This paper examines ongoing urban redevelopment of a near-inner-city neighborhood in Johannesburg through transformations of the South African Victorian bungalow, from freestanding residences into complex courtyard typologies—i.e., bungalow compounds. These changes, reflecting predominantly new lower-income residents’ social and cultural values as well as economic opportunities, are part of wider city-making processes, here termed urban compounding. After apartheid's abolition in the early 1990s, the suburb Yeoville has been mostly re-populated and intensely densified through non-formal processes. Official policy promotes urban regeneration “top-down,” expecting re-development through 3–4 floor walk-ups as (formal) private sector initiative, whereas desired densities and socio-economic objectives are being met through emergent compounding processes. Methodologically, the study documents knowledges embedded in lived realities through in-depth micro-scale case studies. It regards the dynamic emergence of new urban forms as an opportunity to read what is as the basis for alternative imaginaries of what could be at macro urban scales.
This paper focuses on understanding the processes and outcomes of self-organization in an Indonesian urban kampung so as to better inform our understanding of how contemporary cities self-organize and evolve. Drawing on empirical research from a selected kampung (an informal settlement), the paper addresses how kampung residents and community groups plan and design their socio-cultural, physical, and economic settings through ‘bottom-up’ decision-making. Key aspects of the self-organizational process as examined include triggers of self-organization, pre-conditions, the role of reflection and feedback, rules, orders, community initiatives, and types of self-organization. Socio-cultural norms and values based around the Indonesian socio-cultural concept of gotong royong also play a major role in the process. Coupled with informality, self-organization as immersed in its socio-cultural settings can be viewed as a major driver of flexible urban orders. These orders are expressed in diverse kampung spatial and physical patterns, creating a unique type of emergent urbanism as part of robust city-making processes.
Across the skyline of central Maputo, the rooftops of aging apartment blocks have become inhabited surfaces, populated by improvised annexes of brick, tin, and wood. These rooftop dwellings, many occupied by urban youth determined to remain in the city despite housing scarcity and rising costs, have become emblematic of Tawen, a term that reimagines “town” as both a spatial referent and an affective political claim. What began as a playful social media refrain, “não saímos da Tawen” (“We are not leaving the town”), evolved into a form of urban presence that defies displacement and recalibrates idioms of visibility and entrenched regimes of recognition. Based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork in Maputo, this article examines Tawen as a phenomenon of emergent urbanism through which illegal occupation becomes a declarative practice of claiming urban recognition and enacting a pragmatic form of citizenship. Rather than interpreting rooftop structures through normative frameworks of informality or disorder, Tawen is approached as a situated model that both reveals and composes the city through acts of inhabitation. Drawing on Gilbert Simondon’s theory of individuation, the article argues that Tawen operates not as a representation of urban order but as a generative prototype through which materials, tropic imageries, and social attachments temporarily align, producing a self-referential city form and the political claims embedded within it. In doing so, it contributes to broader debates on emergence, visibility, and urban citizenship in rapidly transforming African cities.
This paper articulates an urban design logic of informal settlement. While there are many different morphological outcomes of informal settlement processes, there are common patterns of expansion, intensification, and design of public space networks. Unlike formal urban design where the street network comes first, informal settlement involves a complex co-emergence of buildings and streets. Based on a global range of morphogenic studies, this paper articulates the spatial logic through which street/lane networks emerge incrementally in conjunction with building and plotting. Morphogenic mapping shows how settlements expand and intensify, how they stabilize or ‘overdevelop’. Understanding this logic requires new concepts such as ‘incremental gridding’, ‘back-to-back plotting’, and ‘interface creep’. This work expands our knowledge of how informal urban design works, and how the emergence of ‘slum’ conditions might be avoided. A better understanding of this morphogenic logic is the basis for any effective approach to in situ upgrading.
Despite frequent references to ‘paradigm’ and ‘paradigm shift’ in urban design, these terms are often conflated with incremental methodological or policy adjustments rather than fundamental epistemic change. This Viewpoint proposes a conceptual typology distinguishing genuine epistemic transformations from tactical, normative, or historical shifts. Drawing on recent literature (2000–2026), it clarifies how paradigmatic language is used, identifies recurring patterns, and highlights the effects of terminological imprecision on interpreting disciplinary change. By emphasizing conceptual rigor and analytical clarity, our viewpoint article provides criteria for evaluating claims of paradigm shifts, supporting a more accurate assessment of professional and epistemic evolution.
Urban publicness increasingly unfolds through the interaction between physical space and digital mediation, raising the question of how such hybrid publicness can be empirically assessed. Building on a physical–virtual publicness framework, this study develops a four-dimensional assessment encompassing accessibility, affordance, vitality, and inclusiveness across both realms, applied to Qiaoxi Historical District in Hangzhou using multi-source data. The results reveal differentiated spatial patterns and configurations. Commercial corridors exhibit intensified publicness through reinforcement between physical and virtual dimensions, while residential interiors remain marginalized. Cultural spaces display a polarized pattern, with highly exposed sites forming reinforcement zones and less activated ones remaining marginal. Everyday retail streets exhibit asymmetric patterns of strong physical presence but limited digital visibility, whereas symbolic nodes attract high online attention despite constrained spatial capacity. These findings demonstrate that hybrid publicness emerges as a relational outcome shaped by spatial configuration, digital infrastructures, and mediated practices, highlighting uneven translation between physical presence and digital representation.
Curriculum scholarship emerges as one of the key yet underexplored areas, considering epistemological and institutional construction of the urban design field. This article develops a transferable methodology as an investigative lens and applies this to map the evolution of urban design curricula in the higher education system of Türkiye. Combining diachronic and synchronic analysis, it traces curricular models and shifts across four periods, highlighting how programs negotiated the pedagogy and the identity of urban design. Qualitatively, it considers the role of international higher education models, national policies, and institutional historiographies; quantitatively, it maps curricular structures, content, orientations and areas of specialization. Findings highlight multiple pathways in shaping educational programs prior to the increasing structuration of curricula to balance disciplinary theory and methods with other specialization domains while centralizing design studio-based pedagogy. The study demonstrates that an evolutionary perspective is needed to explore the transformation in urban design education more broadly.
The plot scale represents an undertheorized domain in urban design, positioned between citywide structure and street-level interfaces. Although classic urban design theories have long emphasized spatial configuration as shaping urban vitality, the plot itself has rarely been treated as a configurational unit. This study addresses that gap by conceptualizing the plot as a meso-scale spatial configuration. It proposes a typology of plot-scale spatial layouts, including edge-distributed, center-oriented, and street-integrated types, and introduces a multidimensional vitality metric comprising activity density, diversity, and willingness. Based on behavioral observation and spatial analysis of 12 commercial plots in Shanghai, the study found that center-oriented and street-integrated layouts were associated with higher levels of urban vitality than edge-distributed configurations. Two spatial characteristics, building permeability and spatial amenity diversity, correlated with distinct vitality dimensions. These findings suggest that the link between spatial layout and urban vitality operates through intermediate spatial conditions that relate configurational properties to observable activity patterns. Given the limited sample size and the context-specific nature of the data, the results are best understood as exploratory. This study provides an exploratory conceptual framework for interpreting plot-scale vitality and contributes to configurational urban morphology by extending analysis to the internal spatial organization of plots.
This article investigates whether and how 9–11-year-old children’s knowledge of the physical attributes of their neighborhood change from less to more redeveloped neighborhoods. Our findings are based on the cognitive map drawings of 274 children living in six historic Istanbul neighborhoods with varying degrees of redevelopment. The findings show that, compared to children in more redeveloped contexts, children living in neighborhoods that have managed to partly protect their historic fabric and land uses tend to draw more physical attributes of their neighborhoods. Compared to children in less redeveloped contexts, children in more redeveloped neighborhoods are less likely to show communal places commonly used for socialization, and more likely to show tourist-oriented places in and around their communities on their map drawings. A negative association was found between length of residency in the neighborhood and the number of nodes and districts drawn in the least redeveloped neighborhoods.
This article investigates the transformation of the Aurès region in Algeria, where a strong tribal identity historically structured land use and settlement patterns. Colonial and post-colonial land policies, implemented through judicial and administrative mechanisms, redefined spatial organization by dismantling collective land governance and centralizing state control. Drawing on historical maps, cadastral documents, and archival records, the study examines how these interventions altered settlement forms, territorial cohesion, and community autonomy. Despite political transitions, continuities in top-down land management reinforced the marginalization of local actors and constrained adaptive capacity. Beyond its regional scope, the analysis underscores how planning practices disconnected from cultural and social contexts can fragment landscapes, weaken resilience, and reconfigure identity. The Aurès case thus contributes to broader debates in urban design on the long-term consequences of imposed territorial restructuring and the challenges of integrating customary governance into contemporary planning frameworks.
Planning education in Poland has developed within a fragmented institutional setting, creating uncertainty about where design-related competences belong and how they are taught. This paper verifies the place of urban design-focused training within planning programmes by examining how curricula and learning outcomes frame graduates’ capacity to make informed decisions on the built environment. Using a framework that integrates contextual, systemic, and pedagogical challenges, the study combines a quantitative review of 28 university programmes, curriculum analysis, and insights from exploratory expert interviews. The findings show a structural mismatch in the classification of planning as a scientific field, a marginal presence of design-oriented content, and weak alignment between intended learning outcomes and their actual delivery, largely due to acute staffing shortages. The study provides new insight into planning education in Central Europe and helps clarify the evolving role and disciplinary boundaries of design within planning training.
Debates on urban density have long been shaped by a tension between quantitative and qualitative assessments – often treated as oppositional – prompting the search for ideal forms, thresholds, or indices defining optimal densification. Empirical evidence, however, consistently demonstrates that such models frequently underperform once implemented, producing uneven social, spatial, functional, or environmental outcomes across contexts. This paper advances the hypothesis that neither quantitative metrics nor qualitative indicators alone are sufficient to evaluate high-density environments, as density is inherently context-dependent and shaped by place-specific planning, design, and governance conditions. Drawing on an extensive review of secondary findings, this paper proposes a comprehensive procedural framework for the planning and assessment of high-density urban environments that integrates quantitative, qualitative, and contextual dimensions. Conceptualised as ‘integral density’, the framework reframes density as a relational and networked phenomenon shaped by urban form, spatial experience, socio-political conditions, and environmental performance, rather than as a fixed numerical value or a proxy for liveability. In contrast to existing density, liveability, or compact city indices, which typically privilege either measurable outputs or experiential qualities, the proposed approach embeds context as a constitutive evaluative domain. The framework introduces an assessment matrix capable of supporting both the conception and post-implementation appraisal of high-density environments, allowing density to be evaluated dynamically and comparatively across places and over time. By positioning urban design and spatial planning as mediating fields, the paper contributes a methodological toolkit that translates multidimensional density into actionable and context-sensitive insights, supporting adaptive, inclusive, and spatially coherent high-density urban development.
In the USA, studio-based urban design teaching has greatly declined in planning curricula following the drift of city planning to the social sciences and given the fact that studio pedagogy is expensive as well as other factors. This paper offers case-study insights on the planning curriculum at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo that, nevertheless, have sustained service-learning urban design studios in the undergraduate and graduate planning curricula. A survey of students' and clients' perspectives on such studios over a 20-year period, along with the authors' perspectives and experiences, indicates their pedagogical value and professional worth. This paper provides quantitative and qualitative insights from 20 years of experience on the merits of studio-based urban design education in undergraduate and graduate planning curricula.
This article presents a critical reading of colonial modernism through a typomorphological analysis, examining how projects developed by the CIAM-Alger group sought to reconcile the universalist principles of modernism with local constraints. The study adopts a synchronic approach applied to two collective housing estates built in Algiers in the early 1950s. It focuses on four interrelated dimensions: urban components (site, street network, built framework, and open spaces); building layout (morphological relationships between buildings and these components); building-type characteristics; and the layout and distribution of rooms. The research combines archival sources with site visits and measured surveys; archival graphic materials were systematically redrawn to ensure consistency. This research demonstrates the potential of typomorphology as a critical method to interrogate colonial modernism. The comparative analysis reveals distinct strategies of urban composition that both reflect modernist ideals and adapt them to local conditions, exposing the enduring colonial logics of segregation and spatial control.
This article examines thick mapping as a transformative method that links urban design pedagogy and research with the normative aims of urban design justice. To demonstrate the possibilities of thick mapping, we analyze two community-engaged studio projects from UCLA's Urban Humanities Initiative graduate curriculum, focused on the Westlake neighborhood of Los Angeles. Each project illustrates how thick mapping can advance justice in urban design pedagogy and research, while fostering reflection on issues of ethics and positionality. We argue that thick mapping offers distinct affordances for collaborative learning and community-engaged research, directing designers’ attention to the entanglements of space, agency, and narrative. In doing so, the practice illuminates key dimensions of urban design justice – distributive, procedural, interactional, and recognitional – positioning it as a dynamic method for connecting pedagogy, research, and practice to more just urban futures.
The growing availability of big data and digital planning tools offers new ways to understand, analyse and design cities. Urban design pedagogy has accordingly adapted, embracing new analytical tools and methods to study the built form, including computer-aided design and parametric modelling. This paper investigates how procedurally modelled shape grammars can operationalise theoretical concepts of urban elements, patterns, morphological studies to inform design proposals. This investigation is based on an empirical study of an urban design studio conducted in Singapore where human-centric design principles were translated into computational logic for design synthesis. Through qualitative observations of the CGA modelling for urban design, the translation process and points of friction encountered are documented, offering new insights for urban design pedagogy and software development in the context of high-density Asian cities.
Transitional spaces (TS) serve as socio-spatial buffers between public and private realms, shaping safety, comfort, and environmental quality. This study examines TS between local streets and apartment buildings in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, to identify socio-spatial constraints affecting street–building interfaces. Using a mixed-methods environmental audit, 168 buildings across ten streets built over the past 30 years were examined through field measurements and systematic observations. Fifteen spatial, material, and social variables were assessed, and differences between two ground-floor configurations were analyzed. Results revealed consistently low performance across all dimensions, associated with building regulations and street management practices, with parking demand emerging as a critical constraint shaping use and physical character. Significant differences between ground-floor types demonstrate the influence of building form on socio-spatial conditions. By operationalizing a socio-spatial framework through street-edge conditions, the study develops an empirically grounded approach for assessing TS in urban contexts where such research remains limited.
In planning education, the role of design and exploration of non-anthropocentric actors remain in their early stages. This research builds on a studio course offered to urban studies and planning students within an interdisciplinary graduate programme in Finland. The studio aims to develop students’ planning skills by fostering design thinking to integrate knowledge and methods from various disciplines towards solving complex urban problems. In autumn 2024 and autumn 2025, the studios focused on rethinking streets for more-than-human life under climate change and different urban contexts. Design thinking was pivotal in advancing the interdisciplinary approach, fostering iterative exploration and teamwork, and equipping students to address intricate urban scenarios that emphasised inclusivity for more-than-human entities. By prioritising ecological and ethical considerations, students proposed urban solutions with a non-anthropocentric perspective. Integrating design thinking process and mindset in an interdisciplinary studio setting enabled students to foster multispecies considerations towards transformative, sustainable planning solutions.
