In the first part of this special issue that was published earlier this year, papers variously explored art as an inherent aspect of urban design and a discrete component of it – the question of ‘art of’ versus ‘art in’ urban design (Sieh et al., 2015). In this second volume, we have chosen to frame the papers through a conceptualisation that takes as its starting point ‘art’ rather than ‘urban design’; that the ‘art-ness’ of urban design is related to its success as intentional communication, thereby affecting not only people's experience of a space, but their very sense of that place, their responses to place thus created and the consequent reproduction of place.
Is this a fruitful way of thinking about an art of urban design? This is the question we reflect upon in this editorial, drawing on the thoughts of Leo Tolstoy (1930) on art. Tolstoy argued that art is a communicative activity ‘by means of which one man, having experienced a feeling, intentionally transmits it (by means of signs) to others’ (Maude, 1930: p vi), so that they may be infected by these feelings and experience them.
In the opening paper, Smith (2015) posits that the art of urban design is something that mediates the relationship between people and spaces in the contemporary city, specifically, art is to be found in the multi-sensorial aesthetic experience of urban spaces. Photographic evidence and literature are drawn upon to demonstrate how, in an oversized, fast-paced and constantly changing contemporary urbanity, the potential for such experience is eroded, and what potential there is privileges the sense of sight. In the closing statement the idea of ‘art as communication’ is most boldly stated: urban design needs to ‘afford’ and indeed deliberately ‘invite’ multi-sensorial aesthetic experience in the face of the challenges posed by contemporary urbanity. There is resonance here with Tolstoy: ‘Every work of art causes the receiver to enter into a certain kind of relationship both with him who produced or is producing the art, and with all those who, simultaneously, previously, or subsequently, receive the same artistic impression’ (Mounce; 2001: p 24). It is this relationship that Smith suggests is not easy to achieve.
Baroud (2015), in her paper on the funeral procession in Tripoli, Lebanon, extends and contrasts Smith's focus on (presumably) individual perceptual experience to explore how individual actions coalesce into a corporate response to what they perceive. Drawing on de Certeau's (1984) notions of ‘conjunction’ and ‘disjunction’, she notes, for instance, that some passers-by abandon their routine and join the procession for a short while. Baroud ascribes this unorchestrated yet directed movements to individuals' continually revised senses of belongingness, which are spontaneous responses to different ‘logics of movement’ that are encountered. In responding bodily to the procession by joining it, the passers-by are drawn into the collective life of their city. These observations are in the tradition of work based on the cycle of reflexivity; for example, Garfinkel's ‘service lines’ (Garfinkel, 2002), Mead's ‘practical action’ (vom Lehn, 2014) and also work on the embodied production of place (e.g. Low, 2014; Ingold, 2007), in which the funeral procession would be seen as an urban social and spatial object that is produced from co-responsive bodily actions of participants as they move through the city. However, could the funeral procession be seen in terms of art? Tolstoy gives art a vital role in human life. He argued that because humans have capacity to both express and understand thoughts of others, they can share in the activity and thus feeling of ancestors, contemporaries and descendants – that is, of humanity – by means of art (Tolstoy, 1930). By drawing people into its compelling artistic form of collective movement and its artistic substance of social and civic solidarity, the funeral procession could be seen as an artistic activity, more or less intentionally produced by the core participants.
Wulff Barreiro and Guirnaldos Diaz's (2015) article explores, via two case studies in Mediterranean cities, how small, low-cost actions that are designed to create collective aesthetic responses evinced sufficient criticality and emotion to, in turn, elicit serious institutional and spatial design responses. By ‘institutional’ we mean both reactions from the establishment, as well as the creation of new forms of place-specific institutions of urban governance, which may be citizen-led. This sort of ‘tactical urbanism’ (Lydon and Garcia, 2015) or ‘performative urbanism’ (Wolfrum, 2014), in which temporary uses (Bishop and Williams, 2012) are a favourite technique, is topical for urban design, not only because of the downward pressure on public budgets but because there is a growing acknowledgement that in order to implement design temporal programming and institutional design almost certainly have to be dealt with. Notably, it also directly addresses Tolstoy's concern that the value of art lies in its consequentiality for what is good, defined as ‘a sense, pervasive in the culture, of what is important in life’ (Mounce, 2001: p 36); indeed, Wolfrum (2014) defines ‘performative’ as ‘consequential’. In pursuit of a better urban condition, which surely is an aim of urban design, such actions can provoke sharp insights into the nature of the contemporary one, thus enlarging our experience of urban life, another feature of Tolstoy's ‘art-ness’. Successful tactical urbanism is most definitely art in the sense we have so far discussed; it often leads to responsive action, galvanised by emotion. But is it an art of urban design?
Munar Bauzá and González Raventos’ (2015) paper about the ‘urbane’ design of Barcelona's big infrastructure is an example of how Smith's (2015) call for urban design to invite experience of space is heeded and extended to citizens through what is conventionally understood to be urban design; urban design here invites such experience through its manipulation of spatial configuration at multiple scales, and of materiality. The narrative of the paper privileges the design configuration, which is itself a response to the projected patterns and needs of civic life. Cerda, in imagining how the design configuration might create aesthetic responses in the users, created an enduring art out of urban infrastructures. Ironically, it took an engineer to demonstrate that the motorway – that potent symbol of all that is un-aesthetic about cities – can be transformed by its thoughtful design into art. This suggests a way of thinking about the resulting art of urban design as those designs that take seriously the aesthetic response of their users.
To understand the nature of user response to urban design may require scientific, or at least empirical, techniques. In the context of a knowledge exchange project between academic research and design practitioners, Aelbrecht and Stevens (2015) applied such rational techniques to research two possible arts related to urban design. The first is the design practice's art of urban designing. Post occupancy evaluation (POE) is used to assess response of users to the designed spaces. The second is the art of knowledge exchange that takes place in this research project enabled by formal knowledge exchange dialogues between designers and researcher, something which the researchers investigate by reflecting upon them. While the art of knowledge exchange is not the same as the art of urban design, it is clearly ‘art’ in the sense we have been discussing. The paper clearly demonstrates emotional response by the design practitioners to the researcher's attempt at knowledge exchange; note words and phrases such as ‘overwhelmed’ and ‘defensive but confident’ when describing practitioner responses. The paper raises many questions for an art of urban design; for example, do rational feedback mechanisms aid or diminish the effectiveness of the urban designer's practise of their art (incidentally a question addressed by Leach et al. (2015), in part 1 of this themed issue)? To what extent does the successful art of knowledge exchange and its more general category, communication within the design process, affect the success of the art of urban design?
Finally, Madanipour's (2015) article sums up three historical perspectives upon which the present discourse of an ‘art of urban design’ is founded. The first is nostalgic and looks to the past as inspiration for the aesthetic visual qualities of cities today, as exemplified by the work of Sitte, Cullen and Tibbalds. The second perspective held that urban design has to skilfully express the civic life it contained/enabled, such as championed by Raymond Unwin, designer of the first garden city of Letchworth. The third is the modernist ‘machine’ aesthetic of the likes of Le Corbusier, which also purports to express the functional, looking to science and technology for the basis of its art.
The aesthetic, civic and technical that are highlighted by Madanipour (2015) can be seen as the ‘urban design-specific’ versions of the three classic ideals of beauty, goodness and truth. They are also what Marshall (2015) sets up as three foundational spheres that urban design finds itself to be at the conjunction of. Marshall's conceptualisation of the art of urban design, as an integrative technical art resonates well with Tolstoy's insistence that the three branches of culture: art (whose object is beauty), morality (whose object is goodness), and science (whose object is truth) must always considered together holistically. For Marshall, ‘a sense of place’ is the substantive content of an art of urban design. A ‘sense of place’ is the type of feeling that this art delivers, so that those who experience place experience ‘something about the ‘mainness’ of the main street and the ‘side-ness’ of the side streets’ (p 12), for example. This art is ‘place signification in the medium of the urban fabric’ (Marshall, 2015: p 14), and what it is signified is not just any sense of place, but a sense of place that is aesthetically, civically and technically appropriate to the locality.
But is this all? Let us return to the question of ‘art of’ and ‘art in’, raised in the editorial to part 1 of this themed issue.
We have seen how art – the intentional signification of feelings for the purpose of sharing an experience of those feelings – is ‘shot through’ many urban activities, but not all of them are clearly an art of urban design. However, they may be art that becomes/informs a component in urban design. For instance, the art in urbanism and urban practices, such as the place-signifying activity of the Lebanese funeral (Baroud, 2015), and emerging practices such as performative and tactical urbanism (Wulff Barreiro and Guirnaldos Diaz, 2015), could implicate, feed, and inform the practice, shape and material of urban design; this is art in design, not an art of design.
In Smith (2015) we begin to see the initial stages of an art of urban design, when she argues that such an art needs to expand its means of ‘invitation to experience’ beyond the visual to the multi-sensorial. Munar Bauzá and González Raventos (2015) can be seen as showing us one possible answer to this invitation, in Barcelona; they demonstrate how mainstream urban design, by taking seriously the aesthetic response of users while articulating the urban fabric with a flourish to address aesthetic, technical and civic needs, is indeed the exemplar of an art.
Finally, if urban design is to be a civic art, the power of the art of urbanism as demonstrated by Baroud, and Wulff Barreiro and Guirnaldos Diaz asks of us the question of whether those ‘feelings' brought forth by the art of urban design should also induce a response consisting of practical and co-reactive actions that produce ‘civicness’ as well as a ‘sense of place’. Does the production of ‘civicness’ go beyond the remit of art of urban design? Perhaps. It takes us as urban practitioners and citizens into the realm of civic action and politics. But civic action and politics are essential for delivering built urban design, and both involve ‘art’. So, if urban design, as built, is to be seen an allegory of ‘the civic’, of living together closely and harmoniously in an urban place, and if Tolstoy's dictum, that any art, including the art of urban design, requires ‘a sense … of what is important in life, in short, what is good’ (Mounce, 2001: p37), then, in order to achieve this art of urban design, practitioners and citizens need to also practise art in urban design.
