People and Place-making: participation in urban design processes

The term urban design was coined in the mid-1950s (Lang 2005) almost coincidentally with its first appearance in academic curricula in the United States. The first academic program in urban design in the United States was the University of Pennsylvania’s Civic Design Program, started in 1956 (Barnett 1982; Strong 1990), followed by Harvard’s Urban Design Program in 1960. Thereafter, the term was imported into the United Kingdom, even though it was in Great Britain where the first course and the first department of “Civic Design” began in 1909, at Liverpool University. The Liverpool University course was intended to train planners (Cullingworth and Nadin 2006), with a “close connotation to municipal government and functions such as ‘Civic Centre’” (Cuthbert 2007, 180) and town planning (The Builder 1908), and thus it cannot claim the progenitorship of today’s urban design curriculum. Some authors and urban designers interpreted urban Design since its first appearance as a way to connect people and place or, better, to make places for people. Francis Tibbalds, proposed perspectives on urban design such as: “the three dimensional design of places for people” or “the physical design of public realm” (Tibbalds 1988, quoted in Madanipour 1996, 93). Matthew Carmona and Steve Tiesdell (2007, 1) define urban design “as the process of making better places for people than would otherwise be produced” (emphasis in original). Ali Madanipour, an urban design theorist and scholar at the University of Newcastle in England, proposes to define urban design: “as the multidisciplinary activity of shaping and managing urban environments, interested in both the process of this shaping and the space it helps shape. [...] Urban design is part of the process of the production of space” (1996, 117).