Introduction to Urban Design and Community Planning

Artwork in the Islamic culture is typically created by use of extravagant patterns and designs, without any representation of specific images. This category of art is defined by the term aniconism. Aniconism entails that no human images are portrayed and is often used in works deemed to be religious. Several works of Islamic architecture, represented in Art Beyond the West, utilize aniconic art due to the heavy religious background of the piece.

There exist three basic components of traditional Islamic art: calligraphy, geometric patterns, and floral and vegetal motifs. These three stylistic tools are beautifully rendered and masterfully integrated into complex works of art, but there is no question that artistic expression is severely limited under these categorizations. However, this limitation stems from Islamic theology and concept of art. The main reason for the limitation imposed on visual art is the Islamic theological prohibition of figural imagery. Social laws presented in the Hadith prevented the representation of figures because any imitation was deemed idolatrous. Also, art is considered to be decorative and imitative. Script and patterns are used to decorate

Paul Goldberger, an American architectural critic once quoted, “Urbanism works when it creates the journey as desirable as the destination.”

Rowe in Collage City wrote a very condensed summary of the ideas developed within the Urban Design studio he taught at Cornell. He wrote about an autonomous apparatus containing formal strategies of typology,

Islamic art and architecture, works of art and architecture created in countries where Islam has been dominant and embodying Muslim precepts in its themes. They are explored with calligraphy, which considered one of the important parts of Islamic arts. Almost all Islamic buildings have some type

In today’s society the landscape of the city is constantly changing to accommodate for technological innovations, greater populations, and economic opportunity. As the skyline of cities across America are changing at a rate faster than ever seen before, one immense community is being left in the dust. The suburbs of America have refused to change, allowing a great resemblance of what they looked like 50 years ago. The stubbornness of the suburbs to change has led to many issues economically and environmentally. In her essay, “Seventy-Five Percent”, Ellen Dunham-Jones puts forth that 75% of construction in the past decade occurs in the suburban landscape. Yet, in today’s society much of the architectural community contains a strong bias against the suburbs. However, with over half the country’s

Cities are characterized by the patterns of streets and squares that define their arrangement, a concept that undergoes frequent changes since the establishment of cities 10,000 years ago. There are multitude factors that influence such changes with system of government, values, population size, values, artistic sensibility, building methods, design techniques, paving techniques, military considerations, and transport technology being the main determinants. Medieval architectural designs emphasized on rigid grid forms, that contemporary writers of the history of urban planning and design, assume the presence of grids even in plans where they exist in approximate forms. Absence of grids is often perceived as lack of planning. Nevertheless, it is critical to note that the complex patters of streets in medieval cities were neither random nor chaotic.

These new design concepts for these new neighbourhoods may be aesthetically pleasing, but aesthetics alone do not create community or urbanity. The New Urbanism and Fused Grid design concepts still follow segregate zoning. These neighbourhoods follow the standard planning principle of the past fifty years, a zoning principles that practice separate zones according to use. The zoning segregation keeps these new neighbourhoods communities from resembling the small towns and urban feeling they strive to become. These new concept plans of New Urbanism and Fused Grid try to obtain the old traditional urban design, but these old urban design were not planned and further more they were not zoned, they just happen.

“The best that can be said of the conception is that it did afford a chance to experiment with some physical and social planning theories which did not pan out. “ This quote reflects Jane Jacob’s philosophical ideas in an attempt to criticize the social housing’s design approach and its associated urban planning in modern era. “The physical and social theories” outlines the urban planning idea of social housing (Utopian idea) and according to Jane’s statement, such experiment of these theories were deem to be unsuccessful. It is inevitably certain to some extent that a provocative statement towards modern era social housing approaches would hold true due to the minimal success the plans brought to the city, such as solving the working class commendations temporarily. Nevertheless, it is a failure to deliver long-standing social improvements corresponded with the increasing suspicion of modernism, one cannot simply attribute ill fate to its “innovative physical features” (As Jane said, the Utopian and Utopia), but should rather considered a range of other elements in the larger aspect of society: factors such as difficulty of racial integration, problems of financing and management, lack of bridging between architecture and planning, as well as the increasing preference of suburban lifestyle from the rising mid class. These problems reflected evidently in some stereotypes of social housing communities built in the modern era such as Pruitt-Igoe, sunny side Gardens, Paul

Urbanism was developed in the early 19th century. Within architecture discourse, the characteristic of urbanism is the interaction of town and city dwellers with the built environment. The concept was explained as the association of the social, civil and cultural with the environment.

New Urbanism, a burgeoning genre of architecture and city planning, is a movement that has come about only in the past decade. This movement is a response to the proliferation of conventional suburban development (CSD), the most popular form of suburban expansion that has taken place since World War II. Wrote Robert Steuteville, "Lacking a town center or pedestrian scale, CSD spreads out to consume large areas of countryside even as population grows relatively slowly. Automobile use per capita has soared, because a motor vehicle is required for nearly all human transportation"1. New Urbanism, therefore, represents the converse of this planning ideology. It stresses traditional planning, including multi-purpose zoning,

Designing a city from scratch is a remarkable thought experiment but ultimately fails at implementation because we always approach it from the perspective of “how can we create a new city that solves problems of existing cities.” It’s less a process driven by design and more by critique. Urban living has paved its way into modern society, yet the vision for a city has changed over time. Large settlements need planning to grow; yet differences in minds is what leads to the modifications of a city, in return makes a city so unique. Alterations in opinions are what thrives urban life, still these differences are what skews the view of how others see a city compared to myself. They say the eye of the beholder deems beauty; this could explain

The garden city movement, a method of urban planning that was initiated in 1898 by Sir Ebenezer Howard, had a significant influence on urban planning. The theory of urban planning has envolved over the past hundred years, some have attempted to emulate theories from the garden city movement, while others have been revised based on Howard’s original ideas. The Garden City concept spawned many ideas of urban planning. Among these ideas, the Garden Suburb, Satellite City, the New Towns Movement and the New Urbanism are all significant theories in the history of urban planning and had their influence to this day. The integration of town and country, the separation of conflicting land uses and modes of travel, and the ideas of growth management are all elements of the Garden City concept that have made made their ways into plans of most major Western cities.

As per the authors definition of what urban design should be he discusses three aspects of cities, control and process, activities of humans and also the physical form of the city. As a planner or urban designer one should pay attention to all these aspects which forms a better

First of all, to start building a city an urban pattern has to be established, this will make the city look much more organized and well thought. A pattern can be chosen from a whole list of working patterns for a city. Establishing a grid is a common way of equally distributing the city. However, we want to keep in mind, that important buildings, such as businesses, and government buildings must be accessible to the public, but separated from the rest of the city. We have great examples of grids such as New York City, in New York, United States, or Mississauga City, in Toronto ,Canada. Although, when building from scratch it is not possible to leave aside what has already been built, a city indeed has to adapt to what is already existing, as well as to the new global economy, social and political trends, and new issues that arise in the new era, this also changes the structure and tradition of building and forming urban patterns. Using the existing patterns, combined with new ones, both patterns can collide and make new forms in city blocks. Results vary from city to city, but the essence is the same in all of them; old and new patterns coming together to create unplanned shapes, a new form of Urbanism, based on new and old patterns, aiming to satisfy the needs of the modern world. A great example is New York