You are viewing a single comment's thread from:
RE: William H. Whyte & the Way We Understand Our Public Spaces
Another way to ask the same question is, "Should social considerations be part of the design process?" Designers can have all sorts of intentions, whether purely aesthetic, ego-boosting, pragmatic, and/or to the benefit of people. I would guess that many designers are not ambitious/conscious enough to solve social problems with their work, even though that is the real impact of the spaces that we live in!
It's definitely a facet of design that hasn't taken a stage in design discourse. A lot of it is just simple naivety but some architects aggressively block these discussions from mainstream practice. It's a lot of hard work and complicated debate. Hopefully more practitioners take on these challenges.
Thanks for the comment Brian!