“The End(s) of Urban Design”

In “The End(s) of Urban Design,” Michael Sorkin provides an unrelenting and much debated critique of the urban design field and its associated “mainstream” practice. He contends that the field has reached a “dead end” with respect to its ability to either inspire passion or answer the deep challenges of sustainability, population, equity, and diversity. Positioned somewhere in the theoretical middle between the nostalgic traditionalism of the New Urbanism and the fragmented, self-aggrandizing dystopia of Post Urbanism, urban design has failed to produce the type of city that Sorkin desires: an urbanism and architecture of creative disruption that responds to social equity challenges; the open urbanism of the rock concert; the science-fiction polemic of paper architect provocateurs, who present visions with little hope of implementation (a claim leveled by some against Sorkin himself). More to the point, he thinks contemporary urban design is too “restrictive” and “boring”; perhaps the greatest critique of all. Sorkin suggests urban design needs to confront a new reality that helps in retrofitting and reconfiguring the planet to address exponential population growth, resource limits, and environmental demands. The task of reconceptualizing the field is made more difficult by growing complexity (stakeholder, economic, environmental, legal, resource, infrastructural) and an impending sense of urgency that we may be running out of time. Sorkin’s critique can be divided into three parts: 1. failure of field consolidation and collaboration in the design academies; 2. the mainstreaming of the field through regulation and backward-looking methods; and 3. the rise of neo-traditional urbanism, primarily through the Congress for the New Urbanism (CNU).