Urban Design International is entering a period of transition between editors. The journal was established by both Richard Hayward and Sue McGlynn while they were colleagues at the Joint Centre for Urban Design at Oxford Brookes University. There is now a decade of editions that reflects their considerable contribution to encouraging research and thinking in urban design. We thank them for their efforts on the behalf of authors working in this fledgling field, but the new editorial team that emerges also hopes that authors will still continue to support this journal in the coming years.
In the first paper in this edition Pedro Hormigo, Takao Morita and Jean-Sebastien Cluzel provide us with a fascinating tour of what Trancik might call lost space, celebrating its evolution and contribution to the urban environment of Tokyo. The paper initially examines how, within a context of very intense demands upon urban space, the lost spaces under highway or railway infrastructure take on a new significance and provide useful room for particular types of activity. The work characterises the notion of urban layers: a primary layer of traditional urbanism that as a result of urban intensification and evolution sees the development of secondary layers of infrastructure for necessary highways and railways. The notion that the secondary layer serves the primary layer is intriguing, as often this infrastructure harms much of its context, but this paper examines how these remodelled spaces are recommodified and made productive again. The paper moves on, however, to examine just how spaces of escape are also found within the intense urbanism of Tokyo. These are in-between spaces that allow people to transcend or break out of their environment – using traditional examples of a planetarium and cable car, replaced now with electronic screens and big adverts, ironically often for very small products. The essential message is that we need and inhabit these gaps, and that they help to make such intense patterns of urbanism tolerable.
In our second paper we move to China where Charlie Xue and Minghao Zhou take us on a tour of plans for '...one city and nine towns...' in Shanghai, a city that celebrates its selective assimilation of western cultural ideas. The focus of this paper is a discussion about how western designers have been used to achieve different forms of development within a context of very rapid urbanisation. We see, among others, a UK master plan for Songjiang City, a German combination of Altstadt form with Bauhaus architecture in Anting, and Italian urbanism is Pujiang.
Following this Michael MeHaffy discusses the continuing influence of Christopher Alexander and then interviews him about his recently published 'The Nature of Order'. Mehaffy is keen to understand how Alexander views the notion of 'organised complexity' which he feels might be used to describe and understand patterns of urbanism; he wants to know how Alexander's thinking might inform ideas about more ecological patterns of settlement, while he is also keen to find out what Alexander thinks about the New Urbanists. Alexander's ideas about generative design processes and their embracing of complexity are fascinating and offer interesting insights into the possible nature of future design studios.
