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Innovation in Urban Design: Does Research Help?

ANN FORSYTH
a

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

Available online: 24 Sep 2007

To cite this article: ANN FORSYTH (2007): Innovation in Urban Design: Does Research Help?, Journal of Urban Design, 12:3,
461-473
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Journal of Urban Design, Vol. 12. No. 3, 461473, October 2007

Innovation in Urban Design: Does Research Help?

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

ABSTRACT In a world of design solutions, how important is research to innovation? This

paper describes how innovation intersects with (1) urban design practice and (2) the work
of research universities. When innovation is largely stylistic, design practice sensibilities
may well be more useful than research skills. But when innovation requires new data or
new analytical techniques, research is important. With their direct connections to tangible
issues and their location within multiple professions, urban designers could well become
exemplars of interdisciplinary research, serving as the human face of the research turn
while expanding and deepening their own body of knowledge. Indeed, they could use this
research turn to accelerate and disseminate inventive work in urban design, so that the
urban 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 to
urban designers because many universities are currently trying to improve their
measurable research productivity. The benefits to universities include not only
the development of new knowledge, but also an increase in funding, prestige and
economic development. Urban designers are well positioned to take advantage of
this moment to build a research infrastructure that, by helping to push the
practice and theory of urban design, will encourage a robust level of innovation.
In fact, urban design, urban planning and urban studies programmes often
involve just the types of interdisciplinary (or multidisciplinary or transdisciplinary) groups solving important human problems that have become so
appealing to well-heeled funders in the hard sciences. Even less well-funded
interdisciplinary programmes in other areas, such as the social sciences, are now
finding themselves the core of current initiatives to increase research output in
areas of human and environmental importance (Lombardi et al., 2001; Forsyth &
Crewe, 2006).
Urban designclaimed as a teaching and research specialty within
architecture, landscape architecture and planning, and typically involving teams
from multiple professionsis 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, Cornell
University, Ithaca, NY 14853, USA. Email: af16@cornell.edu
1357-4809 Print/1469-9664 Online/07/030461-13 q 2007 Taylor & Francis
DOI: 10.1080/13574800701602569

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A. Forsyth

their location within multiple professions, urban designers could well become
exemplars of interdisciplinary work, serving as the human face of the research turn,
while expanding and deepening their own body of knowledge. Indeed, they could
use this research turn to accelerate and disseminate inventive work in urban design,
so that the urban design field experiences significant innovation.
However, it is all too likely that many academic urban designers will not do
well in this context. Professional schools, such as programmes in the humanities
and social sciences, have had complex reactions to the recent interest by
universities in increasing funded and interdisciplinary research. Those focused
on apprentice-like professional training in design, architecture and landscape
architecture may have neither skills nor interest to take advantage of this trend
to increase research of any type (Stevens, 1998). While urban planning has
embraced the research turn, architecture and landscape architecture, the
university disciplines housing much of urban design education are not so
well prepared, and in fact may see the research emphasis at best as irrelevant
and at worst as a threat to achieving excellence in professional education and
practice.
Based on a review of projects and papers in urban design, this paper proposes
that 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 and
interdisciplinary work

Obviously, research can help with innovation in some areas more than others. So
far, the core environmental design professions of architecture and landscape
architecture have contributed most to creating new, or newly revised, urban
design styles or urban types. These variations on neighbourhoods, streetscapes
and plazas are often lovely, or at least interesting, and have become icons for
landscape architecture, architecture and planning. When such innovation is
largely stylistic, design practice sensibilities may well be more useful than
research skills. However, urban planners could contribute a much needed
research base to solving the emerging problems of the urban worldfrom
environmental damage to infrastructure for the poor to providing a sense of place.
Through new solutions and sophisticated evaluations this research base could
lead to innovation in urban design. The rather narrow palette of urban design
strategies in current practice could be evaluated more carefully and significantly
expanded.
This paper first defines innovation and examines the importance of research.
It then explores the differences between research and design, comparing how they
lead to innovation. It concludes with reflections on how university-based urban
designers can take advantage of the move in many universities toward a stronger
research emphasis. As urban design faces a number of important and complex
urban problems, research-based innovation in urban design is most likely to take
place in planning programmes or in academic programmes where architectural
urban 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 these
have been characterized by the economic historian Joseph Schumpeter as follows:
The first, and most fundamental, is invention, meaning the discovery of new ideas
with far-reaching potential... The second is innovation proper, whereby new ideas
are adapted, packaged and applied in practical ways (Ward, 2002, p. 4).
Innovation in this sense implies transferability or diffusion beyond the immediate
problem (Rogers, 1995). Schumpeter was most interested in innovation
in business, in the pursuit of profit, and there is a large literature on business
innovation (Utterback, 1994).1 Urban design is not quite a parallel activity, but the
profit motive is more clearly in play in urban design than in typical public sector
planning (Ward, 2002, p. 4). For most built work in urban design, implementing
and dispersing an innovative idea (innovation proper) requires significant
resources 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 the
personality characteristics of innovators. Through interviews with more than
90 highly creative individuals, Csikszentmihalyi demonstrates the importance
of 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 apparently
contradictory personality trait pairs possessed by creative individuals, such as
imagination coupled with discipline, and high levels of divergent or creative
thinking coupled with a high capacity for convergent or logical thinking to
separate good ideas from bad. Collaborators, commentators, physical space,
time, and the information to build mastery in the field were all found to be
important. It is important that work on innovation and creativity frequently
distinguishes between ideas that are novel to the person and those novel to
the 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 of
environment, context, milieu and networks (Dacey, 1989; Rogers, 1995;
Csikszentmihalyi, 1996a, 1996b). Ward, for example, uses the idea of milieu to
explain how the isolated musings of a lone visionary might well receive their first
tentative airings. Here their ideas can be rehearsed and made into something
altogether more practical and relevant to the real world (Ward, 2002, pp. 8 9).
The context is also important for judging innovation because often an innovation
in one field is in part a translation of knowledge from another; what matters is it is
new to the audience and their intellectual and professional world and that it
transforms the new field (Symes & Pauwels, 1999, p. 99).
While research universities, centres and units can certainly provide resources
and a milieu, they are not the only possible locations of such supports for
innovation in urban design. For example, architecture has a long tradition of
innovation coming from practice. In the case of practice, a milieu can be created by
a group coming together, rather as happened with the garden cities movement,
the Regional Plan Association of America, the Congres Internationaux
dArchitecture Moderne (or CIAM), and, more recently, the Congress for New
Urbanism (Thompson-Fawcett, 2003; Mumford, 2006). Journalists played a strong

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A. Forsyth

role in critiques of modernism and the rise of New Urbanism helping create a
significant level of debate (Jacobs, 1961; Kunstler, 1993).
Foundations or wealthy patrons have funded meetings and publications for
urban design innovators outside of universities. For example, the Rockefeller
Foundation funded Jane Jacobs to write her classic Death and Life of Great American
Cities, although it also funded those within universities such as Kevin Lynch
(Laurence, 2006). Developer James Rouse brought together a number of
innovative thinkers in Columbia, Marylands, social planning work group and
many more on the long-term professional team, with only few academics. Rouse
also funded an internal group, the American City Corporation with at least part of
its mission to educate others about Columbia (Forsyth, 2005, ch. 3). A number of
developers, including the Prince of Wales, have funded New Urbanist work and
meetings. The Prince of Wales has been particularly active in forming the Urban
Villages Group and later International Network for Traditional Building,
Architecture and Urbanism (Thompson-Fawcett, 2003, p. 256). Particular firms
have codified innovations with books and manuals on their work. This has been
particularly obvious with New Urbanists, although before them modernists and
garden city proponents were similarly prolific (e.g. Duany et al., 2000; Urban
Design Associates, 2003). Given that urban design ultimately results in a new,
rebuilt or refined built environment, practitioners and journalists can be well
placed to translate new ideas into formats accessible to many (Symes & Pauwels,
1999, p. 100). Overall, universities have not always been a key location for urban
design innovation. Adaptation, in particular, often happens outside their walls.

How Important is Research?

However, given the important innovations that have happened without much
formal research, how important is research? When planning moved toward the
social sciences in the middle of the last century, it left design to other professions,
such as architecture and landscape architecture, while it became firmly ensconced
as a public sector activity that drew increasingly on formal social-scientific theories
and rational decision-making to solve problems (Birch, 2001). In the world of
urban planning, innovation relies on good information, clear theories and a multidimensional view of the public interest. There is a strong link with research.
The architecture fields went on a rather different trackand, it should be
noted, have been quite successful in it. Landscape architects continued to work on
suburban developments, parks, plazas and streetscapes, and architects expanded
into the void left by planners, working on buildings and large ensemble projects
and populating most of the formal degree programmes in urban design. There
have certainly been research-oriented professionals in these groups. Urban ecology
has become increasingly important in landscape architecture, and landscape
architecture programmes typically include a course in research methods (Spirn,
1984; Nassauer 1992). The broad field of human-environment interactions has
drawn from psychology, sociology and anthropology to create a range of
interesting 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 dealt
with the public realm (Cranz, 1982; Hayden, 1995). Researchers have investigated
how to use new technologies in analyzing and representing public spaces with

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Innovation in Urban Design: Does Research Help?

465

increasing success as computing capacity has increased (e.g. Urban Simulation

Team, 2007; Environmental Simulation Center, 2007; Senseable City Lab, 2007).2
However, urban research was far less dominant in the architecture fields than
in planning. Design theory became the term to describe design inspirations
rather than a mode of explanation (as it is seen in other fields). As a result, the
process 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 as
is the case with festival market place redevelopments, New Urbanist street layouts
or transect planning, and landscape urbanist infrastructure interventions
(Calthorpe, 1993; Shane, 2004). While certainly involving various types of
investigations, and often having a large effect on practice, the link to formal
research 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 this
example, much of what is new in LID reflects recent research in ecology and
hydrology 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 see
research as involving several key dimensions including: having a broadly
important question, systematically collecting and analyzing evidence,
building on earlier work, recognizing alternative explanations, evaluating and
documenting findings, subjecting work to peer review, making it public, and
overall 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 empirical
studies that collect and analyze data, logical arguments, critical analyses,
syntheses and some very systematic uses of creative work that conform to the
rather stringent definition above (Groat & Wang, 2002; Forsyth & Crewe 2006).
Research is a subset of scholarship, which is commonly defined as work that
shows great expertise, has clear goals, is documented with a reflective critique, has
significance beyond an immediate context, and is reviewed by peers (Diamond,
2002, Table 1; Humphreys, 1997, p. 1; Forsyth & Crewe, 2006, p. 161).3 Table 1
compares definitions of research and scholarship that have been developed
elsewhere and adds an analysis of design.
As can be seen in Table 1, design is quite different from research and
scholarship in that it typically solves a specific problem by creating
representations of future environments that will result in built forms (Groat &
Wang, 2002, p. 101). Although designers do create generalized models or types
such as the New Urbanist village, a design is typically developed for a specific
rather than a generalized client. It solves a problem for particular people and is not
intended to extend the knowledge base of a field. It also uses a very different form
of argumentation based on graphical representations of analyses and proposals.
While there is a problem-solving approach to design, often called analysissynthesis, it still involves a fairly mysterious creative leap. Other design
approaches or methods include those currently evident in New Urbanism, such as
copying or modifying precedents and using codified systems akin to recipes or
patterns. Metaphor and analogy are also used (Rowe, 1987; Casakin, 2006;
Lawson, 2006). Such designs may certainly develop new approaches to the fields

466

Dimensiona

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Goals and background

Researcha

Scholarshipa

Designa

Answers a question that has some general

interestrelated to gaps in knowledge or
key questions
Provides evidence that has been systematically
Collected and
analysed, and that is capable of answering
the core question

Requires a high level of discipline related

expertise; has clear goals

Answers a specific, site related question for a

client

Has clear methods

Relation to earlier work

Builds on earlier work

Requires a high level of discipline-related

expertise

Argument

Peer review
Public/dissemination

Makes an argument that at least implicitly

counters reasonable objections
Documents and evaluates its methods and
findings, so that both can be replicated by
others
Is subject to peer review
Is made public

Combination of analysis and inspiration.

Can be:
black box
analysis/synthesis (problem solving)
based on precedents, analogies, or metaphors
from a codified approach such as new
urbanism or modernism; etc.
Sometimes part of a school, often deliberately
unique
Makes a proposal in graphical/visual form

Contribution

Contributes to knowledge in a field

Methods

Documentation and
evaluation

Involves documentation that includes a

reflective critique

Is documented and made public through

building (and drawing)

Is reviewed by a panel of peers

Involves documentation that includes a
reflective critique
Is significant beyond the immediate context
due to innovation of a capacity of replication
or elaboration

May occur through awards. Not essential.

Is documented and made public through
building
Solves a problem; contributes to body of work
of designer

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

A. Forsyth

Table 1. Research, scholarship and design

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Innovation in Urban Design: Does Research Help?

467

of architecture, landscape architecture or urban design but still not conform to the
definition of research.
Urban design uses these generic design skills but with a more public
orientation than is typical in mainstream architecture or even landscape
architecture. Urban designers, particularly those in architecture, are often cut
off from their professional peers. Authorship is less clear in urban design. Urban
design is creating a setting for activities, in the context of complicated ownership,
regulatory and circulation needs. Because of this urban design architects must
usually make do with background or fabric buildings and masterplans rather
than signature buildings, making it harder to reach star status (although The New
Urbanists have compensated for this somewhat by finding an audience among
planners, developers and the public). However, while having a public orientation,
the aim of urban design is still solving specific problems using design and not
research 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 different
criteria.
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 some
advantages in creating innovative contexts, enabling the conduct of research that
combines convergent and divergent thinking and sparks transferable solutions.
However, close-knit professional groups such as CIAM and the Congress for New
Urbanism may also create innovative contexts. A number of manifestos,
reflections on practice, pattern books and think pieces have had great impact on
urban 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 as
engaging and understandable to designers as the history of design guidelines
demonstrates (Cooper Marcus, 1986; Cooper Marcus & Sarkissian, 1986; Cooper
Marcus & Francis, 1998; Kaplan et al., 1998; Forsyth & Musacchio, 2005).
However, on the design side, merely solving unique problems does not mean
that the problems or the solutions are important for changing the overall practice
of urban design. Local reports or local projects, which demonstrate the expertise
and artistic skills of the urban designer as well as their knowledge of the basic
palette of urban design strategies or moves, can be useful to communities and
clients. However, most do not change the overall practice of urban design. While
designers periodically think up new stylessuch as forms of deconstructivism
and New Urbanismmany are recycling past approaches and the more avantgarde of these are unlikely to be built on a large scale because they are typically
interesting (i.e. expensive and uncomfortable) rather than sustainable.
Similarly, given urban designs location at the boundaries of a number of
professionsparticularly architecture, landscape architecture and urban planningsome of what is seen as innovative in the urban design practice of one of
these professions is really just the common sense of another profession
translated. So, for example, the periodic discovery by architects of landscape is
often an example of translation rather than true innovation, interdisciplinarity or

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468

A. Forsyth

even collaboration. Innovation requires practitioners who can select, conduct and
document their work with a consciousness of its national and international
contribution, beyond one site and one profession, and who have the ability to
make such a contribution. Of course, the same is true for researchers, but the
focus of research on contributing to knowledge makes this somewhat easier.
However, the question remains, does research actually lead to innovation in
urban design?
In some ways it is easiest to think about innovation in urban design by
reflecting on examples of innovative practitioners. As indicated above, much of
the work in urban design practice simply recycles a set of standard aims such as
creating a visual hierarchy or promoting social interactions. Other work just
translates from one field to another. Yet some of the most creative urban design
work, even in the past 50 years, has come from outside universities, including the
work of James Rouse on shopping centres, Jane Jacobs on street vitality, Gordon
Cullens townscape work, William Whytes street life project (which also involved
formal research), the New Urbanist movement, and much work on sustainable
urban design (Cullen, 1961; Jacobs, 1961; Whyte, 1980; Gillette, 1999; Laurence,
2006). Practicing professionals have been able to try design approaches and learn
from experience or, like Jacobs, have used a journalistic method with broad
influence. They have created new models, new urban types and new ways of
understanding cities.
However, other innovators have been linked to universities, including such
academically affiliated practitioners as Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk for New
Urbanism, Ian McHarg for design with nature, Kevin Lynch on several theoretical
classifications 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 of
more traditional researchers and scholars who have clear connections to practice,
and sometimes do have practices, such as Anne Vernez Moudon on urban form
and health, Dolores Hayden on gender and diversity issues, Hillier and Hanson
on space syntax, Anastasia Loukaitou-Sideris on social uses of public spaces, and
Michael 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 a
sense of the range of innovation in urban design.
Considering these exemplary individuals, it can be seen that innovation in
urban design can and does occur through both practice and research, both within
and outside of universities and in a number of areas (Hack, 1984; Moudon, 1992;
Schurch, 1999; Carmona et al., 2003; Ben-Joseph, 2004; Krieger, 2006). Some
exemplars do not neatly fit their categories, for example, William Whyte, although
a practitioner, conducted investigations that are recognizable as research;
Elizabeth Plater-Zybeck has had a long and distinguished university career but
has remained an important practitioner-scholar rather than a researcher. Overall,
unlike some more technical fields, these exemplars all together demonstrate that
innovation seems to come from a range of institutional locations, and from both
research and practice.

Domain of Innovation
Style
Project types
Process and engagement
Formal/functional analysis and
representation
Ethical, social, and cultural analyses
Innovations in collaboration with
other fields

Description
Built work or sustained illustrations that change
the formal character of urban design
Creates new urban types
Develops new processes or modes of public
engagement
Involves new techniques for understanding and
representing space
Highlights issues of the good
Interdisciplinary research and prototype projects

Example
Ecological design (wild aesthetic), neo-traditionalism, and townscape.
The festival market place.
The New Urbanist charette; the Australian speak out.
Serial vision, Lynchian cognitive mapping, and space syntax.
Gendered spaces, space evaluations. The power of place.
Human factors (psychology, sociology, e.g. post-occupancy
evaluations).
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.

Innovation in Urban Design: Does Research Help?

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Table 2. Forms of innovation

470

A. Forsyth

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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 plays
a more primary role in some types of innovation than others, with the importance
of research increasing toward the bottom of the list. Universities are uniquely
placed to innovate in urban design in those latter areas, which are also arguably
the areas most linked to larger societal issues (as opposed to debates within the
practice 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 ecological
damage, energy issues, urban growth, urban poverty and the need for a sense of
place (Beatley, 2002; Gospodini, 2002; Madanipour, 2006). Obviously, urban design
practice can no more be put on hold until all questions are answered through
research than can medicine or forestry or any other profession. In addition, the
public and even other professionals are often open to the urban designers latest
recipe for change, whatever the evidence for its success, as long as the speaker is
charismatic and their slides beautifully composed. Research may well be ignored
even where it may be available and useful.
Urban design programmes, particularly in the architectural fields, may
also lack research capacity.5 Many design schools focus rather less on research
than the hard sciences or social sciences. Their research model may be compared
with the humanities, for example, scholarly interpretations of built work,
although their problem solving and professional training orientation makes them
unique. Many urban design faculty in architecture and landscape architecture
have traditionally considered the core mission of their academic programmes to
be professional training operationalized as apprentice-like teaching. Innovation in
urban design at universities may certainly occur through the work of edgy
practitioners (those working part-time at university to help finance risky
practices).6 Such practitioners make up a large percentage of faculty in key
schools. They may certainly contribute to innovation, for example, creating new
urban types. However, not everyone doing practice and associated with a
university is being highly innovative. In many cases, those doing urban design in
many architecture and landscape architecture programmes are more interested in
teaching rather than research or even innovative practice.7 Thus universities do
not necessarily produce innovation, whether research or practice based. Further,
much innovation in urban design stemming from universities comes from
affiliated practitioners.
However, emerging issues are amenable to researchcreating energy
efficient urban forms, for example, or developing a sense of place. Because of the
shift toward social science that planning underwent in the 1960s and 1970s,
academic programmes in urban planning have long attracted faculty interested
in research. They are well equipped to contribute to the areas of formal or
functional analysis and representation; ethical, social and cultural analyses, and
innovations in collaboration with other fields. They can evaluate whether urban
design strategies have achieved particular outcomes and even propose new
solutions.
Indeed, based on the idea that other fields in the universities will look to
urban designers for help solving important societal problems, it may seem at first

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471

glance that research-based innovation in urban design will most easily happen in
the area of collaborations. Yet it is often the case that urban designers are seen
and included merely as built-environment consultants, rather than full partners
in research conceptualization and analysis (Forsyth, 2007). Further complicating
the matter is the fact that research is not at all essential to professional education
in design. In schools where faculty have a mix of backgrounds and research
faculty are a minority, the possibilities for fruitful collaboration may be quite
limited.
Overall, the research turn raises many questions as well as opening
significant possibilities for innovation. Urban design innovation is likely to
continue to occur both in research and in practice, but it will be important not to
underestimate the potential for research innovation or to underestimate the
importance of practice in the design fields. Understanding the relationships
between innovation, research and design can help increase understanding of key
points 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 for
valuable comments.
Notes
1. Some business texts use innovations as a synonym for change or focus on processes or products that
are 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 provide
symbolic capital (or status and networks), research or scholarship, and education to reproduce a
field or profession (Stevens, 1998, p. 207). However, different fields have different balances of
activities. The large number of government jobs in planning mean that few faculty are attracted to
academic positions by the stability of institutional jobs; in contrast, stability may be a major
incentive for faculty from the design fields, whose alternative employment is largely in the private
sector.
6. The design fields present an interesting contrast with the rest of the university. In typical academic
fields, 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 provide
recognition in architecture and landscape architecture means that a number of those faculty use
university positions to achieve some of that status (Stevens, 1998).

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