Birkhäuser has recently published a second, revised edition of Leonhard Schenk’s “Designing Cities: Basics, Principles, Projects” (2012). In 2012, it could be seen as a summary of thinking on urban development and urban design between 1990 – following the collapse of the Eastern Bloc – and 2012. The revised edition does not update that picture. However recent it may be, this work already feels dated. For an idea of how urban design might be approached today, one would be better off looking to a designer such as the Frenchman Franck Boutté. A tribute book on his work was recently published.

The basic premise of Designing Cities is that urban design is an integral part of urban planning. Whilst urban planning seeks to anticipate the impact of future economic and social needs on the layout of a territory, urban design focuses on how that planning is ultimately experienced, both physically and mentally, by residents.

Schenk argues that a good design of the functional aspects of urban design, such as traffic management, is a necessary but certainly not sufficient condition for persuasion. In doing so, he draws on his extensive knowledge of design competitions. The design must also display a convincing ‘gestalt’ if it is to be legible and usable for the resident. The crux of his argument is that history has provided all the tools for this, regardless of the meaning attributed to those forms. The centre of a city, for example, has always been important, but in China there was an imperial palace there, in the Middle Ages we placed a church there, and today you might find a conference centre or shopping mall there.

With admirable thoroughness, Schenck then unpacks that entire toolbox, illustrating it using (competition) designs that largely date from the 1990s to the 2010s. This concerns organisational principles, the relationship between part and whole, and possible grids, building blocks, road networks, squares and streets. The examples are consistently illustrated using a few well-chosen images from the designers. The book concludes with several concrete case studies of built urban designs, and a number of supplementary essays by third parties.

For urban designers, this is a valuable tool, but the book also provokes a certain irritation because it gets bogged down too much in abstractions. As Schenck presents it here, the world is flat, nature is a green patch on a plan and water is a blue line. Aspects such as climate, topography, the relationship with nature or with water, as well as specific cultural and social sensitivities, are not addressed here, even though – as history has shown – they were often the driving forces behind urban designs. Schenck essentially documents how urban developments for the upper middle class, which became the norm in Western Europe from 1990 onwards, were conceived. Hafencity in Hamburg, however, proves that they were by no means always the resounding success that was expected of them.

For that reason, it is a breath of fresh air to read L’urbanisme, vecteur de transitions / Franck Boutté immediately afterwards. It is a tribute to Franck Boutté, winner of the French Grand Prix de l’urbanisme 2022. In that sense, it is certainly not a well-constructed argument like Schenck’s. The authors, Ariella Masboungi and Antoine Petitjean, do, however, bring together a series of texts and images that demonstrate how urban planning and urban design, even down to the level of a large city block, can play a role in precisely all the areas that Schenck overlooks.

The book demonstrates how profoundly thinking about urban planning has changed over the past decade. It is no longer about the pretty picture; it is about tackling the multi-crisis we face today. What Boutté demonstrates in his designs and research is that this multi-crisis repeatedly calls for a different approach to the landscape and the city. That it should also have an attractive ‘gestalt’ seems obvious. But this is no longer the primary concern in urban design.

Designing Cities: Basics, Principles, Projects, Leonhard Schenck et al., 2nd edition, Birkhäuser Verlag Basel, 2023. ISBN 978 3 0356 2611 7 (4). Recommended retail price (softcover): €58.

L’urbanisme, vecteur de transitions / Franck Boutté, Ariella Masboungi and Antoine Petitjean (eds.), Editions Parenthèses, Marseille, 2022. ISBN 978 2 86364 422 5. RRP: €18.