Urban Designer > Architect??

 

 

 

 

Has the Urban designer become more popular than the Architect? In Everyday Urbanism by Margaret Crawford, it does seem like that is the notion. To be an urban designer, a wide range of skills are needed, and has slowly shifted into a specialty field. Urban design has become pretty popular as of late, bringing urban designer more to the forefront than architects. And with urban design not being an accredited profession like architecture or planning, an urban designer has a background in planning and design. Urban designers think of themselves as leaders of teams creating guidelines instead of designs. While sometimes it seems like urban designers get more of the glory or spotlight these days, I also don’t and wouldn’t envy the jumping through hoops for the political and economic aspects of city work they do. So, I guess each has its plus and minuses because as the text states “Without a commitment to making architecture and landscape in the context of the palpability and surprise of the present city, any type of urban design devolves into an intellectual curiosity distanced from its subject. At the same time, in the absence of any means of incorporating everyday urban life into the city, architecture and landscape architecture become marginalized, void of much purpose beyond the functional or purely aesthetic.”

 

So, even with how popular or in demand urban design may be, it hasn’t been able to bring dynamism into its world leading to a city that is not as ideal as perceived. I do think it is interesting that it is mentioned that once urban design starts to become city design, “it is transformed into an architecture of situational tactics in social space. Architecture as city design can become a discourse of collaboration.”  Ultimately, I think this is what urban design truly should be, a discourse of collaboration. Especially when you are designing for a city that has people with many differing views, wants, and needs.  City design as situational architecture seems to like an interesting method to go about designing and I would be intrigued to see if this would be a discourse taught in schools.