Digital Commons Network^™

What Can Urbanism Be? Problematizing The Design Of Cities, Aseem Inam

DRS Biennial Conference Series

In this paper, I highlight a number of different ways of defining and describing the field conventionally known as urban design, which I problematize by broadening, deepening, and calling urbanism and which I re-define as city-design-and-building processes and their spatial products. These ways include morphological definitions, as a default focus, as the keeper of the public realm, through lists of categories, as a map of bodies of knowledge, as a field of research, as different modes of practice, via models for understanding and making cities, and practical “how-to” approaches such as best practices. I describe and critique each of these …