Unnatural Borders

The European model of architectural education that is widely practised around the world teaches architecture and urban planning under one roof: there’s no such thing as an architect without some training in urban planning nor an urban planner without an understanding of design principles. I’ve discovered that in Canada, things are quite different: here, the disciplines have been split and most urban practitioners are architects (who have no background in policy-making), planners (who have no background in design), or one of the sadly overlooked urban designers (a professional classification that is confusing even for city-builders — both architecture and urban planning schools offer master’s degrees in urban design, leaving it belonging to both).

By contrast, both my five-year degree program at the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology and the student exchange program in Paris I participated in were integrated under a banner of “architecture and town planning.” A large portion of the curriculum was dedicated to urban design, as well as urban-planning history and law, and blended with architectural design.

This integrated model isn't a recent or original invention. In Italy, for instance, the roles of architects, urban planners, and urban designers were combined centuries ago, promoting a cohesive and harmonious approach to building cities. Designing impressive cityscapes was not just about showcasing amazing buildings for their singular architectural or structural achievements; it was also about creatively using urban-planning principles to blend those buildings into the broader urban context and people’s daily and public lives. This is why churches in Rome, Florence, Venice, and Milan are situated as focal points with surrounding piazzas at the apex of narrowing alleys, creating the lively and intimate public spaces we long for in Toronto today.

In the three years I worked in Israel as an architect, the work was mostly in line with what we were taught in school, which is that planning is the responsibility of the architect. When I moved to Toronto and got my first job as an urban designer in a leading local planning firm, little did I realize that urban planners here are not design professionals; they don’t even share a professional toolbox or terminology with architects.

When I tried to describe what urban planners do in Toronto to my friends back home, I stumbled. “Well, it’s much closer to practising law, actually. Relying so heavily on precedent and policy…they also work in Word and Excel A LOT,” I would chuckle.

What I was disguising with those laughs was how mysterious it all was to me. How can one plan cities without an educational and professional background in how cities are, well…designed?

But when you’re new to a country, you give everything the benefit of the doubt. You’re eager to contribute, and there’s a strong tendency to conform to the norm and the prevailing narrative. I too felt pressure to pick the best-fitting box for myself. I asked myself, “Am I an architect or an urban planner?”

It took a few long years to figure out how to explain that I am both. And it took a lot of effort to gather the courage to say that putting architecture and planning in separate boxes is harming our cities.

This partition not only leaves our planners lacking knowledge about designing a city but also disconnects our architects from the broader context they work in. Too often, architects end up prioritizing design aesthetics over social impacts, creating a gap between the professionals and the public discourse, which affects the profession. It is as if only the planners should be responsible for handling the public and political aspects of building a city. As a result, when planning policies take shape, architects have already missed out on understanding how those policies may impact their future design projects. By the time they do realize the implications of planning policies, they have little to no influence on them.

An even more apparent issue, perhaps: our designers often misinterpret (admittedly hard-to-read) planning policies because they lack a deep understanding of how they work. Unaware that policies are crafted to be broad enough to cover various scenarios while remaining flexible in allowing for case-by-case interpretations, they inadvertently interpret the policies too literally. Here are a couple of examples Torontonians may recognize from the streets they walk through every day:

Podium and a Tower — This approach aims to improve on the mistakes of the past “tower in the park” model, in which isolated and monolithic towers were situated far from the street. The goal of the podium-and-tower model is to ensure a continuous and engaging street wall, creating a more vibrant and modern urban environment. On paper, it sounds like a great improvement. But, in reality, we have ended up creating two types of boxes: (1) the podium, a horizontal box capped at eight storeys and not truly restricted in length but requiring a break every 60 metres, and (2) the tower, limited to a 750 m2 floor plate. As a result, we are designing uniform long repetitive surfaces that rarely encourage walkability or a lively public realm around them.

Angular Planes — These are meant to facilitate the transition from low-rise residential neighbourhoods to higher-density buildings by requiring buildings to slope inwards as they go up in height. As a result, our cityscape is now dotted with stepped buildings with each floor positioned three metres back from the one below it to align with a prescribed 45-degree angle. These buildings are more expensive to build and come at the cost of new homes, lost to the sacrificed floor space in the upper storeys. I’ve learned through informal conversations that even the team responsible for drafting Toronto’s midrise building design guidelines was not expecting this tool to be applied so literally. Now after over a decade, the planning department has revised this policy to allow a simpler built form.

There are many more examples, but these alone are enough to demonstrate the crucial connection between urban planning and architecture and the influence each can have on the other, for good and for ill. This link is known as “urban design” by professionals. All of which brings me to this startling reality: even worse than the silos between architecture and planning, the practice that can and should serve to bridge these two — urban design — isn’t even recognized as a discipline at all.

Take a moment to think. Can you name a single urban design firm in Toronto that isn’t a subsidiary of an architecture, landscape architecture, or urban-planning firm? And who oversees the urban design profession in Ontario? The Ontario Association of Architects (OAA) or the Ontario Professional Planners Institute (OPPI)? Neither! Unlike the other professions, urban designers have no specific accreditation or licence.

Urban design is recognized as a distinct profession at Toronto City Hall, which has created an urban design department. Yet, whenever urban designers make presentations, whether to the public or industry professionals, they are faced with questions about what they actually do.

In case you too are wondering, here’s the answer: they design the public realm, the space between the buildings. And in an environment where architects aren’t trained in urban planning and urban planners aren’t trained in design, urban designers are the essential overlooked piece of our city-building ecosystem.

In 2022, when Smart Density, the firm I co-founded seven years ago, received the OAA’s Best Emerging Practice award, I heard informally that the jury had a lively debate about whether to grant us the award because we “practise more planning than purely architecture.” What the questioners were missing was that this is precisely the “secret sauce” that made us worthy of the award: we understand how planning and policy influence the built environment and the public realm.

What truly shapes practitioners’ and residents’ perceptions of the city, and their connection to it, is not just the creation of stunning architectural landmarks or detailed, 100-page planning policies. Our perceptions are informed by how we move, interact with others and the environment, and go about our daily tasks. In essence, they are created by how we experience the public realm in our city.

The contribution of urban design has been unjustly overlooked. It is urban design that binds all of the intricate components of the city together. To build sustainable and adaptable cities that can respond to the evolving demands of our time, we not only require the best of our solitary disciplines but also the robust and unifying role of urban design to integrate them all. UP

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