Representing Pasts – Visioning Futures

Abstract

In this paper we explore and critique the way that urban designers use drawings. The way they are used to inform and mislead, to instruct and dissemble, to understand and to baffle. This is not a ‘how-to’ guide it is a investigation into the craft of urban design and the tools that it uses. Our contention is that the way urban designers draw and the tools that they use affects the places that we create. Because of the complex context of urban design sometimes the drawn masterplan becomes more important than the built scheme. Urban designers will probably not be around to oversee the latter nor be given credit for what is eventually built. Their drawings are another matter. Throughout time they have been a much purer representation of the ideal worlds conceived by the urban designer populated with happy people basking in benevolent sunshine before the messy business of dealing with developers and planners intervenes and ruins everything. They offer the greatest insight into the paradigms that underpin the proposal. We will also argue though, that when new techniques arise they act to drive the evolution of new paradigms – by altering the ways in which designers perceive and conceptualise cities and by highlighting/obscuring different aspects of a proposal as it is developed and presented for professional and public approval.