NJU International Fellowship Initiative Lecture

Blocks and Quarters: Parts and Wholes in Urban Design and Planning

Parts and wholes permeate urban design and planning – buildings and building components, blocks and superblocks, neighbourhood units. While there are several ways of organising these in principle, in practice these are not necessarily clear or consistent. This presentation reports on research for a forthcoming book, Blocks and Quarters, that addresses this issue and provides an approach to understanding and applying knowledge about urban building-blocks, and how they might be put together in urban design and planning. The presentation first briefly summarises existing approaches to urban building-blocks. Then, we investigate what we can learn from the discipline of mereology – the philosophy of part-whole relations. Then we develop a framework appropriate towards an urban mereology, that is used to interpret urban mereological structure. We then turn to consider how this knowledge might be applied to urban design. We consider modes of formation, including both morphological processes such as aggregation and subdivision, and dynamics of top-down, bottom-up and things in between. Finally, we suggest an approach to urban design and planning oriented towards incremental development, where urban form is assembled not in a single grand design, but in different increments, over time, by different hands. This culminates in a proposed ‘system of design’ featuring a number of devices such as concepts, types and codes, as well as designs and plans. We end with reflections on the nature of urban design and its relation to urban morphology.