Brian McGrath
Brian McGrath is Professor of Urban Design and served as Dean of the School of Constructed Environments at Parsons School of Design. He is also the founder and principal of urban-interface, an consultancy fusing expertise in urban design, ecology and media. McGrath is a Co-Principal Investigator in the Baltimore Ecosystem Study, a National Science Foundation's Long Term Ecological Research, where he leads the Urban Design Working Group. McGrath served as a Fulbright Senior Scholar in Thailand in 1998-99 and an India China Institute Fellow in 2006-2008 and as the Research Director in the joint US-EU Transatlantic exchange program Urbanisms of Inclusion. He received his Bachelor of Architecture from Syracuse University and his Masters of Architecture degree from Princeton University, and attended the Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies in New York. He currently serves on the Advisory Editorial Board of AD Architectural Design Magazine in London and Nakhara Journal of Environmental Design and Planning at Chulalongkorn University Faculty of Architecture, Bangkok, Thailand.
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Books by Brian McGrath
The complexity of urban areas results from their spatial heterogeneity, their intertwined material and energy fluxes, and the integration of social and natural processes. All of these features can be altered by intentional planning and design. The complex, integrated suite of urban structures and processes together affect the adaptive resilience of urban systems, but also presupposes that planners can intervene in positive ways. As examples accumulate of linkage between sustainability and building/landscape design, such as the Shanghai Chemical Industrial Park and Toronto’s Lower Don River area, this book unites the ideas, data, and insights of ecologists and related scientists with those of urban designers. It aims to integrate a formerly atomized dialog to help both disciplines promote urban resilience.
The format of this publication reflects the interdisciplinary and collaborative nature of urban design. Design work is presented here in a series of projects, essays and interviews which take the form of a discussion. The words of the project's sponsors, studio faculty, and guest participants are interspersed with student analyses and design proposals. This report takes on the shape of the discussions that were part of the studio process, reflecting both disagreement and consensus. In other words, urban design is presented here not only as an act of physical design and image making but as a medium through which to inform and give form to civic discourse and further public access to decision making processes in the production of urban space. The studio results are presented as a dialogue between words and images. This dialogue positions architectural and urban design invention within an expanded, interdisciplinary field of urbanism. Initially, research was compiled in the areas of ecology and environment, infrastructure and public policy, business and workplace, cultural and social institutions, and economic development. Pilot design projects were later developed as immediate and highly specific local interventions in order to initiate public policy and private development towards longer range goals of regenerating Nepperhan Valley ecologically, socially and economically. The new paradigms for urban design which emerged are explored in examples of student work illustrated in three chapters framed by interviews.
Papers by Brian McGrath
small-scale practices that “trigger” (Merwood-Salisbury and McGrath 2013)
regenerative social-natural processes towards achieving a just transition from extractive to regenerative economies (https:// cl imatejusti cealliance .org/ just-transition/ ). Our perspective is that equitable and sustainable urban designs are only achieved through the material resolution of the dynamics between socially produced spaces and natural processes, rather than exclusively as modern nature-based solutions (NBS). Good urban designs achieve not only the right to the city (Harvey 2008), but also the right to nature (Apostolopoulou and Cortes-Vazquez 2018). Since its mid-twentieth-century origins, however, urban design has had a troubling authoritarian, anti-social and anti-natural history, tied to the misuse of bureaucratic power based on Western ideas of modernization (Berman 1981; McGrath 2020) and the misuse of natural metaphors to describe urban social processes (Light 2009). Based on this troubling history, we argue against uncritically adopting modern NBS to the already overly technocratic disciplines of centralized urban design planning, and advocate for the cooperative formulations of continually evolving social-natural resolutions (SNR) negotiated through diffuse but nested consensual management and governance practices. Social-natural resolutionary processes can continually advance both new frontiers in ecological science as well as advancements in design justice (Costanza-Chock 2020). The growth of low- to medium-density urbanization across the globe is a pressing issue today with urban land consumption outpacing population growth (McGrath et al. 2017). We offer here indigenously based designs through the practice of “spatial ethnography” (Sen and Silverman 2013) in Chiang Mai, Thailand, as
an example of designing for the new complex, connected, diffuse and diverse global urban realm (McHale et al. 2015).
The complexity of urban areas results from their spatial heterogeneity, their intertwined material and energy fluxes, and the integration of social and natural processes. All of these features can be altered by intentional planning and design. The complex, integrated suite of urban structures and processes together affect the adaptive resilience of urban systems, but also presupposes that planners can intervene in positive ways. As examples accumulate of linkage between sustainability and building/landscape design, such as the Shanghai Chemical Industrial Park and Toronto’s Lower Don River area, this book unites the ideas, data, and insights of ecologists and related scientists with those of urban designers. It aims to integrate a formerly atomized dialog to help both disciplines promote urban resilience.
The format of this publication reflects the interdisciplinary and collaborative nature of urban design. Design work is presented here in a series of projects, essays and interviews which take the form of a discussion. The words of the project's sponsors, studio faculty, and guest participants are interspersed with student analyses and design proposals. This report takes on the shape of the discussions that were part of the studio process, reflecting both disagreement and consensus. In other words, urban design is presented here not only as an act of physical design and image making but as a medium through which to inform and give form to civic discourse and further public access to decision making processes in the production of urban space. The studio results are presented as a dialogue between words and images. This dialogue positions architectural and urban design invention within an expanded, interdisciplinary field of urbanism. Initially, research was compiled in the areas of ecology and environment, infrastructure and public policy, business and workplace, cultural and social institutions, and economic development. Pilot design projects were later developed as immediate and highly specific local interventions in order to initiate public policy and private development towards longer range goals of regenerating Nepperhan Valley ecologically, socially and economically. The new paradigms for urban design which emerged are explored in examples of student work illustrated in three chapters framed by interviews.
small-scale practices that “trigger” (Merwood-Salisbury and McGrath 2013)
regenerative social-natural processes towards achieving a just transition from extractive to regenerative economies (https:// cl imatejusti cealliance .org/ just-transition/ ). Our perspective is that equitable and sustainable urban designs are only achieved through the material resolution of the dynamics between socially produced spaces and natural processes, rather than exclusively as modern nature-based solutions (NBS). Good urban designs achieve not only the right to the city (Harvey 2008), but also the right to nature (Apostolopoulou and Cortes-Vazquez 2018). Since its mid-twentieth-century origins, however, urban design has had a troubling authoritarian, anti-social and anti-natural history, tied to the misuse of bureaucratic power based on Western ideas of modernization (Berman 1981; McGrath 2020) and the misuse of natural metaphors to describe urban social processes (Light 2009). Based on this troubling history, we argue against uncritically adopting modern NBS to the already overly technocratic disciplines of centralized urban design planning, and advocate for the cooperative formulations of continually evolving social-natural resolutions (SNR) negotiated through diffuse but nested consensual management and governance practices. Social-natural resolutionary processes can continually advance both new frontiers in ecological science as well as advancements in design justice (Costanza-Chock 2020). The growth of low- to medium-density urbanization across the globe is a pressing issue today with urban land consumption outpacing population growth (McGrath et al. 2017). We offer here indigenously based designs through the practice of “spatial ethnography” (Sen and Silverman 2013) in Chiang Mai, Thailand, as
an example of designing for the new complex, connected, diffuse and diverse global urban realm (McHale et al. 2015).