The Town Observed: Looking at Settlements from the Surrounding Landscape

Abstract

Comparatively little attention has been paid in urban design to the external appearance of settlements. The paper seeks to ground the way we see towns from the surrounding landscape in a particular theoretical context—David Thomas's neglected General Theory of planning design. The main lineaments of this theory are explained, focusing on the crucial distinctions Thomas makes between, respectively: ‘normal and technical usage’, ‘internal and external realities’, and ‘continual and contractual planning processes’. Two developments of the theory specifically relevant to the external appearance of settlements are explored, namely the influence of the lapse of time, and of the character and use of the surrounding landscape, on people's experience of that external appearance. Finally, the paper indicates components of a method for applying these developments of Thomas's theory to protecting and enhancing the identity of a settlement in the wider landscape.

Acknowledgements

The author wishes to acknowledge the improvements to the paper that resulted from responses to comments on an earlier draft made by Bob Jarvis and by two anonymous referees.

Notes

1. It is important to note here the difference between the common use of the term ‘urban design’ and Thomas's more deliberate and precise use of the term ‘planning design’. Because most readers will be more familiar with the term ‘urban design’ this is used to describe the generic activity throughout the paper. However, where a more specific activity relating directly to the planning system is being referred to, terms such as ‘planning design processes’ or ‘planning design policies’, which reflect Thomas's insistence on accuracy, are used.

2. The protection of distant views of parts of a city is currently being re-examined in policies for a number of cities in the UK (e.g. Edinburgh and London) and elsewhere (e.g. Cork in the Republic of Ireland and Seattle in the USA), but the approach adopted in most instances seems still to be trapped in a static way of thinking about the way people experience their surroundings, being restricted to fixed views available at a specific time and place and focusing principally, sometime exclusively, on ‘landmark’ buildings.

3. More than a 100 years ago, Santayana (1896), albeit he was discussing the nature of beauty, made the similar point that all elements of the perceived world are sensations: “The qualities which we now conceive to belong to real objects are for the most part images of sight and sound” (p. 30).

4. This philosophical debate is fraught with claim and counter-claim and is mirrored in the field of psychology, with ‘representational’ theories of perception postulating an isolated and autonomous subject set apart from its ‘real’ environment in which the mind is not in contact with the environment itself—we experience only a representation of the external world. Set against this are the precepts of ‘ecological’ theories of perception (Gibson, 1979), which are committed to the view that the relation between organism and environment is internal so that the environment cannot be considered, as it is in the Cartesian scheme, as an autonomous case; the debate is concisely summarized by Costall (1984). Gibson, perhaps the main protagonist of this ecological approach to perception, puts forward a ‘theory of affordances’ that is relevant here; an ‘affordance’ refers to the possibilities for action that a perceived object, or scene, has to offer the individual perceiver, yielding information about possibilities for human purposes and that human evolution has developed towards this end—perception inevitably leads to some course of action (Gibson, 1979). In this context, Kaplan (1988) also refers to the perceptual process being inextricably connected with human purposes.