Nine Planning Principles for the Twenty-First Century

Urban design is about creating cities, or improving existing cities, as vibrant and sustainable places that are relevant to the uses and needs of people, especially pedestrians (Sim and Gehl, 2019). It is about creating promising and resilient places that can adapt and respond to different social, environmental, and economic needs and create positive change in the urban environment.

For these objectives, nine principles can be summarized:

Principle I: Sustainability (commitment to the environment)

Principle II: Accessibility (promoting ease of movement)

Principle III: Diversity (maintaining variety and selectivity)

Principle IV: Open Space (renewing natural systems and greening the city)

Principle V: Compatibility (maintaining harmony and balance)

Principle VI: Incentives (regenerating declining cities/rebuilding brownfield sites)

Principle VII: Adaptability (promoting ‘integrity’ and positive change)

Principle VIII: Intensity of development (designing compact cities with appropriate public transport systems)

Principle IX: Identity (creating/protecting a unique and memorable sense of place)

These principles consider the theory and practice of urban design from a walkability perspective in order to facilitate a more effective, sustainable, humanistic, and responsive approach.

I would like to talk about some of my understanding of the first three principles.

Principle I: Sustainability:

“Sustainability” means retaining as much of the base as possible in its current state.

This search for, retention, and enhancement of elements does not only take place within the site but can even be extended to the entire urban space to find strong support for the design.

Principle II: Accessibility:

This refers to the organization of traffic at the level of morphological design. From the point of view of urban morphology, urban roads play an important role in controlling the size of plots and keeping the overall spatial texture of the city stable.

Urban Grids of various cities ©helmofthepublicrealm.com

As cities develop, the functions of buildings change, and even the buildings themselves are transformed, demolished, and rebuilt, but what remains over time is a city’s street and alley system and the relationship between the landmasses, which are the most iconic elements of a city, and the core and most challenging responsibility of urban form design.

In this respect, good urban design is not only about the differentiation of functional areas in terms of building form, but also about the organization of traffic and the control of the scale of plots.

Principle III: Diversity:

This is the ‘easiest’ and ‘most complex’ step. It is simple because it is not very technical, but complex because it requires a great deal of basic building material and the development of modeling skills. This ability seems to me to be crucial, although not decisive, for the core construction of a program, as the final link in the expression and presentation of the concept.

The built form at the planning level serves two main roles.

① Demonstrating the planning structure: this includes the use of existing elements, the control of the scale of the plot, the organization of open spaces, the control of the urban image, etc.

② Connecting the city to the building monolith: a two-way interaction from the city to the building and from the building to the city, laying the foundation for the next step of implementation, which also requires the building form to be appropriate to the basic function and use requirements.

In conclusion, the sustainable, liveable urban design does not come from complex statistics, functional problem solving, or specific decision-making processes. Rather, successful cities come from advocating easily understood human values about the sensory qualities of the environment and then designing to translate these qualities into sustainable reality (Kriken, Enquist and Rapaport, 2011). These principles provide a way of working that demonstrates how cities can be designed, built, and rebuilt to create sustainable, humane human habitats.

References

[1] Kriken, J., Enquist, P. and Rapaport, R., 2011. City building. New York, NY: Princeton Architectural Press.

[2] Matan, Anne. Rediscovering urban design through walkability: an assessment of the contribution of Jan Gehl. Diss. Curtin University, 2011.

[3] Sim, D. and Gehl, J., 2019. Soft city. Washington: Island Press.