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Urban design has long been accused of being more ‘design’ than ‘urban’, more the province of architects than planners (Inam, 2002). Yet, as many communities face decades of economic decline and population loss, often visible in their physical fabric, there is a role for urban designers to help re-imagine the future of these cities and a need to frame urban design as service. This paper provides an opportunity to examine the role of service in urban design in two ways – as a service in an under-resourced community with a declining economy and population, and as a pedagogical approach.
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In the United States, the discipline of architecture has a history of providing community design as a public service. The political activism of the sixties found fertile ground in architecture, leading the American Institute of Architects to establish the Urban Design Assistance Team and the Rural Design Assistance Team, programs that sent professionals to work on site in a charrette mode to develop design proposals for community-revitalization projects. A number of design schools also established outreach programs to provide architectural services to communities and organizations in need. Such projects usually involved master planning, urban renewal, and adaptive reuse of existing buildings.
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The last fifty years have witnessed a radical transformation of the urban contexts, influencing people’s daily lives. On the one hand, this has gone along with the rise of individual’s freedom; but on the other hand, it also went with a manifest collapse of the community. This double phenomenon is not only unprecedented in History; it is also connected to an important paradox: individuals are losing their ties with their community at a period when they might need them increasingly more than before. In fact, many enjoy the positive sides of their urban individual freedom, whereas they also feel increasingly more exhausted as they struggle to face, on their own, the daily soaring stress level, competitive working contexts, changes in family unit (especially single women with children), reduced mobility and social isolation of contemporary urban life.
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Architect Eyal Weizman discusses his new book, Hollow Land – an exploration of the political space created by Israel’s occupation as a laboratory of advanced capitalist colonialism in which the actions of the Israeli military, humanitarian workers, settlers, and different groups of the colonised themselves are intertwined, forming intense relationships.

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An interview with the vanguard contemporary thinker, Bruno Latour, on the end of progressivism, the limits of representation, the irrelevance of contemporary parliaments, the politics of things…

(The interview is also available on podcast)

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Architects and urban planners have so far done remarkably little with the rise of new media over the past decades, argues Geert Lovink. Real estate speculators still mass manufacture the same old offices, as if nothing has changed. And architects seem all too willing to play this game with town planners and developers and will design a nice surface for these generic, boxed spaces.

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A renewed approach to architecture and urban planning cannot be initiated solely by centralised structures and governmental bodies. Doina Petrescu highlights the importance of ‘other spaces’, the temporary appropriation and use of leftover spaces and urban interstices, spaces of relative freedom, where rules and codes can still be redefined.

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Architects cannot bring about democracy, or any other political condition, argues Denise Scott Brown. They should avoid, however, to form physical barriers to the making of connections in the city.

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