Better Urbanity – to What Extent a Design Issue?

Ilari Karppi (Tampere University)

Complex urban development processes transcend the boundaries of administrative silos. They are often carried out through artefacts, sometimes referred to as urban things. These artefacts (self-driving vehicles, urban farms or procedures for planning them) are design items, but the extent to which they can turn out better urbanity is limited. They both challenge and depend on the distributed capacities to govern and manage urban transformations.We need to make city regions home to hundreds of millions of newcomers worldwide. This is already having a fundamental impact on our ideas of how cities evolve. To an extent, this is a design issue, like integrating high- performance transit systems with land-use planning. However, it is also a governance issue: the fundamental goals of urban planning and alternative means for reaching them must meet in order to serve the sustainability imperatives.

This presentation focuses on one of the contemporary urban things, planning and construction of new urban and metropolitan rail services, with due governance and decision-making implications. They include major urban design projects such as new mixed-use district for ca. 25 000 residents in the urban core of Finland’s second-largest city region as well as downtown renewal or retrofit processes in the region’s fast-growing suburban municipalities.

The author, involved in these projects in multiple roles – action-oriented researcher, consultant, and a policy evaluator – shares his insights of the developments having led to them and the envisioned role that design should have in reaching wider policy goals.

The presentation’s general frame is planetary urbanization that is turning Homo sapiens a predominantly urban species. Irrespective of the spatial scales, this entails relocation of much of the earth’s population to expanding urban areas. In this process, sustainable planning and design of cities, often blamed of deteriorating their immediate environments, has an elementary role to the humankind.