, with qualities of its own.

Ryan distinguishes urban design from its sister arts by its pluralism: plural scale, ranging from an alleyway to a region; plural time, because it is deeply enmeshed in both history and the present; plural property, with many owners; plural agents, with many makers; and plural form, with a distributed quality that allows it to coexist with diverse elements of the city. Ryan looks at three well-known urban design projects through the lens of pluralism: a Brancusi sculptural ensemble in Romania, a Bronx housing project, and a formally and spatially diverse grouping of projects in Ljubljana, Slovenia. He revisits the thought of three plural urbanists working between 1960 and 1980: David Crane, Edmund Bacon, and Kevin Lynch. And he tells three design stories for the future, imaginary scenarios of plural urbanism in locations around the world.

Ryan concludes his manifesto with three signal considerations urban designers must acknowledge: eternal change, inevitable incompletion, and flexible fidelity. Cities are ceaselessly active, perpetually changing. It is the urban designer's task to make art with aesthetic qualities that can survive perpetual change.

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This "measured manifesto" argues that urban designers should pursue the "aesthetic aims of urban design." In the preface, Ryan (head, Joint Program in City Design and Development, MIT) classifies urban design with the arts of "architecture, landscape, sculpture, and land art," but considers it different because it concerns design on a grand scale, the kind that requires long tracts of time and many hands, and takes form in an ever-changing world. Success requires accounting for many factors that are outside urban design's control (hence the "plural urbanism" in the subtitle), including the ongoing, fluid operations of commerce, industry, transportation systems, large populations spread across the income spectrum, and legal restraints that property owners easily bend to their interests. Designers must accept "flexible fidelity" and incompleteness. Ryan writes that "turgid" urban design histories offer nothing useful and neither do ideology and master plans, but for guidance, he singles out three authors (David Crane, Edmund Bacon, Kevin Lynch) and proposes three 20th-century models. Including colorful illustrations, this is an ample, well-organized volume for those interested in urban design. Summing Up: Recommended. Graduate students, researchers, faculty. --Carroll W. Westfall, emeritus, University of Notre Dame (retired)