All-of-a-piece urban design

To many observers, organizing urban design projects to be carried out building-by-building, and landscape-by-landscape by a number of developers according to an overall conceptual design is the core of urban design work. Many architects see all-of-a-piece urban design as inferior to total urban design because it is less a work of individual art. They believe projects would be better if dreamt of and designed by one hand as in Le Corbusier's design for the capital complex in Chandigarh or Oscar Niemeyer's work in Brasilia. Others, however, believe that it is only through all-of-a-piece urban design that both a unity and variety can be captured in large project design today.
The products of all-of-a-piece urban design run the gamut of design types: new towns, new precincts and urban renewal schemes. Few all-of-a-piece urban design are as theatrical as many total urban design although Haussmann did very well in Paris! Their focus of attention depends on the nature of a culture and the nature of the priorities established by the stake-holders concerned.
The source of funding is always a concern but a special set of issues arises with all-of-a-piece urban design in capitalist countries. How are the pieces going to be implemented? Is the infrastructure to be built by the public sector? Or by the developer of the overall project? Or by the developers of individual site? Is the public sector to subsidize the work? Who is to oversee the development? Some public authorities or a private developer? All-of-a-piece urban designs vary considerably in dealing with all the concerns implicit in these questions.
Guidelines that can be defended in court contain three parts: the objective, the pattern required to achieve it and the argument for the pattern based on empirical evidence. If they do not, they are easy to challenge and to be dismissed in the courts and administrative tribunals of democratic societies.
All-of-a-piece urban designs involve the specification for individual buildings to some extent. The most global requirement id for building uses but many other factors can be stipulated for building and open space design.
The degree to which building designs should be controlled is open to debate. The urban design objective has been to define the character of the public realm - streets, squares and other open spaces - and to obtain a sense of unity and/or diversity.

Total urban design

Total urban design occurs when an entire project is carried out under one auspice and under the direction of an individual designer or a group acting as an individual. It is completed as one piece of work from property development to design to implementation. The concern is from the broadest policy issues, to the architecture, to the landscaping and to the details of street furniture. Total urban designs include a wide variety of product types: new towns, urban precincts of various descriptions, new suburbs, housing developments, campuses and historical revitalizations. Some projects are mixed types.

The successes and failures result not from the schemes being total urban designs but from the goals set and the nature of the programme assumed. In some cases a grand scheme does celebrate civic pride for a people and enhances their self-image. Certainly the capital complex in Chandigarh does this. In other cases suffered from severe financial constraints; others were just shortsighted. In addition, all urban designs have failings on one dimension or another. It is impossible to meet all the requirements of all the people who inhabit or use, or are affected by a project equally well.
Each was conceived and carried out as one project and cut from a single piece of cloth. They are conceived and carried out as one project and cut from a single piece of cloth. They are total urban designs. The time taken to implement them varied but each was conceived to be completed within a short time-frame. Brasilia took only 5 years to build. When the decision-making power is centralized actions can be taken rapidly.

Urban Design

Urban design, as we know it today, has developed in respond to the limitations of the philosophies and design paradigms, rationalists and empiricist, of the modern movement in architecture and city planning.
There were three points to the criticism of the way urban design was carried out under the aegis of the Modernists. They were : (1) that the models of people, human behaviour and the way people experience the environment used by designers were simplistic; (2) that the person-environment relationship was poorly understood and, as a consequence, (3) the paradigms and theory on which many large-scale urban development projects were based were inadequate for their purpose.

Efficient land use

The concept of 'sustainable urban extension' is not new. It has previously been promoted in UK planning as both Garden Cities on the model designed by Ebenezer Howard in 1898 and by private companies like Eagle Star in their sponsoring of a new settlement at Micheldever in Hampshire.
More efficient land use is achieved by raising density around key nodal points, greater integration between land use and public transport networks, and ensuring that, if greenfield development is to take place, it strictly adheres to such principles while also linking to existing urban centers.
The promotion of numerous new settlements undertaken during the 1990s, in which free-standing and self-contained towns were promoted on greenfield and some previously used land is likely to be a launch pad for more satellite developments or urban extensions based upon sustainable  principles.
While considerable energy will be devoted to retrofitting higher-density schemes into existing urban areas, sufficient demand exist for new housing on otherwise undeveloped countryside. Developers, especially house builders, have embraced such thinking, and centrally located and brown-land sites are increasingly being developed for medium density and mixed-use schemes.