Architects and planners' approaches to urban design: A comparative study (Ontario).

摘要

This is a praxis-oriented study that compares architects and planners' approaches to understanding and dealing with built environments. It examines the underlying issues regarding the conception of 'good' built forms, which contributes to the current intellectual divide between architecture and planning professions. While planners generally deal with urban form as a by-product of socioeconomic relations and good planning processes, architects perceive urban form as determinative of the urban experience and quality of life. The study ultimately aims to develop a nuanced understanding of urban design concerns within a North American context.; Planners and architects are profoundly involved with community issues, politics, and public decision making and hence face-to-face dialogues with practitioners is an effective tool to build informed urban design knowledge. The researcher elected the urban region of Toronto as the locale to interview practitioners due to its economic and cultural centrality within Canada (in particular) and North America (in general). Toronto region is home to an array of planners, architects, landscape architects and other professionals who deal with local, regional, and global issues affecting urban design and related practices. Urban design involves partnership and interaction on many levels; as such, the research methodology is rooted within a constructivist interactive paradigm predicated on achieving pluralistic understanding of urban issues. More emphasis is placed on inductive approaches, contextual analyses, and mutual learning informed by explanatory social, architectural, and planning models. This approach not only links theory and practice but potentially transcends singular and biased understandings of city-building processes.; This study is neither attempting to delineate a 'good city form' nor developing a grand theoretical urban design scheme. It develops an understanding of theoretical and pragmatic concerns within design professions (architecture/landscape architecture) and social science professions (planning at large) and extends an interdisciplinary urban design perspective. The researcher perceives built forms as both the incubator and product of social processes. In other words, although social and economic relations presuppose urban space, they are also conditioned by the physical attributes of urban space. Social, economic, and physical configurations on local and regional development levels exhibit evolving properties through which they interact and transform each other. This study takes a balanced position that urban form is the embodiment of local and regional actions shaped by the interdependent dynamics of instrumental and structural forces. It deals with urban form as a communal product and urban design as the social discourse of a consensus-building process.