Urban Design Reader：The temporal dimension.pdf

Section Seven The temporal dimension TEAM LinG The temporal dimension 265 Although sometimes considered to be a matter of changing, shaped and reshaped by technological, working in three dimensions, urban design is four- economic, social and cultural change. Furthermore, dimensional – the fourth dimension being time. Time any intervention into the physical fabric of a place impacts on almost every aspect of urban design – on irreversibly changes its history for all time, becoming the way the environment is perceived (i.e. over time part of that history. Never static, the built environ- and on the move) (see Section Five); on the way ment stands as testament to processes of continuity, places become imbued with meanings – over time change and the passage of time within a particular (see Section Three); on how places last and adapt; place. how robust they are (i.e. on how places change over The emergence of conservation resulted in an time); their morphological processes (see Section increased concern and respect for the uniqueness of Two); and on the length of time that urban design places and their history and, in large part, was instru- processes take. Some of the most stimulating discus- mental in the evolution of the contemporary con- sions of time are found in related fields such as cultural cept of urban design, which attempts to respond to geography, philosophy, anthropology and phenome- the existing sense of place and stresses ‘continuity- nology, but a number of theorists have also attempted with’ rather than a ‘break-from’ the past. In a world o