The shock of bad design or planning comes when we encounter some dreadful place or dysfunctional facility–a nightmarish concrete jungle or an infuriatingly disconnected interchange–and realise that it was not that way by accident, but was deliberately designed so. As users we might think of the designers and ask ourselves ‘what were they thinking of?’ As designers, we must think of things from the users' point of view: a user perspective that we aim to air in Urban Design and Planning.
Despite our best intentions, we can sometimes short-change the user. We can seduce our clients (and ourselves) with geometric patterns and eye-catching forms that look good on the drawing board or in glossy magazines, but which look or feel wrong on the ground. We may try to get a feel for the site, but not necessarily in the most critical conditions: alone at night on foot, or at crush hour with a handful of children and shopping bags. We may conscientiously imagine ourselves as users, but fail to also imagine those users who are unlike ourselves. In any case, as hired professionals, we may naturally view new projects as opportunities, not threats–unlike those who will have to live with our creations after we are gone.
In pursuit of some grand vision or with an eye to global attention, we may miss attention to some critical local detail–a much loved view or a particular tree or bench whose value is subtle and site-specific but not accounted for in official any evaluation or design brief. And when it comes to the design itself, we may sometimes design or plan for people as if they-we-were simply physical objects, mechanistic bipeds of a certain size and velocity, or robotic agents behaving according to simplistic utility-maximising algorithms, rather than addressing the ‘whole human’.
Achieving user-friendly solutions is not just a matter of being a good designer or planner in the technical sense of devising coherent physical configurations of land and buildings. It requires us to be well informed about the users, about basic human behaviour, about many different kinds of people, how people interact in a social context and how all of these are influenced by the environment we–and they–create.
Ultimately, when dealing with any design or planning that is urban in scale or public in scope, we must also be politically aware. As designers or planners we influence who benefits from the built environment. We may create or perpetuate inbuilt advantages for some users–say, those who have most clout or cash to spend in an area, those using vehicles or those who are able-bodied–while excluding or marginalising others. There is a kind of built-environmental justice at stake: urban designers and planners have a right and a responsibility to play a part.
Starting with this issue, Urban Design and Planning invites short briefings to help illustrate different user perspectives, to help inform user-friendly design and planning–to help bridge between ‘them’ and ‘us’.
