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Abstract
Recent scholarship suggests that the urban design profession is flourishing with many newly created urban design departments, programmes and certificates. Within this context, this paper suggests that urban design education should explore how urban designers can acquire a deeper understanding of the larger socio-economic processes which have an impact on urban form and different groups in the city. More specifically, it posits that urban designers should take notice of the informal urbanism that is burgeoning in many cities of the Global North. For this to happen, urban design pedagogy should prepare future urban designers to better understand and positively intervene in informal urban landscapes, and the urban design studio is an appropriate venue where this can happen. The paper articulates a four-tier framework of responding to informal urbanism through urban design that concentrates on the scope, context, process and practice of urban design. It details a graduate urban design studio that followed this framework to offer spatial solutions and accommodation of street vending in one Los Angeles inner city neighbourhood.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes
1. According to the US Department of Agriculture farmers’ markets in US cities have grown from 2863 in 2000 to 5274 in 2009 (in Gold Citation2010).
2. Rebar, a San Francisco based art and design studio, converted in 2005 a single-metered parking space into a temporary (two-hour) public park in downtown San Francisco. This initial installation sparked the development of a national Park-ing Day movement in the US.
3. In recent decades we have witnessed a blurring in the distinction between ‘developed’ and ‘developing’ countries. The former term is used here to denote highly affluent, post-industrial economies such as those of the US, Western Europe, Scandinavia, Australia and Japan. Although the authors have a slight preference for the moniker Global North, it is used interchangeably with the term ‘developed countries’.
4. Students in the studio were also the recipients of academic excellence awards by the American Planning Association and the Institute of Certified Planners.