Urban Design: Good Book, Unfortunate Field?

Urban Design is a book published last year, but it is a collection of 18 essays that Harvard Design Magazine (HDM) published in 2006-07 to mark the 50th anniversary of a fabled conference on urban design that took place at Harvard's Graduate School of Design (GSD) in 1956. This conference aimed to establish the field of urban design as both a subject for academic study and a realm of practice both incorporating and independent of architecture and city planning. The book includes excerpts from the proceedings of the 1956 conference, and it concludes with the transcript of a discussion on "Urban Design Now" held at Harvard in 2006 among some of the contributors to the book as well as other urban designers and critics. GSD professor Alex Krieger and William S. Saunders, editor of HDM, edited the book.

Urban Design is an excellent guide to both the history of Urban Design as a field and today's conflicts both within and without. For that I recommend it highly. What's unfortunate, however, is that the adjective that pervades the sense of the book is "despair." One cannot read these essays without reflecting on how disastrous the past 50 years have been for cities.

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