inputs at increased levels of density – and for resolving urban complications
(through design) against noise-intrusiveness, unsafeness, and conflict.
2 Involves consciously providing a community focus and having a sense of identity in
mind; to include a mixture of compatible urban land-use types, and to allow residen-
tially compatible functions to be incorporated into higher-density suburban layouts.
The objective is to work proactively to ensure in every situation that the noise,
glare, smell and vibration effects of small homework businesses are mitigated.
The most common among the totally unacceptable uses being the likes of
backyard repair shops, fleet parking and gas stations. Design is engaged as
the means for enabling residents within an urban neighbourhood to feel that
they are also part of a community that is characterized by consonant vitality
and variety. Such a community would comprise all manner of functional
households and compatible work practices, along with an accommodation of
a variety of places for cultural expression and interchange.
3 Involves a harnessing of design consciousness to provide physical infrastructural ease-
ments and open space networks within communities in a way which facilitates ‘per-
meability’, ‘connectability’ and household ‘defensibility’(refer to box 5.1). Safety is
also an issue here, the overall objective being to avoid the separation and
atomizing of suburban people, and to provide them with access to a variety
of workplace opportunities and services. In terms of ‘detail’ it is important to
fashion and craft street pavements, street furniture and fittings, public art,
plantings, heritage conservation, mixed land uses, signage, new buildings
and traffic ordering in well-mannered and neighbourly ways (refer to David
Sucher’s City Comforts, 1995).
4 To increase the overall density of greenery along with increases in density [!] and to
resist any suggestion that this challenge is mutually excluding. It is also an aim to
protect existing shrub and tree planting, and to install additional street and
public realm tree planting at every opportunity and in every available space.
Beyond 30 households per hectare this challenge intensifies. One useful
criterion is that the end result ‘outcome’ fulfils the pre-project landscaping
parameters set for a project.Physical design for pulling together a socially worthy urban outcome is a chal-
lenge for those managers, planners, engineers, landscapists and surveyors who
would plan. The engagement of good design, along with an acceptable site-utility
and land-use mix, induces the best that constitutes vibrant, wholesome and joyful
urban living, accommodating work-at-home preferences, house-type mixtures
and offering social choices. A difficulty with this emphasis on urban social design
is that it works through as an aestheticism which is sought out, and in effect paid
extra for, by those wealthy enough to afford it; but of course the need for good
design is imperative for poor communities because it induces ‘pride of place’.Urban social arrangement and style leads to a consideration of the global edicts
given out by Agenda 21 (1992 United Nations Conference on Environment
and Development: précis given in the Appendix to this Chapter) although this
does not come to the universal aid of the urban cause because the urban design210 Practice