ABSTRACT
Chapter One focuses on the need for a paradigm shift in the way we think and practice urban design and explores the way forward. First, the focus is on why the sense of time and rhythm is important for design. Here, it discusses the contemporary city temporal crisis, and the new conditions and new challenges that urban designers are faced with as part of it. Also, it touches on the problem with dominant growth-led approaches and the obsolete visual aesthetics within the field of urban place design that inhibits methodological innovation. Second, it proposes a way forward. It does this by proposing the Doughnut Spatial-Political Economic model as foundational for Temporal Urban Design, aiming for more ecological and social benefits and assisting social productivity and wellbeing in the urban environment. It challenges designers with a new aesthetics of place that shifts the design focus from physical form and materiality to the shaping of experience, performance, performativity and affect through time in urban space. Moreover, it discusses the temporal socio-cultural identities of urban places as key to understanding the sense of time, the sense of place and atmosphere in the urban environment, and which in turn should be valued and preserved. Finally, it argues for the need for methodological innovation and interdisciplinarity that embrace and act upon the dimension of timespace. Its aim is to expand the field of urban design and to challenge its typical (primarily physical) perspective.
