Aseem Inam: The Journal of Urban Design published my review of a recent and remarkable book, The New Companion to Urban Design.
Urban design is a multifaceted and evolving field. However, it does not become multifaceted and evolve by itself. We make it so. The "we" is the community of inquirers and enactors such as academic scholars, urban practitioners, and citizen activists. From time to time, the field also needs a good shake. This is just such a time. Cities all over the world are confronting the climate crisis, urban inequality, structural racism and health emergencies such as the current Covid-19 global pandemic. How is urban design engaging with such realities and challenges? The book, New Companion to Urban Design, provides some valuable answers. Indeed, the New Companion is a monumental and path-breaking tome in an increasingly welcome and crowded field of urban design readers and companions. The breadth and scope of the issues it covers, at 50 chapters and 714 pages, is a breathtakingly impressive achievement. As significant as this is, the New Companion is monumental in another, equally impressive, manner, which is the outstanding quality of its most remarkable chapters—all of which bring fresh and potentially transformative perspectives to the field of urban design.
The editors of the New Companion, the distinguished and prolific scholars Tridib Banerjee and Anastasia Loukaitou-Sideris, state that the present book should be seen more as an aspirational sequel to their earlier project, Companion to Urban Design (2011), which was more foundational. The Companion to Urban Design was focused on what I would call a passive observation of past research and current trends, as revealed in the titles of its nine parts: roots, theoretical perspectives, influences, technologies and methods, process, components, debates, global trends, and new directions. In contrast, the New Companion concentrates much more on substantive issues and future possibilities in its fifteen sections: part 1: Comparative Urbanism (i.e. arguments and observations, regional experiences,), part II: Challenges (i.e. claims and conflicts, informality, explosive growth versus shrinkage, large-scale development, gentrification and displacement, mimesis and simulacra) and part III: Aspirations (i.e. reliance and sustainability, health, conservation / restoration, justice, intelligence, mobility and access, arts and culture).
As this summary list attests, the chapters and their authors cover a wide range of facets of cities that are being increasingly recognized for their importance in city-design-and-building processes and their spatial products. Within this overall structure, a number of chapters are especially outstanding for their fresh empirical analysis, theoretical contributions and new directions for practice in urban design. These chapters share a number of themes that are vital for shaping the future of urban design. Three themes are especially pertinent: the first challenges Euro-American centric modes of thinking by learning from the global south, the second recognizes the complicity of urban design in urban inequality by engaging with theories of social justice, and the third complements an exclusive focus on urban form and space by theorizing about new modes of transformative practice.
The rest of the original and detailed book review and essay can be viewed and downloaded from this website. The shorter and edited version, as published by the Journal of Urban Design, can be viewed here. AI.
Cover image of the recent book, The New Companion to Urban Design. Source: Routledge.
First paragraph of the published book review. Source: Journal of Urban Design.