Community and streetscapes: the art of urban design revisited

Camillo Sitte argued that town planning should incorporate artistic principles. Raymond Unwin, Gordon Cullen, Kevin Lynch and many others have developed this theme, demonstrating how urban form can be artfully manipulated, to be attractive and stimulating, producing distinctive townscapes rich in texture and meaning. However, this approach has often been criticised as being merely picturesque and subjective. This paper discusses the considerable agenda underpinning the artistic approach (rather than public art) and mainly draws on UK experience, up to the present day. It will argue that – far from being an irrelevant sideline – this approach has, while addressing the Vitruvian ideals of beauty and delight, incorporated practical solutions to many contemporary urban design issues: traffic-calmed streets, mixed uses and placemaking. With the debate in the UK about the re-evaluation of the garden city concept to address the massive shortfall in housing construction and the aim to incorporate ‘wellbeing’ within urban design, is it time to identify and distil those principles of the artistic approach to enrich urban design education and inform policy and practice?