ABSTRACT
Despite Cuthbert’s (2010: 444) timely reminder that urban design is a trans-historical process as old as cities and civilisation, and if anything, ‘urban design invented itself ’, recent urban design debates have ironically featured a heavy dose of scepticism over its endurance as a coherent discipline generating its own knowledge (Schurch 1999). Confronted by such doubts over its ability to function as a field, practice or profession, many scholars have commonly argued for its repositioning where it can be informed by other disciplines beyond the bravado of ‘just design’ (Verma 2011). Notwithstanding the risk of fracture from the diverse knowledges, it seems that the only way out for urban design is to borrow from other primate disciplines, an approach that has characterised the fate of contemporary urban design (see Chapter 1). Thus, through much of the twentiethcentury urban design found itself conveniently located at the interstices of architecture and planning, coming across either as an extension of architectural imagination or as the physical consequence of state planning policies. In this position outcomes have too often represented a commodified version of aesthetic formalism characterised by a general dissolution of the idea of the social. Responding to the need for an alternative social imagination of urban design, scholars
such as Cuthbert (2007) and Verma (2011) have emphasised the need to disentangle it from the traditional confines of architecture and planning, specifically recommending its reorientation to social science.
