Abstract :
The problem of urban sustainability will concern many disciplines during the first
decade of the 21st century. One aspect of this will be an urgent reappraisal of
notions of ‘the city’ in face of the crises of urban living represented in popular
culture and substantiated by actuality; another, a search for alternative models of
what urban professional practice, and urban settlement, might be, such as ‘action
planning’ or ‘new genre public art’, or the Open City at Ritoque, Chile, or the village
of New Qurna designed by Egyptian architect Hassan Fathy. A possible third aspect
may be a multi-disciplinary approach underpinned by critical attitudes to the
professional ideologies of planners, architects, designers and artists.
Urban forms are produced historically through processes of planning and design;
a number of possible futures are thus open. Whilst the dominant conceptualisation
of ‘the city’ reflects the dominant values and structures of power in a society, these
values and structures, like the model of a city, are contestable. Education has, then,
a responsibility to interrogate received notions of both urban form and the
methodologies through which it is produced. This paper asks how education might
construct design as a critical practice, how imagination might reconfigure notions of
‘the city’
