Briefing: Is urban design just bollards?

Planning, urban design and regeneration must respond to an ever more complex, rapidly shifting, globalised, connected world. This coincides with new thinking about self-organisation – emergence. Increasingly, connections are being made between ideas about emergence and political and academic thinking about planning and development for an uncertain world. Following the wisdom of crowds is gaining ground over following the wisdom of leaders and professionals. So how do we tackle the big stuff? Emergence may work at street or neighbourhood level. Will emergent local cells combine naturally into undesigned but successfully functioning urban systems? In other words, can we still design at large scale, or must urban design be confined to the creation of local townscape now that we have discovered emergence and face change and complexity on an unprecedented scale? Is urban design only a process for choosing the right bollards, or should we try to shape the bigger picture? To look at some of these issues the author initiated a CABE (Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment) programme, led by my colleague Biljana Savic, to find out if urban design can still work at larger than neighbourhood scales. This paper draws some initial conclusions from that work, due for publication later this year.