Urban design foresight

摘要

The future of urban design should include more robust tools to envisage potential futures. Delineating futures has always been a core role of urban design. We propose compositions for future places. Moreover, understanding how places are composed over multiple separate design iterations is a longstanding, if underdeveloped, focus of urban design. Sitte, for example, wrote '[The Acropolis of Athens] is no longer a simple square in the ordinary sense of the term, but the work of several centuries grown to the maturity of pure art' (1980[1889], 7). And a layered sense of the unfolding of time, change and continuity, novelty and repair, and decay and adaptability is one of the joys of a great city.