A New Theory of Urban Design

The sixth volume of “The Center for Environmental Structure Series” on architecture published by Oxford University Press, “A New Theory of Urban Design” attempts to recapture the process by which cities develop organically. The venerable cities of the past, such as Venice or Amsterdam, convey a feeling of wholeness, an organic unity that surfaces in every detail, large and small, in restaurants, shops, public gardens, even in balconies and ornaments. However, this sense of wholeness is lacking in modern urban design.
To discover the kind of laws needed to create a growing “whole” in a city, the authors propose a preliminary set of seven rules. The rules embody the process at a practical level and are consistent with the day-to-day demands of urban development. They then put these rules to the test, setting out with a number of graduate students to simulate the urban redesign of a high-density part of San Francisco, initiating a project that encompassed some ninety different design problems, including warehouses, hotels, fishing piers, a music hall, and a public square. This extensive experiment is documented project by project, with detailed discussion of how each project satisfied the seven rules, accompanied by floor plans, elevations, street grids, axonometric diagrams and photographs of the scaled-down model, which clearly illustrate the discussion.
“A New Theory of Urban Design” provides an entirely new theoretical framework for the discussion of urban problems, one that goes far to remedy the defects which cities have today.