Urban Design and People
ROBERT STEUTEVILLE OCT. 1, 2009
By Michael Dobbins
John Wiley & Sons, 2009, 400 pp., $80 hardcover
Michael Dobbins has worked for more than 40 years as a planner, urban designer, administrator, or planning teacher — first in New York under Mayor Lindsay, later in New Orleans, Birmingham, and Berkeley, and most recently in Atlanta, where from 1996 to 2002 he headed the city’s planning, development, and neighborhood conservation efforts. For the past seven years he has been “professor of practice” at Georgia Tech. His long experience as a public-sector urban designer imbues Urban Design and People with an in-the-trenches understanding of how to get things done.
Urban design is clearly improving, Dobbins believes. “Until recently, city planners have tended to view urban design as prettying up places here and there in the city — maybe a nice thing to do, but not the serious business or larger policy and equity issues that could actually make cities better,” he observes. That has changed, he says, mainly because of Jane Jacobs, historic preservationists, and other nondesigners — people who forced planners to conceive of urban design more broadly and to engage the public much more meaningfully than used to be the case.
This book, a distillation of what Dobbins has learned in the course of his career, aims to help readers — students, teachers, practitioners, and everyday citizens — seize urban design’s full potential. Public spaces should possess human scale, he says. Mixed uses should be encouraged. Conditions should be created in which pedestrian activity can thrive. The key: “Design places to reflect the people who are or will be there.”
Public domain is more than a chance for personal expression
Dobbins is highly critical of the effect that modernism has had on cities. “Architects and landscape architects need to back off from looking at work in the public domain solely as a personal opportunity to express themselves,” he declares. “Rather, they should look for public guidance, willingly incorporate ideas they didn’t think up, and interact with community leaders and other design disciplines. This approach is likely to produce more satisfying and enduring results.”
He is receptive to New Urbanism. Form-based codes and the use of the rural-to-urban Transect to guide development may not be a “final solution,” he says, but they represent genuine progress, because they are “simpler, easier to visualize, and can be more flexible than some of the older codes.”
Citizen participation is indispensable, in Dobbins’ view. “Include everybody, from the beginning,” he urges, noting that the development community— including large institutions and government agencies such as parks, public works, and highway departments — is becoming more open to “a partnership approach.” Developers are discovering that inclusive processes usually make their projects more successful.
Participation depends in part on making sure that needed information is easily accessible. Dobbins recognizes that “government agencies are leery about sharing too much information too freely.” They want to protect their turf and shield internal processes from public view. They worry that any inadequacies in their knowledge and methods will be exposed. Nonetheless, he stresses: “Information is crucial in any change-management process.”
With great perceptiveness, Dobbins explains the pros and cons of “the three traditions” of laying out communities: organic, formalist, and modernist. He encourages the use of tools such as figure-ground drawings and visual preference exercises, which help people reach consensus on how their communities should develop. In a chapter on techniques, he explains urban block dimensions that he believes can accommodate pedestrians, street-level retail activity, interior-block parking, and other elements of a pedestrian-scale, mixed-use area.
The book is extraordinarily text-heavy, containing 400 oversized pages relieved by only a smattering of illustrations. Concise it is not. I sometimes felt like I had stumbled into the seminar room of a professor who always has something more to say. But the content — which ranges from historical observations to current advice, public-spirited philosophizing, and nitty-gritty discussions of the physical, economic, social, and organizational aspects of planning — should prove useful to serious students of public-sector urban design. There’s a lot to learn here, on topics that can make New Urbanism more effective.
John Wiley & Sons, 2009, 400 pp., $80 hardcover
Michael Dobbins has worked for more than 40 years as a planner, urban designer, administrator, or planning teacher — first in New York under Mayor Lindsay, later in New Orleans, Birmingham, and Berkeley, and most recently in Atlanta, where from 1996 to 2002 he headed the city’s planning, development, and neighborhood conservation efforts. For the past seven years he has been “professor of practice” at Georgia Tech. His long experience as a public-sector urban designer imbues Urban Design and People with an in-the-trenches understanding of how to get things done.
Urban design is clearly improving, Dobbins believes. “Until recently, city planners have tended to view urban design as prettying up places here and there in the city — maybe a nice thing to do, but not the serious business or larger policy and equity issues that could actually make cities better,” he observes. That has changed, he says, mainly because of Jane Jacobs, historic preservationists, and other nondesigners — people who forced planners to conceive of urban design more broadly and to engage the public much more meaningfully than used to be the case.
This book, a distillation of what Dobbins has learned in the course of his career, aims to help readers — students, teachers, practitioners, and everyday citizens — seize urban design’s full potential. Public spaces should possess human scale, he says. Mixed uses should be encouraged. Conditions should be created in which pedestrian activity can thrive. The key: “Design places to reflect the people who are or will be there.”
Public domain is more than a chance for personal expression
Dobbins is highly critical of the effect that modernism has had on cities. “Architects and landscape architects need to back off from looking at work in the public domain solely as a personal opportunity to express themselves,” he declares. “Rather, they should look for public guidance, willingly incorporate ideas they didn’t think up, and interact with community leaders and other design disciplines. This approach is likely to produce more satisfying and enduring results.”
He is receptive to New Urbanism. Form-based codes and the use of the rural-to-urban Transect to guide development may not be a “final solution,” he says, but they represent genuine progress, because they are “simpler, easier to visualize, and can be more flexible than some of the older codes.”
Citizen participation is indispensable, in Dobbins’ view. “Include everybody, from the beginning,” he urges, noting that the development community— including large institutions and government agencies such as parks, public works, and highway departments — is becoming more open to “a partnership approach.” Developers are discovering that inclusive processes usually make their projects more successful.
Participation depends in part on making sure that needed information is easily accessible. Dobbins recognizes that “government agencies are leery about sharing too much information too freely.” They want to protect their turf and shield internal processes from public view. They worry that any inadequacies in their knowledge and methods will be exposed. Nonetheless, he stresses: “Information is crucial in any change-management process.”
With great perceptiveness, Dobbins explains the pros and cons of “the three traditions” of laying out communities: organic, formalist, and modernist. He encourages the use of tools such as figure-ground drawings and visual preference exercises, which help people reach consensus on how their communities should develop. In a chapter on techniques, he explains urban block dimensions that he believes can accommodate pedestrians, street-level retail activity, interior-block parking, and other elements of a pedestrian-scale, mixed-use area.
The book is extraordinarily text-heavy, containing 400 oversized pages relieved by only a smattering of illustrations. Concise it is not. I sometimes felt like I had stumbled into the seminar room of a professor who always has something more to say. But the content — which ranges from historical observations to current advice, public-spirited philosophizing, and nitty-gritty discussions of the physical, economic, social, and organizational aspects of planning — should prove useful to serious students of public-sector urban design. There’s a lot to learn here, on topics that can make New Urbanism more effective.
