The Largest Art: A Measured Manifesto for a Plural Urbanism

<div><p><strong>Why urban design is larger than architecture: the foundational qualities of urban design, examples and practitioners</strong> </p><p>Urban design in practice is incremental, but architects imagine it as scaled-up architecture -- large, ready-to-build pop-up cities. This paradox of urban design is rarely addressed; indeed, urban design as a discipline lacks a theoretical foundation. In <em>The Largest Art</em>, Brent Ryan argues that urban design encompasses more than architecture, and he provides a foundational theory of urban design beyond the architectural scale. In a "declaration of independence" for urban design, Ryan describes urban design as the largest of the building arts, with qualities of its own. </p><p>Ryan distinguishes urban design from its sister arts by its pluralism: plural scale, ranging from an alleyway to a region; plural time, because it is deeply enmeshed in both history and the present; plural property, with many owners; plural agents, with many makers; and plural form, with a distributed quality that allows it to coexist with diverse elements of the city. Ryan looks at three well-known urban design projects through the lens of pluralism: a Brancusi sculptural ensemble in Romania, a Bronx housing project, and a formally and spatially diverse grouping of projects in Ljubljana, Slovenia. He revisits the thought of three plural urbanists working between 1960 and 1980: David Crane, Edmund Bacon, and Kevin Lynch. And he tells three design stories for the future, imaginary scenarios of plural urbanism in locations around the world. </p><p>Ryan concludes his manifesto with three signal considerations urban designers must acknowledge: eternal change, inevitable incompletion, and flexible fidelity. Cities are ceaselessly active, perpetually changing. It is the urban designer's task to make art with aesthetic qualities that can survive perpetual change.</p></div>