Foundations of Urban Design

»With this book, Marcel Smets not only offers an inspiring vocabulary to describe the spatial features of the city but, above all, a unique dictionnaire raisonné to discuss past and future interventions in our largest man-made artefact.« — Tom Avermaete, Chair for the History and Theory of Urban Design, ETH Zürich

»Smets’ fundaments may be likened to emblems. […] The paired titles, the written analysis, alternating abstractions and historic references, together with Heinrich Altenmüller’s pairs of essentialized computer graphics, neither completely ‘explain’, nor exhaust each other’s suggestive capacities. Some of the pairs […] tackle the city scale proper, while others […] question processes and paradigms of making.« — Cristina Purcar, Planning Perspectives

by Marcel Smets

With illustrations by Heinrich Altenmüller.