Highlighting urban design's interdisciplinary impact

University of Cincinnati professor Vikas Mehta’s work in urban design began with a question about sociability. People are a social species, he argues, but not all social contact is alike.

Building on the work of urbanists and urban sociologists such as Jane Jacobs, Kevin Lynch, William Whyte and Lyn Lofland, Mehta developed a taxonomy of sociability — passive, fleeting and enduring — describing three ways people build relationships in shared space. He set out the framework in his award-winning book, "The Street: A Quintessential Social Public Space," and it still anchors his work today.

As director of the Master of Urban Design program at UC's College of Design, Architecture, Art, and Planning (DAAP), Mehta’s classes revolve around the role of design and planning in creating a more responsive, equitable, stimulating and communicative environment. He teaches courses such as Public Space and Urbanism, Urban Design and the Contemporary City. 

That work has drawn attention well beyond his field, leading to two keynote speaking events this summer including the fourth International Workshop on Social Infrastructure Systems, part of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) BuildSys, held in Banff, Canada. The workshop brought together researchers, practitioners and industry leaders working at the intersection of the built environment, computing, human behavior and social systems.

Mehta was invited to speak about the part of that intersection the rest of the room knew least about: The link between people and place.

“I asked who the audience would be, and they said they’re all engineers and scientists from several fields,” Mehta said. “They understood how the systems of their field worked, but they wanted a better understanding of human systems. That’s where I came in.”

Mehta’s keynote, “Public Spaces as Social Infrastructure Systems,” drew on his research into the everyday places that support public life — parks, main streets, libraries, schools, gardens, recreation centers, restaurants, other retail, care spaces and more. Individually, they look like amenities. Collectively, Mehta argued, they are the infrastructure a city’s social life runs on, generating trust and belonging, easing loneliness, improving health, enhancing resilience during crises and sustaining the habits that make civic life possible.

The second invitation came from an unlikely direction. The Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland was convening an event on the outlook for small businesses, pairing data analysis with owners’ firsthand accounts and pointing toward practical ways to support them.

Mehta’s contribution grew out of his research based on conversations with small-business owners in Cincinnati and other cities about why they had started their businesses and how they held their ground in an environment dominated by e-commerce and large corporations. The finding that stayed with him had little to do with balance sheets. The business owners, he found, were passionate community-builders, place-makers and urbanists.

“They are more than just entrepreneurs — they’re engaged citizens,” Mehta said. “They’re deeply invested in their neighborhoods and main streets, and they want these places to be resilient, welcoming, walkable and fun. They want to create a sense of place in these areas, and that’s something we might not think about.”

For his audience, that reframing had practical consequences, though Mehta was careful about the limits of his own expertise.

“I told them I’m not an economist, so I can’t tell you what you should do in terms of your economic policies,” he said. “They’re like, ‘No, we want to know what these businesses bring to their neighborhoods and cities, so we can actually take that and explain it to funders — to show that there’s more value to them than simply selling you some goods and services.’”

Taken together, the two events convinced Mehta that the questions he has been asking for over 20 years extend well beyond the built environment disciplines. Speaking to engineers, computer scientists and bank economists rather than the familiar audience of planners, urban designers and architects turned out to be the most valuable part of both.

But the audience he thinks about most is still the one in his classroom. By pushing students to work past disciplinary boundaries and to ask who their plans and designs actually serve, Mehta hopes to send out a generation of urban designers, planners and architects capable of making places that are more equitable, better connected, engaging and delightful.

Featured image at top of Vikas Mehta giving his presentation as a keynote speaker. Photos/provided