Schools and skills of critical thinking for urban design

ABSTRACT

This paper explores possible ways in which urban design can engage with critical thinking and critical theory. After a brief explanation of the terms, with particular attention to the Frankfurt School of thought, it provides various answers to the question as to whether urban design is critical or not. One categorization applied to planning critical theory is then used to explain the potential for employing critical theories in urban design. Critical thinking skills are then argued to be helpful for enriching the literature of urban design in order to achieve better practice. The conclusion is that urban design can benefit from critical creativity, which is an embodiment of critical thinking within the limits imposed onto creativity. In this paper, the ways in which urban design can engage with both critical theory and with critical thinking are explored in order to achieve better critical creativity in the field.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. This echoes Kant’s (2009) classification of human knowledge.

2. https://www.city-analysis.net

3. The connections that occur between the most disparate and the most similar of objects, places and people; the strange chains of events that link people (Parr 2010).

4. Structural thinking here, as a technique, must not be confused with structuralism.

5. https://criticalcreativity.org/