Selecting Design Sites in the Urban Landscape

This paper explores answers to the practical question of how to approach site selection in the urban landscape. Contemporary cities can be characterized by an increasingly diluted and blurred line between built-, open- and infra-structures, which creates a hybrid condition of urbanity and countryside. Working in and with this urban landscape, urban designers face many complex choices throughout the design process. One choice, related to the initial operations of creating a field from which further formative and creative design steps can be taken, is the selection of site. The paper outlines three operational approaches to this selection: sequential, outright random, and strategic. To illustrate the use of these approaches, a design study is included. This study ties in the selection of sites with the wider urban design process of capturing site conditions and discovering and developing their potential for future intervention.