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Innovation in Urban Design: Does Research Help?ANN FORSYTH aa Department of City and Regional Planning, Cornell University, Ithaca, USA

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Innovation in Urban Design: Does Research Help?

ANN FORSYTH

Department of City and Regional Planning, Cornell University, Ithaca, USA

ABSTRACT In a world of design solutions, how important is research to innovation? Thispaper describes how innovation intersects with (1) urban design practice and (2) the workof research universities. When innovation is largely stylistic, design practice sensibilitiesmay well be more useful than research skills. But when innovation requires new data ornew analytical techniques, research is important. With their direct connections to tangibleissues and their location within multiple professions, urban designers could well becomeexemplars of interdisciplinary research, serving as the human face of the research turnwhile expanding and deepening their own body of knowledge. Indeed, they could use thisresearch turn to accelerate and disseminate inventive work in urban design, so that theurban design field experiences significant innovation.

Introduction

In a world of design solutions, how important is research to innovation?This paper argues that there are two primary locations for innovation in urban

design: practice; and university-based research innovations. This is of interest tourban designers because many universities are currently trying to improve theirmeasurable research productivity. The benefits to universities include not onlythe development of new knowledge, but also an increase in funding, prestige andeconomic development. Urban designers are well positioned to take advantage ofthis moment to build a research infrastructure that, by helping to push thepractice and theory of urban design, will encourage a robust level of innovation.In fact, urban design, urban planning and urban studies programmes ofteninvolve just the types of interdisciplinary (or multidisciplinary or transdisci-plinary) groups solving important human problems that have become soappealing to well-heeled funders in the hard sciences. Even less well-fundedinterdisciplinary programmes in other areas, such as the social sciences, are nowfinding themselves the core of current initiatives to increase research output inareas of human and environmental importance (Lombardi et al., 2001; Forsyth &Crewe, 2006).

Urban design—claimed as a teaching and research specialty withinarchitecture, landscape architecture and planning, and typically involving teamsfrom multiple professions—is essentially interdisciplinary (Moudon, 1992;Schurch, 1999; Lang, 2005). With their direct connections to tangible issues and

Correspondence Address: Ann Forsyth, Department of City and Regional Planning, CornellUniversity, Ithaca, NY 14853, USA. Email: af16@cornell.edu

Journal of Urban Design, Vol. 12. No. 3, 461–473, October 2007

1357-4809 Print/1469-9664 Online/07/030461-13 q 2007 Taylor & FrancisDOI: 10.1080/13574800701602569

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their location within multiple professions, urban designers could well becomeexemplars of interdisciplinarywork, serving as the human face of the research turn,while expanding and deepening their own body of knowledge. Indeed, they coulduse this research turn to accelerate anddisseminate inventivework inurbandesign,so that the urban design field experiences significant innovation.

However, it is all too likely that many academic urban designers will not dowell in this context. Professional schools, such as programmes in the humanitiesand social sciences, have had complex reactions to the recent interest byuniversities in increasing funded and interdisciplinary research. Those focusedon apprentice-like professional training in design, architecture and landscapearchitecture may have neither skills nor interest to take advantage of this trendto increase research of any type (Stevens, 1998). While urban planning hasembraced the research turn, architecture and landscape architecture, theuniversity disciplines housing much of urban design education are not sowell prepared, and in fact may see the research emphasis at best as irrelevantand at worst as a threat to achieving excellence in professional education andpractice.

Based on a review of projects and papers in urban design, this paper proposesthat there are (at least) six domains of urban design innovation:

. Style

. Project types

. Process and engagement

. Formal/functional analysis and representation

. Ethical, social, and cultural critiques and evaluations

. Innovations in collaboration with other fields, a broad area of collaborative andinterdisciplinary work

Obviously, research can help with innovation in some areas more than others. Sofar, the core environmental design professions of architecture and landscapearchitecture have contributed most to creating new, or newly revised, urbandesign ‘styles’ or urban ‘types’. These variations on neighbourhoods, streetscapesand plazas are often lovely, or at least interesting, and have become icons forlandscape architecture, architecture and planning. When such innovation islargely stylistic, design practice sensibilities may well be more useful thanresearch skills. However, urban planners could contribute a much neededresearch base to solving the emerging problems of the urban world—fromenvironmental damage to infrastructure for the poor to providing a sense of place.Through new solutions and sophisticated evaluations this research base couldlead to innovation in urban design. The rather narrow palette of urban designstrategies in current practice could be evaluated more carefully and significantlyexpanded.

This paper first defines innovation and examines the importance of research.It then explores the differences between research and design, comparing how theylead to innovation. It concludes with reflections on how university-based urbandesigners can take advantage of the move in many universities toward a strongerresearch emphasis. As urban design faces a number of important and complexurban problems, research-based innovation in urban design is most likely to takeplace in planning programmes or in academic programmes where architecturalurban designers can tap into the innovative capacity of collaborator fields.

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Defining Innovation

The practice of innovation is frequently defined as having two dimensions.Stephen Ward explains in his history of planning in the 20th century that thesehave been characterized by the economic historian Joseph Schumpeter as follows:“The first, andmost fundamental, is invention, meaning the discovery of new ideaswith far-reaching potential... The second is innovation proper, whereby new ideasare adapted, packaged and applied in practical ways” (Ward, 2002, p. 4).Innovation in this sense implies transferability or diffusion beyond the immediateproblem (Rogers, 1995). Schumpeter was most interested in innovationin business, in the pursuit of profit, and there is a large literature on businessinnovation (Utterback, 1994).1 Urban design is not quite a parallel activity, but theprofit motive is more clearly in play in urban design than in typical public sectorplanning (Ward, 2002, p. 4). For most built work in urban design, implementingand dispersing an innovative idea (innovation proper) requires significantresources and the strong role of private development.

Psychologist Mikhaly Csikszentmihalyi, in his 1996 book titled Creativity:Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention, offers insight into thepersonality characteristics of innovators. Through interviews with more than90 highly creative individuals, Csikszentmihalyi demonstrates the importanceof context to creativity. He found that in order to make a real difference,creative individuals need to have a context (termed a ‘domain’ in his book)and an audience (a field). Csikszentmihalyi pointed to a number of apparentlycontradictory personality trait pairs possessed by creative individuals, such asimagination coupled with discipline, and high levels of ‘divergent’ or creativethinking coupled with a high capacity for ‘convergent’ or logical thinking toseparate good ideas from bad. Collaborators, commentators, physical space,time, and the information to build mastery in the field were all found to beimportant. It is important that work on innovation and creativity frequentlydistinguishes between ideas that are novel to the person and those novel tothe field; though both are important, this paper deals with the latter (Boden,1990; Lawson, 2006).

Like Csikszentmihalyi, Ward and many other theorists emphasize the role ofenvironment, context, milieu and networks (Dacey, 1989; Rogers, 1995;Csikszentmihalyi, 1996a, 1996b). Ward, for example, uses the idea of milieu toexplain how the “isolated musings of a lone visionary might well receive their firsttentative airings. Here their ideas can be rehearsed and made into somethingaltogether more practical and relevant to the ’real world’” (Ward, 2002, pp. 8–9).The context is also important for judging innovation because often an innovationin one field is in part a translation of knowledge from another; what matters is it isnew to the audience and their intellectual and professional world and that ittransforms the new field (Symes & Pauwels, 1999, p. 99).

While research universities, centres and units can certainly provide resourcesand a milieu, they are not the only possible locations of such supports forinnovation in urban design. For example, architecture has a long tradition ofinnovation coming from practice. In the case of practice, a milieu can be created bya group coming together, rather as happened with the garden cities movement,the Regional Plan Association of America, the Congres Internationauxd’Architecture Moderne (or CIAM), and, more recently, the Congress for NewUrbanism (Thompson-Fawcett, 2003; Mumford, 2006). Journalists played a strong

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role in critiques of modernism and the rise of New Urbanism helping create asignificant level of debate (Jacobs, 1961; Kunstler, 1993).

Foundations or wealthy patrons have funded meetings and publications forurban design innovators outside of universities. For example, the RockefellerFoundation funded Jane Jacobs to write her classic Death and Life of Great AmericanCities, although it also funded those within universities such as Kevin Lynch(Laurence, 2006). Developer James Rouse brought together a number ofinnovative thinkers in Columbia, Maryland’s, social planning work group andmany more on the long-term professional team, with only few academics. Rousealso funded an internal group, the American City Corporation with at least part ofits mission to educate others about Columbia (Forsyth, 2005, ch. 3). A number ofdevelopers, including the Prince of Wales, have funded New Urbanist work andmeetings. The Prince of Wales has been particularly active in forming the UrbanVillages Group and later International Network for Traditional Building,Architecture and Urbanism (Thompson-Fawcett, 2003, p. 256). Particular firmshave codified innovations with books and manuals on their work. This has beenparticularly obvious with New Urbanists, although before them modernists andgarden city proponents were similarly prolific (e.g. Duany et al., 2000; UrbanDesign Associates, 2003). Given that urban design ultimately results in a new,rebuilt or refined built environment, practitioners and journalists can be wellplaced to translate new ideas into formats accessible to many (Symes & Pauwels,1999, p. 100). Overall, universities have not always been a key location for urbandesign innovation. Adaptation, in particular, often happens outside their walls.

How Important is Research?

However, given the important innovations that have happened without muchformal research, how important is research? When planning moved toward thesocial sciences in the middle of the last century, it left design to other professions,such as architecture and landscape architecture, while it became firmly ensconcedas a public sector activity that drew increasingly on formal social-scientific theoriesand rational decision-making to solve problems (Birch, 2001). In the world ofurban planning, innovation relies on good information, clear theories and a multi-dimensional view of the public interest. There is a strong link with research.

The architecture fields went on a rather different track—and, it should benoted, have been quite successful in it. Landscape architects continued to work onsuburban developments, parks, plazas and streetscapes, and architects expandedinto the void left by planners, working on buildings and large ensemble projectsand populating most of the formal degree programmes in urban design. Therehave certainly been research-oriented professionals in these groups.Urban ecologyhas become increasingly important in landscape architecture, and landscapearchitecture programmes typically include a course in research methods (Spirn,1984; Nassauer 1992). The broad field of human-environment interactions hasdrawn from psychology, sociology and anthropology to create a range ofinteresting work from design guidelines to visual and functional assessments(Lynch, 1960; Alexander et al., 1977; Cooper Marcus, 1986; Cooper Marcus &Sarkissian 1986; Sanoff, 1991; Southworth, 1997; Nasar, 1998). Histories have dealtwith the public realm (Cranz, 1982; Hayden, 1995). Researchers have investigatedhow to use new technologies in analyzing and representing public spaces with

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increasing success as computing capacity has increased (e.g. Urban SimulationTeam, 2007; Environmental Simulation Center, 2007; Senseable City Lab, 2007).2

However, urban research was far less dominant in the architecture fields thanin planning. ‘Design theory’ became the term to describe design inspirationsrather than a mode of explanation (as it is seen in other fields). As a result, theprocess of design decision-making has remained somewhat mysterious (Anthony,1991). Innovations did occur but focused on creating new styles and types,combining or transforming traditional elements to solve current problems such asis the case with festival market place redevelopments, NewUrbanist street layoutsor transect planning, and landscape urbanist infrastructure interventions(Calthorpe, 1993; Shane, 2004). While certainly involving various types ofinvestigations, and often having a large effect on practice, the link to formalresearch has often been tenuous. Only in cases such as low-impact design (LID)does an approach seem to be really new and linked to research, but even in thisexample, much of what is new in LID reflects recent research in ecology andhydrology rather than the urban design fields.

Defining Research and Design

Of course, this discussion depends on the definitions of research and design.While there is no one standard definition of research, authors generally seeresearch as involving several key dimensions including: having a “broadlyimportant” question, “systematically collecting and analyzing evidence”,building on earlier work, “recognizing alternative explanations”, evaluating anddocumenting findings, subjecting work to peer review, making it public, andoverall having an aim of “contributing to the knowledge base of a field” (Forsyth &Crewe, 2006, p. 161). Research may take a number of forms, including empiricalstudies that collect and analyze data, logical arguments, critical analyses,syntheses and some very systematic uses of creative work that conform to therather stringent definition above (Groat & Wang, 2002; Forsyth & Crewe 2006).Research is a subset of scholarship, which is commonly defined as work thatshows great expertise, has clear goals, is documentedwith a reflective critique, hassignificance beyond an immediate context, and is reviewed by peers (Diamond,2002, Table 1; Humphreys, 1997, p. 1; Forsyth & Crewe, 2006, p. 161).3 Table 1compares definitions of research and scholarship that have been developedelsewhere and adds an analysis of design.

As can be seen in Table 1, design is quite different from research andscholarship in that it typically solves a specific problem by creatingrepresentations of future environments that will result in built forms (Groat &Wang, 2002, p. 101). Although designers do create generalized models or typessuch as the New Urbanist village, a design is typically developed for a specificrather than a generalized client. It solves a problem for particular people and is notintended to extend the knowledge base of a field. It also uses a very different formof argumentation based on graphical representations of analyses and proposals.While there is a problem-solving approach to design, often called analysis-synthesis, it still involves a fairly mysterious creative leap. Other designapproaches or methods include those currently evident in NewUrbanism, such ascopying or modifying precedents and using codified systems akin to recipes orpatterns. Metaphor and analogy are also used (Rowe, 1987; Casakin, 2006;Lawson, 2006). Such designs may certainly develop new approaches to the fields

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Table 1. Research, scholarship and design

Dimensiona Researcha Scholarshipa Designa

Goals and background Answers a question that has some generalinterest—related to gaps in knowledge orkey questions

Requires a high level of discipline relatedexpertise; has clear goals

Answers a specific, site related question for aclient

Methods Provides evidence that has been system-atically

Has clear methods Combination of analysis and inspiration.Can be:

Collected and † “black box”analysed, and that is capable of answering † analysis/synthesis (problem solving)the core question † based on precedents, analogies, or metaphors

† from a codified approach such as newurbanism or modernism; etc.

Relation to earlier work Builds on earlier work Requires a high level of discipline-relatedexpertise

Sometimes part of a school, often deliberatelyunique

Argument Makes an argument that at least implicitlycounters reasonable objections

Makes a proposal in graphical/visual form

Documentation andevaluation

Documents and evaluates its methods andfindings, so that both can be replicated byothers

Involves documentation that includes areflective critique

Is documented and made public throughbuilding (and drawing)

Peer review Is subject to peer review Is reviewed by a panel of peers May occur through awards. Not essential.Public/dissemination Is made public Involves documentation that includes a

reflective critiqueIs documented and made public throughbuilding

Contribution Contributes to knowledge in a field Is significant beyond the immediate contextdue to innovation of a capacity of replicationor elaboration

Solves a problem; contributes to body of workof designer

Note: aTwo columns adapted from Forsyth & Crewe (2006); other sources Groat & Wang (2002); Rowe (1987); Lawson (2006).

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of architecture, landscape architecture or urban design but still not conform to thedefinition of research.

Urban design uses these generic design skills but with a more publicorientation than is typical in mainstream architecture or even landscapearchitecture. Urban designers, particularly those in architecture, are often cutoff from their professional peers. Authorship is less clear in urban design. Urbandesign is creating a setting for activities, in the context of complicated ownership,regulatory and circulation needs. Because of this urban design architects mustusually make do with background or ‘fabric’ buildings and masterplans ratherthan signature buildings, making it harder to reach star status (although The NewUrbanists have compensated for this somewhat by finding an audience amongplanners, developers and the public). However, while having a public orientation,the aim of urban design is still solving specific problems using design and notresearch methods. Urban design is not equivalent to urban research.

Overall, while design and research both put something new into the world,that new thing reaches very different audiences and conforms to very differentcriteria.

Research, Design and Innovation

So how do design and research relate to innovation?Overall, the focus of research on important problems raises the potential to

spark significant innovation. In such cases, universities seem to have someadvantages in creating innovative contexts, enabling the conduct of research thatcombines convergent and divergent thinking and sparks transferable solutions.However, close-knit professional groups such as CIAM and the Congress for NewUrbanism may also create innovative contexts. A number of manifestos,reflections on practice, pattern books and think pieces have had great impact onurban design with little base in research (Bacon, 1967; Venturi et al., 1972; Barnett,1974, 1995; Jacobs &Appleyard, 1987; Calthorpe, 1993; Duany et al., 2000; Duany &Talen, 2002).4 Researchers have had to work very hard to make their results asengaging and understandable to designers as the history of design guidelinesdemonstrates (Cooper Marcus, 1986; Cooper Marcus & Sarkissian, 1986; CooperMarcus & Francis, 1998; Kaplan et al., 1998; Forsyth & Musacchio, 2005).

However, on the design side, merely solving unique problems does not meanthat the problems or the solutions are important for changing the overall practiceof urban design. Local reports or local projects, which demonstrate the expertiseand artistic skills of the urban designer as well as their knowledge of the basicpalette of urban design strategies or ‘moves’, can be useful to communities andclients. However, most do not change the overall practice of urban design. Whiledesigners periodically think up new styles—such as forms of deconstructivismand New Urbanism—many are recycling past approaches and the more avant-garde of these are unlikely to be built on a large scale because they are typicallyinteresting (i.e. expensive and uncomfortable) rather than sustainable.

Similarly, given urban design’s location at the boundaries of a number ofprofessions—particularly architecture, landscape architecture and urban plan-ning—some of what is seen as innovative in the urban design practice of one ofthese professions is really just the common sense of another professiontranslated. So, for example, the periodic discovery by architects of landscape isoften an example of translation rather than true innovation, interdisciplinarity or

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even collaboration. Innovation requires practitioners who can select, conduct anddocument their work with a consciousness of its national and internationalcontribution, beyond one site and one profession, and who have the ability tomake such a contribution. Of course, the same is true for researchers, but thefocus of research on contributing to knowledge makes this somewhat easier.

However, the question remains, does research actually lead to innovation inurban design?

In some ways it is easiest to think about innovation in urban design byreflecting on examples of innovative practitioners. As indicated above, much ofthe work in urban design practice simply recycles a set of standard aims such as‘creating a visual hierarchy’ or ‘promoting social interactions’. Other work justtranslates from one field to another. Yet some of the most creative urban designwork, even in the past 50 years, has come from outside universities, including thework of James Rouse on shopping centres, Jane Jacobs on street vitality, GordonCullen’s townscape work, WilliamWhyte’s street life project (which also involvedformal research), the New Urbanist movement, and much work on sustainableurban design (Cullen, 1961; Jacobs, 1961; Whyte, 1980; Gillette, 1999; Laurence,2006). Practicing professionals have been able to try design approaches and learnfrom experience or, like Jacobs, have used a journalistic method with broadinfluence. They have created new models, new urban types and new ways ofunderstanding cities.

However, other innovators have been linked to universities, including suchacademically affiliated practitioners as Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk for NewUrbanism, Ian McHarg for design with nature, Kevin Lynch on several theoreticalclassifications of urban form, both Donald Appleyard and Alan Jacobs on streets,Jan Gehl on public spaces, and Ron Shiffman on participatory design (Lynch, 1960,1981; McHarg, 1969; Newman, 1972; Appleyard, 1981; Gehl, 1987; Jacobs, 1993;Duany et al., 2000). Some have dipped in and out of academic life, for example,Oscar Newman of Defensible Space (1972) fame. In addition, there are a number ofmore traditional researchers and scholars who have clear connections to practice,and sometimes do have practices, such as Anne Vernez Moudon on urban formand health, Dolores Hayden on gender and diversity issues, Hillier and Hansonon space syntax, Anastasia Loukaitou-Sideris on social uses of public spaces, andMichael Southworth and colleagues on streets and street patterns (Hillier &Hanson, 1984; Moudon, 1992; Hayden, 1995; Loukaitou-Sideris, 1995; Southworth,1997; Loukaitou-Sideris et al., 2002; Southworth & Ben-Joseph, 2004). Of course,there are other innovators in each of these categories, but these individuals give asense of the range of innovation in urban design.

Considering these exemplary individuals, it can be seen that innovation inurban design can and does occur through both practice and research, both withinand outside of universities and in a number of areas (Hack, 1984; Moudon, 1992;Schurch, 1999; Carmona et al., 2003; Ben-Joseph, 2004; Krieger, 2006). Someexemplars do not neatly fit their categories, for example, WilliamWhyte, althougha practitioner, conducted investigations that are recognizable as research;Elizabeth Plater-Zybeck has had a long and distinguished university career buthas remained an important practitioner-scholar rather than a researcher. Overall,unlike some more technical fields, these exemplars all together demonstrate thatinnovation seems to come from a range of institutional locations, and from bothresearch and practice.

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Table 2. Forms of innovation

Domain of Innovation Description Example

Style Built work or sustained illustrations that changethe formal character of urban design

Ecological design (wild aesthetic), neo-traditionalism, and townscape.

Project types Creates new urban types The festival market place.Process and engagement Develops new processes or modes of public

engagementThe New Urbanist charette; the Australian “speak out”.

Formal/functional analysis andrepresentation

Involves new techniques for understanding andrepresenting space

Serial vision, Lynchian cognitive mapping, and space syntax.

Ethical, social, and cultural analyses Highlights issues of the good Gendered spaces, space evaluations. The power of place.Innovations in collaboration withother fields

Interdisciplinary research and prototype projects †Human factors (psychology, sociology, e.g. post-occupancyevaluations).

†Public health (collaborating with public health, medicine, e.g.impact of urban design on physical activity).

†Ecological sustainability (urban ecology, engineering, e.g. green cities).† Infrastructure efficiency (economics, e.g. ‘costs of sprawl’ analyses).†Economic and political models of design decisions.

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Table 2, demonstrates this by illustrating six main types of innovation(however, note that each type has numerous subtypes.) Obviously, research playsa more primary role in some types of innovation than others, with the importanceof research increasing toward the bottom of the list. Universities are uniquelyplaced to innovate in urban design in those latter areas, which are also arguablythe areas most linked to larger societal issues (as opposed to debates within thepractice of urban design).

Innovation in University Programmes

So far, the paper has talked about innovation in the past. What about the future?There are many forthcoming challenges for urban design linked to ecologicaldamage, energy issues, urban growth, urban poverty and the need for a sense ofplace (Beatley, 2002; Gospodini, 2002; Madanipour, 2006). Obviously, urban designpractice can no more be put on hold until all questions are answered throughresearch than can medicine or forestry or any other profession. In addition, thepublic and even other professionals are often open to the urban designer’s latestrecipe for change, whatever the evidence for its success, as long as the speaker ischarismatic and their slides beautifully composed. Research may well be ignoredeven where it may be available and useful.

Urban design programmes, particularly in the architectural fields, mayalso lack research capacity.5 Many design schools focus rather less on researchthan the hard sciences or social sciences. Their research model may be comparedwith the humanities, for example, scholarly interpretations of built work,although their problem solving and professional training orientation makes themunique. Many urban design faculty in architecture and landscape architecturehave traditionally considered the core mission of their academic programmes tobe professional training operationalized as apprentice-like teaching. Innovation inurban design at universities may certainly occur through the work of edgypractitioners (those working part-time at university to help finance riskypractices).6 Such practitioners make up a large percentage of faculty in keyschools. They may certainly contribute to innovation, for example, creating newurban types. However, not everyone doing practice and associated with auniversity is being highly innovative. In many cases, those doing urban design inmany architecture and landscape architecture programmes are more interested inteaching rather than research or even innovative practice.7 Thus universities donot necessarily produce innovation, whether research or practice based. Further,much innovation in urban design stemming from universities comes fromaffiliated practitioners.

However, emerging issues are amenable to research—creating energyefficient urban forms, for example, or developing a sense of place. Because of theshift toward social science that planning underwent in the 1960s and 1970s,academic programmes in urban planning have long attracted faculty interestedin research. They are well equipped to contribute to the areas of formal orfunctional analysis and representation; ethical, social and cultural analyses, andinnovations in collaboration with other fields. They can evaluate whether urbandesign strategies have achieved particular outcomes and even propose newsolutions.

Indeed, based on the idea that other fields in the universities will look tourban designers for help solving important societal problems, it may seem at first

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glance that research-based innovation in urban design will most easily happen inthe area of collaborations. Yet it is often the case that urban designers are seenand included merely as built-environment consultants, rather than full partnersin research conceptualization and analysis (Forsyth, 2007). Further complicatingthe matter is the fact that research is not at all essential to professional educationin design. In schools where faculty have a mix of backgrounds and researchfaculty are a minority, the possibilities for fruitful collaboration may be quitelimited.

Overall, the research turn raises many questions as well as openingsignificant possibilities for innovation. Urban design innovation is likely tocontinue to occur both in research and in practice, but it will be important not tounderestimate the potential for research innovation or to underestimate theimportance of practice in the design fields. Understanding the relationshipsbetween innovation, research and design can help increase understanding of keypoints of influence for those in practice, in universities, and in both.

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank Katherine Crewe, Peter Brown and Taner Oc forvaluable comments.

Notes

1. Some business texts use innovations as a synonym for change or focus on processes or products thatare new to a firm but not necessarily innovative in the field (Brickley et al., 2004).

2. However, a number of these researchers came from planning (e.g. Batty et al., 1999).3. However, scholarship does not necessarily involve the systematic collection of evidence or

contribute to knowledge in a field in terms of either facts or theories.4. The work of Koolhaas is not included here because it is not considered to have a strong enough

urban perspective as opposed to an architectural one (Koolhaas, 1995; Goldhagen, 2002; Inam,2002).

5. Generally, as Garry Stevens points out, departments and schools within universities providesymbolic capital (or status and networks), research or scholarship, and education to reproduce afield or profession (Stevens, 1998, p. 207). However, different fields have different balances ofactivities. The large number of government jobs in planning mean that few faculty are attracted toacademic positions by the stability of institutional jobs; in contrast, stability may be a majorincentive for faculty from the design fields, whose alternative employment is largely in the privatesector.

6. The design fields present an interesting contrast with the rest of the university. In typical academicfields, tenure is thought to protect risky practices that are seen as happening within the university,whereas in architecture, risky practice tends to happen outside of the university.

7. The essential role of social status and social networks in achieving the commissions that providerecognition in architecture and landscape architecture means that a number of those faculty useuniversity positions to achieve some of that status (Stevens, 1998).

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