Understanding Cities: Method in Urban Design

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Thinking Cities is richly textured, complex and challenging. It creates the vital link between urban design theory and praxis and opens the required methodological gateway to a new and unified field of Urban Design. For too long urban design has been viewed as a satellite of architecture and urban planning, occupying a \'no man\'s land\' which has prevented its rightful independence. Cuthbert sets out to challenge this assumption. He rejects the idea of yet another theory in urban design, and chooses instead to construct the necessary intellectual and conceptual scaffolding for what he terms The New Urban Design. Using spatial political economy as his most important reference point, Cuthbert both interrogates and challenges mainstream urban design and provides an alternative and viable comprehensive framework for a new synthesis. By implication, this critique necessarily ranges across all the environmental disciplines which are undeniably involved in the intellectual debate which this process of reconstruction entails. Building both on Michel de Certeau\'s concept of heterology - \'thinking about thinking\' - and on the framework of his previous books Designing Cities and The Form of Cities, Cuthbert uses his prior adopted framework - History, Philosophy, Politics, Culture, Gender, Environment, Aesthetics, Typologies and Pragmatics. Overall, the trilogy allows a new field of urban design to emerge. Pre-existing and new knowledge are integrated across all three volumes, of which Thinking Cities is the culminating text.