Design for People or Ideas?

 Crawford’s Everyday Urbanism, specifically ‘The Dilemma of Urban Design and the Everyday City” was impactful for me in understanding how we handle design, specifically of public spaces and affordable housing. Crawford writes, “the tension between modern architecture’s quest for the conceptually pure and the plurality of the modern city defines the fundamental dilemma of the twentieth-century urban design.” I see the modernist approach to create the perfect utopia as a major source of failure in creating safe, affordable, and comfortable public spaces. Many of these failures have resulted from what I see as a very utilitarian approach, where efficiency is valued over the social human experience. Even in post-modernist context, creating public spaces may listen to public voices, but few architectural firms value this over their own narrative.