Civic Purpose (Urban Design in Private Practice)

Time is a factor in urban design. Projects sometimes take decades to materialize. Some never make it.

This monograph features three decades of urban design projects at Johnson Fain varying in type and scale from conceptual architecture to the design for major city additions, to environmental plans for sites thousands of square kilometers in area. Some have been built; some remain in process. They represent a wide range of engagements, and all seek to address our goal to achieve “civic purpose,” benefiting the city, the community and the project’s sponsor.

Civic purpose—contributing to the civility of a city—is central to all our projects, public or private. Public and private sponsors may share similar views of civic purposes, yet often are motivated for different reasons—the public interest in social equity and environmental quality, and the private in engendering support for a project’s entitlements. The urban design project benefits from both. Listening to stakeholder voices surrounding a project helps us understand the possibilities and the impossibilities, and to establish through involvement of all parties a sense of ownership and commitment assuring its success over time. Engaging others in conceptualizing urban design involves both the art of persuasion and the art of accepting other viewpoints, ceding credit for good ideas because our process is never about a single idea, encouraging robust discussion, concept development, and evaluation of alternatives in a collaborative process.

Across this spectrum of work, innovation is achieved both programmatically by defining the urban problem in different and interesting ways, and structurally by offering a formal framework from which participants contribute to the evolution of a plan. Our designers share a zeal for understanding how cities evolve and are committed to a principled practice that ensures they evolve in a beneficial direction for everyone.