Urban Design for an Urban Century: Shaping More Livable, Equitable, and Resilient Cities, 2nd Edition

Chapter 5Theories of Urbanism

In an essay in his 1997 book Common Place: Toward Neighborhood and Regional Design, Doug Kelbaugh—former dean of the Taubman School of Architecture and Planning at the University of Michigan—uses Paris to illustrate three very different approaches to urbanism. In a chapter titled “The Three Urbanisms,” Kelbaugh asks readers to pick an area in Paris they like most, so as to understand which urbanism best aligns with their values.¹

Few urban designers today would admit to preferring the first area, widely admired forty years ago—the “free-standing high-rises of La Défense, [the] twentieth-century office complex.” Kelbaugh sees this inclination as shaped by heroic individual effort, faith in experimentation for its own sake, and a belief that great cities can be achieved by drawing inspiration from a “personal design portfolio, which is typically more self-referential than contextual.” A second urbanism, the “medieval streets and buildings of the Marais district,” continues to hold strong, romantic appeal. Lovers of le Marais embrace “everyday urbanism,” a rejection of formal schools of thought and a preference for “urban design by default [rather] than by intention.” To prefer the third urbanism, “grand monuments and boulevards of nineteenth-century Paris” laid out by Georges Eugène Haussmann, reveals an inclination toward “formal urbanism,” an internally consistent school of thought “utopian” in its deep belief that its approach to placemaking improves ...