b'MUDD 25 - Urban Intensity l Urban Design - SydneyPrograms and Paradigms in Early Twenty-First Century Urban DesigningUrban designers design.While there is much discussion about what they createtheir productsthere has been an extreme reluctance to explicitly discuss the thought processes that generate designs.Few educational curricula, whether they focus on architecture, urban design or landscape architecture have courses on design methodologythe study of the design process.We, nevertheless, understand much about it (see Bazjanac 1974, Schn 1983, and Lawson 1990 for examples of the literature on the subject).The fear among many educators Professoris that if professionals understand and are able to openly debate procedural Jon Lang concerns their creativity will be compromised.Designers, like test pilots and surgeons, either have the right stuff or not (Wolfe 1981).Such an attitude results in many opportunity costs in the urban designs created.They could have been designed better; they could have served a broader range of human motivations than they do.In other words, they could have addressed more functions that the built environment (considered as part of behaviour settings) can potentially afford rather than the limited set implicit in the models that serve as paradigms for current professional work (Lang & Moleski 2010).Colin Rowe, a leading twentieth century urban designer and architectural theorist, identified two fundamental opposing, although not mutually exclusive, approaches to urban designing (Rowe 1982).One is indeed, the paradigm-based approach.In it, clear generic models that are accepted in contemporary practice to be a representation of a good built environment are adapted to meet the instrumental function/purpose that the project at hand is to serve.The other approach, instead of relying on existing models, is based on a detailed multi-functional statement or program/brief, identifying the goals that a project is trying to attaint, the patterns of built form required to achieve them and resolving the conflicts that arise among them to synthesize designs.I have argued for this latter approach (Lang & Marshall 2017), but have been told quite correctly, that designers do not want to work that way.They want to generate new designs based on what they perceive to be the correct, often contemporarily fashionable, design paradigm (Francescato 1989).Paradigm-driven Urban Design Current urban design paradigms vary from the modernist to the hyper-modernist, from the parametric (a computer-based algorithmic procedural approach), to the sustainable environment model as represented in Landscape Urbanism and 16P1-20200229-FOLIO INTRO.indd 21 2020/3/8 11:20:22'