Integrative Spatial Quality: A Relational Epistemology of Space and Transdisciplinarity in Urban Design and Planning

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Notes

^1. Four of the papers in this themed issue emanate from the SPINDUS: ‘Spatial Innovation, Planning, Design and User Involvement’ strategic basic research project funded by the Flemish Agency for Science & Technology, IWT-SBO (Project IWT 090080). SPINDUS ran from December 2009 until November 2013 and aimed to develop practical and pedagogical planning and urban design methods to assess, evaluate, and implement spatial quality. For more info on the research project: www.spindus.org < http://www.spindus.org/>.

^2. For the producers, it reflects a new division of labour among the stakeholders, shapes the built environment, co-ordinates and leads the development process, stabilizes the market conditions and markets the development. For the regulators, it helps make the city more competitive, shapes the future of the city, manages its environmental change, and contributes towards good governance by bringing together different actors to participate in the process of developing and implementing a vision for the city. For the users of the city, it improves how the place functions and enhances its symbolic values, even though such values are always contested (Madanipour 2006).

^3. Good form is about proportions and interrelations between parts and the whole. Legibility as an integrative principle underlying the urban inhabitant's experience of the city (Lynch's ‘sensuous qualities’ or simply ‘sense’ of place—Banerjee and Southworth 1991, 6)—through elements such as paths, edges, nodes, landmarks, districts (own identifiable character)—that is crucial in the ‘interrelationship of parts into a whole’. Vitality refers to the concepts of mixed use, fine grain, high density and permeability as important sources of urban vitality that is a pervasive consideration in urban design. Meaning implies identity, local / indigenous culture, history, etc., i.e. design to make diversity cohere (Sternberg 2000, 270–275).

^4. Carmona (2014, 33) argues that “it is necessary to understand the creation, re-creation and performance of the built environment across four interrelated process dimensions, self-consciously and un-self-consciously using design processes to knowingly and unknowingly shape place (Figure 12). Thus it is not just design, nor even development processes, that shape the experience of space, but instead the combined outcomes and interactions between: Design—the key aspirations and vision, and contextual and stakeholder influences for a particular project or set of proposals. Development—the power relationships, and processes of negotiation, regulation and delivery for a particular project or set of proposals. Space (or place) in use—who uses a particular place, how, why, when and with what consequences and conflicts. Management—the place-based responsibilities for stewardship, security, maintenance and ongoing funding. Moreover, this is not a series of discrete episodes and activities as we often attempt to understand them from our siloed standpoints, but instead a continuous integrated process or continuum from history to and through each of the place-shaping processes of today and on to tomorrow”.