Urban Planning(design)

4 Pages 923 Words

An intergrative Theory of Urban Design by Ernest Sternberg attempts to unifiy the various schools of though within the urban design community and create a theory that looks at urban design from a broader characteristic and not just buy looking any one feature.

His efforts begin with a critique of urban design saying that it “lacks cohesive theoretical foundations. Instead urban design focuses on how planners attempt to improve a community.

Sternberg agues that a theory of urban design needs to fulfill five criteria:

1. It should not relie on one set of design approaches but should rather reveal the principles that underlie several of them.

2. It should be a substantive theory.

3. It should make us aware of the constituents of the human experience.

4. It should recognize the sources of urban form in both markets and plans.

5. It should direct out attention to pertinent features of reality.

His efforts to create an intergrative theory of Urban Design continues with an anaylisis and critique of the focuses of past urban theorists related to the urban economy, Organic theory, Good Form, Legibility, vitality and meaning. Through his critiques he seeks common threads with which to create his integrated theories.

Sternberg begins with a critique of Karl Polanyi who theories attempt to relate the role of the urban designer within the constraints of economic reality. Polani is a strong supporter of free market economics yet relises that the free market can’t “commodify” human experience, the complexities of nature and human reaction, and (too some degree) visual aesthethics. Polanyi calls his economics substantive economics. This in some ways attempts to value that which cannot be valued by “conventional economics”.

A connection is then made between Polanyi’s “Substantive economics and the organ...