ABSTRACT
The proceedings of the 1956 conference reveal two working definitions for urban design, both articulated by José Luis Sert, who organized and presided over the conference. Urban design, he stated at one point, ‘is that part of city planning which deals with the physical form of the city’. Here is the idea of urban design as a sub-set of planning, a specialization that he described as ‘the most creative phase of city planning, in which imagination and artistic capacities play the important part.’ At the beginning of the conference he identified a yet more ambitious goal ‘to find the common basis for the joint work of the Architect, the Landscape Architect and the City Planner . . . Urban Design [being] wider than the scope of these three professions’. Here is the notion of a new overarching design discipline to be practised by all those who were, in Sert’s phrase, ‘urban-minded’.
