There is no escaping subjectivity, no matter what the ultimate yardstick for determining quantitative and even qualitative proportions of urban environments. To suggest that a yardstick for pristine objectivity exists is a subjective notion in itself because it assumes no value is weighted a priori in evaluating the relative importance of its contribution to a solution. If we can't agree as to the essential goal or goals of city design in its various aspects, we can't know what we are measuring in the first place.
We might measure all their programmatic elements and design a "great" stockyard, columbarium, or charnel house because there can be little disagreement about what these are or what their purposes. It may well be we don't design better cities because we have so little idea of what we are trying to accomplish in the result as a feedback mechanism for its human inhabitants. We can manage the processes of a city and its physical proportions to come up with a competition winner based on whatever the values of the judges may be with respect to their social biases, skills, and aesthetic judgements, and still be designing little more than a columbarium for the living.
Interesting graphics and stellar metrics do not good buldings nor cities make.
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Gary Collins AIA
Principal
Gary R. Collins, AIA
Jacksonville OR
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