by Dr Lucy Montague, Senior Lecturer in Architecture at Manchester School of Architecture, Manchester Metropolitan University and David Rudlin, URBED Principal and Director

When we are asked for a definition of urbanism our answer is often to say that urbanism is to the city what horticulture is to the garden or what medicine is to the body. Urbanism is (or should be) the science behind the work we do in cities, the understanding that informs the places we design.

Except, of course, that it’s not a science, it's not even a coherent field of study. The aim of URBED+ is to start to address this issue, to combine the experience of practice with the knowledge of academia, allowing both to feed-off and inform each other, to start to build a more coherent idea of what we mean by urbanism.  

At the moment urban practitioners are a bit like medieval doctors, prescribing policies for cities based on what seems to have worked elsewhere but without any clear idea of why or how they work. This is how we end up with a strategy that seeks to address the crisis on the high street by planting trees, to revive a failing city by building a gallery (the Bilbao effect), or regenerate an inner-city neighbourhoods with luxury flats. 

The process has a name, it's called ‘good practice’. A scheme that seems to work is written up and included in ‘good’ or sometimes even ‘best’ practice publications and other places are urged to follow suit. This happens without necessarily understanding why a certain policy worked and even in many circumstances before its efficacy has been proven – good practice is generally written up on the completion of the project and it is rare for post occupancy work to be undertaken.

URBED+ was launched at a sold-out 4x4 panel discussion in Manchester on urban growth

Some good practice doesn’t even need to have been built. Practitioners are forever being urged to build sustainable, resilient, healthy, child-friendly, smart cities etc. without any clear understanding of what any of this means in practice.

The aim of URBED+ is...to combine the experience of practice with the knowledge of academia, allowing both to feed-off and inform each other, to start to build a more coherent idea of what we mean by urbanism.  

The argument generally goes something like… ‘cities are really important for (insert latest topical issue) and it’s therefore vital that those involved in cities address (insert latest topical issue)’ without actually saying how this should be done. As a result, the various urban factions - the urban villagers, the garden city crew, the suburban apologists and the new urbanists - all believe that their particular form of urbanism is the best for sustainability, resilience, health, child friendliness, and smartness, and so on. We may as well stick with bleeding with leeches and purges of vile humours.

Academia has a different problem. There are groups of academics who have devoted significant research time to investigating every one of the above issues. PhDs will have been undertaken, books and research papers written and even ’toolkits’ created, but little of this will have filtered down to practice. It is not a problem confined to urbanism; academics becoming increasingly expert in ever narrower specialisms and more and more  disconnected from practice.

This is why URBED+ has research interests in fields like post-occupancy assessment, to understand what really works, in the revival of the high street which is one of the most pressing issues that we currently face, and in the impact of future transportation technologies on cities.

What is different with urbanism (compared to medicine or horticulture) is that we don’t have a coherent body of agreed knowledge and understanding – a theory of urban design - into which all of this research can fit. We also lack channels by which academics can communicate with practitioners – they read different journals, belong to different networks and go to different conferences.

This is why URBED+ has research interests in fields like post-occupancy assessment, to understand what really works, in the revival of the high street which is one of the most pressing issues that we currently face, and in the impact of future transportation technologies on cities.

We want to tap into academia to explore the pressing issues facing practitioners while using practice as a test bed in which academic research can be explored.  

We will produce academic outputs and industry-facing publications, presenting material in a way that is accessible to time-pressed practitioners while also being grounded academically robust knowledge. In doing so we hope to make a small contribution to dragging urbanism out of the pseudo-science realm of unsubstantiated ‘best practice’ and into a more coherent field of research and study.