Reflective summary: My Urban Design experience

Personal reflection:

Writing blogs comes with a series of challenges, and the first step can often be the hardest. Simply choosing a theme to write about and sticking to it, without loosing focus and going on a tangent can be tricky. In my experience this happens most often when something interest is uncovered during the research phase that isn’t necessarily relevant to the blog theme but you still want to include or reference it in some way, almost to validate the time spent reading about that subject.

I must admit that the process of writing short blog posts is something that I was already familiar with, in my first year of March studies I participated in a module called ‘Tools for thinking’, in which my year group and I had to write a 500 word blog post every week. With that being said there are still many aspects of writing blogs I find challenging, whether that’s choosing a theme and sticking to it, looking for appropriate academic sources and using the information they give correctly, as well as the actual writing process itself and editing the from the first to final draft.

However that isn’t to say that I didn’t enjoy the work done this semester, this along with the TCP8052 seminar module have been very helpful for my pool of readings, through both modules I have learned a great deal, but what struck me most was the differences and similarities between Urban Design and Architecture. Architecture focuses inwards, a comment criticism being the lack of regard for the wider context, but Urban Design is the opposite, always considering its surroundings and how a design works within the wider urban landscape.

Spatial Justice:

When looking through this lens, discussions tend to shift towards ‘big picture’ ideas like geopolitics etc The concept of spatial justice is a recurring theme, how it can be achieved, the role of designers in this regard i.e. what is and isn’t in a designers ability to control as a working professional. This is not something that’s touched on regularly in architecture, not to say that there isn’t a drive for social equality, sustainability and equity, just that architects do not consider these issues from an urbanism perspective to the same extent as urban designers or planners. So being introduced to the issues surrounding spatial injustice was eye opening and very compelling. I was already familiar with some of the more major concerns, such as redlining, but while reading around the subject I found myself engaging with the ideas and concepts, such as distributive justice, recognizing of the impact of privatizing space and how it leads to increased social exclusion.

While I agree with these concepts and ideas, I can’t help but think it is a very utopian proposition and that designers do not have the level of agency required to enact the sweeping changes authors such as Setha Low advocate for. It’s an issue that regularly comes up when discussing this and similar issues, the client is ultimately the one who has the power over the project not the architect or planner. Without the true agency to adjust projects towards a more equitable goal, designers are somewhat limited in how they can approach projects, all they can really do is put forward their ideas to clients, hoping that they are accepted and outside of that raising awareness of these issues so that they are more well known is critical.

Concluding notes:

The urban design elective I choose as part of my studies has been very challenging at times, there was one incident where I had 2 design reviews on the same day. However now that it is over it was undoubtedly a very beneficial experience that has pushed me to consider design projects from a different perspective, as well as being a great way to learn about new concepts and ideas. The main thing I learned was to think about a singular building is connected to a larger network of processes embedded within the urban fabric, which is something architecture school unfortunately lacks and for that reason I really appreciate the opportunity to learn and explore that concept.