204 Practice
The recommendations start with a contextual scene-setting passage on overall
urban social arrangement and style. They then track inward from the quasi-urban
periphery to the centre, closing with shopping as entertainment.Urban social arrangement and style (p. 204)
Ex-urban sprawl control (p. 211)
Small town conservation with development (p. 217)
Water’s edge urbanization (p. 221)
Eco-village ideals (p. 223)
Raw land suburbanization (p. 227)
Urban retrofit compaction and clustering (p. 238)
Shopping as a leisure activity (p. 251)Public housing policy and transportation provisioning, specialized accessory
topics, do not form a significant part of these recommendations.^18Urban social arrangement and style
Recommendations which address the overall urban design problematic are col-
lated in box 5.1 as Urban social arrangement and style, rea-
soning which owes much to Lynch’s Image of the City(1960),
the Bentley et al. (1985) Responsive Environments, and the
US-based New Urbanism Congress (CNU) modelled on the
European-initiated CIAM.
Incorporating design as a social dimension into urban
layouts assumes that planners, engineers, surveyors, architects
and to some extent landscapists are, or can be, trained and
motivated to address and provide for urban social needs. In
short, consciously to fashion a socio-physical platform for an
urban lifestyle, avoiding patterned-in sterility and searching
out designed-in sustainability.
A problem, even when urban designers and planners are
motivated toward social goals, is that observational science has
difficulty in identifying what neighbourhood morphology
actually isin terms of ‘appropriate’ design – to distinguish in
Kevin Lynch’s terms (1960 and 1970) between ‘practical auto-
mobile’ city form and ‘organic growth’ urban form. Indeed,
even when urban design (for a community, a subdivision, a
housing cluster) ‘appears’ good, there is little understanding
of why this is so, and why any such arrangement works.
To Hjärne (1986: 206 Swedish context) it is not possible to
demonstrate ‘any simple or causal relations between physical
environmental characteristics and the functioning of neigh-
bourhoods’ which, when considering Scandinavian enthusi-
Skintebo – Skiljebo! asm for design, from freeways to furniture, is an indictment of