Teoría y práctica del diseño urbano para la reflexión de la ciudad contemporánea

236 Teoría y Práctica del Diseño Urbano ‘Good’ design The good design of new development is an ‘elusive quality’ (CullingworthandNadin, 2002: 133) that has beena central con- cern of modern town planning since the post-war period. Tay- lor (2007) indicates that we have witnessed, however, a move away from town planning as a design-based discipline, or rather an art, to one which can be conceptualized as a science. In other words we saw, in the 1960s, a shift to a systems view of planning interested in the processes of planning rather than the object that town planning deals with. This shift is in- teresting to us for two reasons. Firstly, it underlines, in many ways, how planners became less concerned with the outcome of the processes they were involved with from this time on- wards, and secondly, it indicates that there have been times when planners have successfully sought high quality envi- ronments in the past. Furthermore it is also true to say that the emerging process- led paradigm of the late 1960s onwards was based around ‘a strong belief in the value of pre-conceived prescription as the basis for controlling [residential] design, but tremendous va- riety and therefore inconsistency – in the chosen approaches used to prescribe that design’ (Carmona, 1999: 36). As such the context for the urban renaissance of the late 1990s onwards was one which saw planning policy as the central plank of a process-led decision-making process which had ‘design’ as a desirable outcome, but one which was both ill-defined and amorphous. Currently we see ‘design issues occupy a more important position in contemporary planning practice today than at any stage over the last 50 years (Punter, 1999: 151). We can define good design as a ‘break away from the com- moditisation of homes sustained through real estate markets or…through an over-reliance on institutional power to impose residential solutions without significant recourse to the peo- ple and communities that will have to live [there]’ (Gallent and Tewdwr-Jones, 2007: 113). In other words we accept a defi- nition of housing design quality that sees communities at the centre of the process of housing production, and thereby see design as having a social as well as aesthetic value (Gallent and Tewdwr-Jones, 2007). This is crucial given that we live in a country where 88% 72 of new housing is produced by the spec- ulative house-building industry (Adams et al ., 2009). 72 In the decade up to the year 2007-08