Urban design and planning: challenges and opportunities

With a small group of like-minded developers and architects, the author recently visited Amsterdam's eastern harbour. The visit included the new suburb of Ijburg, where a plot-based development was underway. The internal street blocks were relatively standard-volume house-builder units, but, in the ribbon of terraced housing around the edge, a single contractor appeared to be building a different design on each plot. This provoked discussion within the group. A plot-based development on Borneo Island had been visited earlier in the trip, but Ijburg was different. How could this scale, variety and complexity be managed economically? Where were the necessary economies...