Editorial Introduction to IDRP Volume 2: Design + Livability

We are pleased to issue Volume 2 of Interdisciplinary Design and Research e-Publication (IDRP). Our issue begins with two articles:

The invited essay is by David Seamon, "Understanding and Making Places in the City: Integrating the Urban Visions of Christopher Alexander and Bill Hillier." This article raises a fundamental concern about New Urbanist theories and practices that by now are paradigmatic: Is a recipe of mixed-use forms and pedestrian scale enough to generate vibrant communities and “sense of place?” What turns on this question is this: while New Urbanist theories greatly emphasize respect for locality and people-scale communities, the cookie-cutter proliferation of look-alike New Urbanist forms nationally in the United States, and internationally—there are now New Urbanist communities in China—seems to contradict this very goal. By revisiting Alexander’s and Hillier’s work, Seamon suggests that, quite aside from prescribed forms, pattern and process, both indexed to indigenous regional conditions, might also have a role in intelligently designing meaningful communities.

Helen Bendon’s "Skirting Around the Edges" was selected for this issue for two reasons. First, it represents a departure from more conventional studies of livable environments by focusing not on, for example, the New Urbanist recipes that Seamon’s article inherently critiques, but rather on how undocumented persons living in a marginal community experience and/or achieve livability. Bendon’s article reminds us that, in the eagerness to create sense of community on the part of many theorists and practitioners, lost in the fray is a much larger population of people who do not have the opportunity of moving into newly orchestrated communities (and on the strength of Bendon’s findings, people who probably would not want to move into such communities). Skirting Around the Edges underlines that history—that is, time and the unintended environments time leaves in its wake in localize venues over the centuries—is an essential ingredient of urban livability. This is not something the New Urbanists can easily recreate. Second, Bendon’s essay is an informative example of an on-the-ground engagement with what interdisciplinary research—or “interdisciplinarity” in research—entails, both in the kinds of new knowledge such efforts can yield, but also in the confusions that might result from multi-method and multi-disciplinary modes of inquiry. Bendon’s self-reflective essay highlights these tensions. We felt that these methodological themes are also a fit for this, an interdisciplinary e-publication on design and research. Click here for a link to the film, "Skirting," referred to in Bendon’s article (MPEG).

As 2008 unfolds, IDRP anticipates additional articles currently being written expressly for this issue to appear on this site.

David Wang, IDRP

---

ISSN: 1939-4659

Sponsored by the Interdisciplinary Design Institute of Washington State University.

The Design Institute is a center where faculty, practitioners, undergraduate as well as graduate students in Architecture, Interior Design, and Landscape Architecture come together to learn in an interdisciplinary setting, to share ideas, and to grow in ability to practice and research in the design fields.