From Innovation to Sustainable Urban Development

As the urban design discipline develops renewed interests in participatory design and collaborative place-making, it becomes critical to review the potential and limitations in current process to ensure a sustainable method for future development. This paper explores how collaborative design can be a key to future sustainable urban development. The process involves a multi-disciplinary collaboration and an innovative learning process by sharing ideas as well as careful consideration on social, economic and political circumstances among government and district stakeholders. This intrinsic proposition of innovative participatory planning implies interdisciplinary collaboration between professionals and local residents to integrate knowledge into new urban place-making thinking. Design innovation in contemporary society can manifest itself in the discourse sustainable urban development by application of bottom up planning and community driven design. This paper examines the emerging design pedagogy which promotes interdisciplinary coalition of professionals and local stakeholders in community development as an innovative design rubric to create a sustainable urban approach. Through two case studies in the Asian context, this paper reviews and critically evaluates the process of how the notion of sustainable development in contemporary urban planning theory is underpinned by the collaborative design practice.